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As someone who has been blogging for several years, I know how easy it can be to start slacking off on my blogging duties. But I also realize that if you want to be a successful blogger, you have to keep working at it, because as soon as you get comfortable, another blog will pop up to try to take your place and steal your readers.

So, to help out myself and my fellow bloggers, I’ve come up with some of the ways we tend to slack off over time. By identifying these dangerous mistakes, hopefully we can all avoid them and continue to grow our blogs.

1. Decreased posting frequency—When you’ve been writing on a daily basis for years, it can be difficult to keep up the pace. Over time, a lot of bloggers start to write less and less, because they’re burned out. I’m not saying you need to write every single day, but I am saying that decreasing your posting frequency can be a slippery slope that leads to you writing less and less until you’ve reached the point that you’re losing readers and your blog rarely gets updated.

2. Uninspired content—After writing hundreds or thousands of posts, it can be pretty hard to find fresh topics to write about. This can lead to rehashed, uninspired content that readers won’t respond to. The best way to combat this is to make sure you stay in tune with the latest news and developments in your industry, and you should push yourself to keep learning new things so you’ll have something new to write about.

3. Less blog promotion—When you first start your blog, you have to promote it like crazy just to get people to read it. Over time, your readers start helping you promote your blog by ReTweeting your content, submitting it to voting websites, emailing it to their friends, etc. However, that doesn’t mean you’re promotional duties are over. There are always more readers to be had, and you need to keep working to spread the word about your blog.

4. Forgetting to moderate comments—If your readers’ comments take days to get approved, they’re going to eventually stop commenting. Blogging is supposed to have a conversational element to it, and to capitalize on that, you need to moderate your comments on a regular basis.

5. Not taking the time to respond to comments—Speaking of comments, approving them isn’t enough. Now, as your blog starts to grow, you’ll start getting more and more comments. Responding to them all can be time-consuming, but you should do your best to be active in your comments section. This helps to build relationships with your readers, keeping them coming back.

Have you ever slacked off on blogging? Share your experiences by leaving a comment.

If you routinely start out your posts with “Sorry I haven’t posted in a while”, this post is for you. If you maintain several blogs in addition to juggling other responsibilities, this post is for you too.

Let me start by telling you a little bit about myself. I’m a freelance copywriter/blogger. I’m running a one-man show, so the success of my business depends on how much work I’m able to handle on a daily basis. With years of experience, I’ve learned quite a bit about being a more productive writer, and now, I want to share some of my best tips with you.

By the way, if you have some of your own productivity tricks, share the love by leaving a comment!

1. Outline a few posts at once—One of the things I do to save time is lay out ideas for a few posts at once. I’ll open a few different documents, put in the headlines, main bullet points, and a short intro for each. Then, whenever I have more time to write, it only takes a few short minutes to fill in each post because I already have a template to follow.
2. Save everything!—Whether you type out your blog posts in a Word doc, Google docs, WordPress, or whatever else, make sure you always save your work every few minutes. There’s nothing more frustrating than losing what you’ve written. It wastes time, and it kills your momentum. Save! Save! Save!
3. Schedule time for blog maintenance—If you try to approve every comment as it comes in, you’ll waste a lot of time all day long. That’s why I recommend setting aside a few minutes each day for your blog maintenance tasks. Put aside 15 minutes or so for approving and responding to comments, and focus on other tasks during the rest of your day.
4. Study your blog analytics—You want to make sure you aren’t wasting time writing posts that won’t help you grow your blog. Check out the analytics on your blog to see which posts get the most traffic, which keywords are performing best, and also, which content your readers aren’t interested in. This will help you focus your writing on topics that can help you get more for your efforts.
5. Know when to throw out a post—At this point, I’ve written thousands of blog posts, articles, and other content. Occasionally, I’ll start writing something, and it just never comes together into a cohesive, quality post. The key is to be able to know when a post isn’t working out, so you can scrap it and move on to something else.
6. Accept guest posts—Finding time to write every single day can be challenging. Accepting content from guest bloggers can give you a little break from writing, so you can focus on handling your other responsibilities. Your blog will also benefit from the increased exposure you get from your guest writers. Sign up on My Blog Guest to connect with eager, well-qualified guest bloggers.
7. Create goals and plans—What do you want to accomplish with your blog? Do you want to hit a certain number of unique views each month? Do you want to achieve certain rankings for targeted keywords? Write down specific goals you want to achieve, and create a plan for achieving them. This helps you stay focused, so you don’t waste time on tasks that won’t benefit your blog.

What productivity tips would you add to this list?

Last night, I came across a blog post by Bob Bly (one of my favorite copywriters) that addressed the question of “How much time should you spend blogging?” Blogging productivity is something that’s almost always on my mind, so I couldn’t help but be intrigued by this post.

In his post, Bly states his theory of blogging. He says “Anyone who blogs more than 10 minutes a day — or more than an hour a week — is spending way too much time reading and writing on blogs.”

Needless to say, this caught my attention. 10 minutes a day? Bly thinks that spending more than 10 minutes a day writing and/or reading blogs is a waste of time, and I disagree.

See, Bly views blogging as something that’s fun, entertaining, and “possibly” useful. To me, blogging is more than that. Blogging helps you build trust with customers. I’ve acquired many new copywriting clients solely from my blogging efforts. They’ve read my posts, found me knowledgeable, and hired me to handle a copywriting project for them. Blogging keeps me visible and credible.

But that’s not the only benefit of blogging that Bly seems to be overlooking. What about the SEO effects of blogging? An optimized blog that attracts back links with fresh content every day can help your entire site rank better for important keywords. Once your site earns higher rankings, it attracts more targeted traffic. When you get targeted traffic, you get more customers. So, blogging can help you bring in more customers from the search engines as well.

I’ve also had success helping clients build their email list through blogging. Well-placed sign up links on a high-traffic blog can attract a high number of sign ups, which can then be converted into customers through effective email marketing.

Look, I’m all for being a more productive blogger. And I fully realize there are a lot of people out there who waste way too much time blogging. But to say anything more than 10 minutes a day is a waste of time is a bit silly to me.

What do you think? How much time do you spend blogging?