The Easy Way to Simplify Blogging

For those of you who think blogging is too much work, you’re almost right. Growing a successful blog requires about 30 different disciplines, all of which can take a good 10,000 hours to master. So where to begin?

The most simple trick to blogging efficiency is to prioritize your work. This means you need to identify and concentrate on what matters most with your blog. And for everyone, the answer should always be the same:

Your Content Matters Most

Ask any top blogger or social media guru what the most important aspect of content marketing is and they’ll unanimously tell you it’s your content. I’m here to tell you the same thing: content matters most.

Content is what truly defines your blog and who you are. It’s not the keywords, the RSS, the CSS, the SEO or even the design — it’s the great ideas, personality and expression behind each and every one of your posts. [Ask yourself: what good are countless miles of train tracks, train stations and classy rail cars without the train?]

I recommend you focus 80% of your all blogging efforts on content production, which means you should be thinking about, writing, editing and publishing content.

This advice may seem commonplace and obvious, but it’s extremely important. Putting 80% of your time and energy into being a content producer means you have to momentarily shut out everything that defines you as a content consumer: an open browser, an email check, a tweet or whatever it is that gives non-essential padding to your daily routine.

If you can develop the discipline to produce content without distractions, you are a huge step ahead of the internet majority. But to do this you have shift your stance from reader to writer, listener to speaker, follower to leader.

Everything Else is Incidental

So where does the remaining 20% of your blogging efforts go? It goes towards the “other stuff,” which in turns supports the presentation, delivery and marketing of your content: technical support, promotion, optimization, education and monetization.

Each of these 5 categories contain at least 5 sub-categories, such as social media, advertising, sales, hosting, etc. As you notice, these are all complex and respectable disciplines in their own right, so it’s easy lose precious time trying to figure all of them out.

No doubt — these 20% tasks are very important, but you should contract out the stuff you have no mastery of to specialists who can do the work proficiently. The stuff you can handle on your own (such as social media) should be done in small, manageable packets of time.

Let’s Sum It Up

Your content is fundamental and everything that supports your content is incidental.

80% of blogging is content production, which means you think, write, edit and publish. Thinking generates ideas, writing gives life to ideas, editing refines your writing and publishing releases and shares it with the world. This is the heart of your work.

The other 20% of blogging is everything that supports the other 80%. This includes non-content producing activities that help package, deliver and market your content.

Photo by byrne7124.