When it comes down to managing your travel blog over the long haul, you need a good schedule. It’s much easier to maintain and motivate yourself with a weekly posting schedule but the problem is that even the best posting schedule can be disrupted, by everything else that comes along with travel blogging. Staying on top of Twitter, email, your RSS reader, and keeping the blog itself up to date can overwhelm you to the point of blogger burnout.
You can break down what seems like a mammoth undertaking (at least after a while) by prioritizing and tackling your travel blogging duties using a 5-pronged approach.
1. Your Content Is Priority
Whenever you’re scheduling out your week or day, make writing blog posts the priority. It lifts a large weight off of your shoulders to do other things once you know your blog is ready. I’d recommend doing a weeks worth of blog posts in a sitting or two, getting them all out of the way to free up the rest of your time to travel or do other work. All of your ideas are out at once and blog posts tend to flow better this way. If you get bored of typing a series of longer posts your readers probably will feel the same way when reading.
- When writing you should turn off your email, lay off the Twitter, and force yourself to write and get a post done.
Of all the 5 prongs, this is the most important one and should come before anything else.
2. Blog Feedback
This is a second priority, more than marketing or promoting, to nurture your travel blog. Respond to comments to generate discussion, reply to emails, and add that new about page you’ve been holding off on. Focus on your blog and create your community there; social media is important but the most important social network for your travel blog is the blog itself.
3. Social Networking (Twitter)
Now that you’ve got your blog squared away you can dive into social networking, which really encompasses a lot of things. Spend a few minutes throughout the day on Twitter, which if you aren’t using you need to be. You can use Twitter to jump start your travel blog and don’t need to over-complicate the process. Put out some tweets about what you’re doing but make them interesting. Connect with people and engage in conversation, tweet some of your posts and retweet other posts you find useful or worth reading.
4. Use Your RSS Reader
Twitter isn’t the only way to engage with other travel bloggers and readers – meet them on their blog as well. The easiest way to keep track of them is to use RSS (here’s what that is) and get a feel for what your peers are writing. There are so many good travel blogs out there, each with their own style and niches that can enrich you with writing and travel ideas. It’s also important to interact with the travel blogs you’re reading. If you have an opinion on a particular post, leave a comment to that effect; offer suggestions about the topic, or answer the questions the author has posed.
- Blogs are personal and one of the best ways to make a connection with other travel bloggers.
You can combine reading and commenting on other blogs through an RSS reader with another important aspect of social networking, StumbleUpon.
5. Get Stumbling
If you’re still confused by StumbleUpon (SU) – don’t worry, many of us were at first – check out a very basic travel blogger’s guide to StumbleUpon. Once you’ve got a grasp of SU, you can begin stumbling some of the posts you like as they pop up in your RSS reader. Along with the stumbling you can even incorporate #3 on this list and tweet some of those posts using http://su.pr to drive some additional traffic to a given post.
Open Up The Time
These are some pillars to incorporate into your weekly blogging schedule and can also be broken down into daily increments. Either way it’s best to force yourself to sit down and get a blog post done, as difficult as it can be, it will really free you up mentally for everything else. You can of course add other tasks to this approach or combine some to keep it to 5 major tasks. Splitting up your travel blogging duties too much will just make it more difficult to do several things well. Focus on the things that bear the most fruit which is much easier if you schedule it that way.
I’m curious, what’s your blogging schedule like or do you have one at all? I’d love to hear about how you manage your blogging time and would appreciate your comments.
[photos by: svenwerk (number 5), Eduardo Deboni (helping hand)]
Thing topic has been on my mind for a while now because I am stuck w/ Bnb and having a tough time getting more readers. One thing I just realized this week is that I suck at time management. I hate to say it but I really think it’s true. I start out good and then something ends up taking too much time and the next thing you know a week or 2 have gone by without a new post. So now I’ve committed to posting every other day. Today I sat down and wrote 3 different posts. I would rather post all photos but I realize that’s not exciting or interesting to a lot of people so I am really trying to get some advice/tip posts out there because I know that is what really helps people when they are traveling. I’m actually pretty excited now and I’m thrilled that I’m staying on my schedule. You are right though, you have to do it so that mentally you are clear for everything else. If I don’t make progress on the blog each day I get very mad at myself and frustrated and mentally it isn’t good. I can also get myself into trouble w/ the social media because I’ll end up in conversations (which are awesome!) but then it will dominate my entire day – which isn’t good. But it has to be done – it’s just so hard to stop! I’m going to try and time block my day out in regards to that to help me avoid all day tweeting. Great post Anil 🙂
I hate planning myself but even a simple schedule helps stay organized with blogging in general. It does lift that mental load so you can focus on writing which is the most important thing in my opinion.
I think you’re on the right track by setting aside from ‘no-tweeting time’ – it can be a very seductive time pit!
I make up a weekly schedule and try to stick to it. Because I cover various topics and my content varies across travel, food, reviews and so on, I find planning helps give me the focus I need.
Re no 1, I would go as far as to say log off everything except your blog. That includes email notifications, social networking, other open browsers and so on. By just concentrating on writing the post, you get a lot done in almost half the time.
It’s amazing how much you can write with the Internet off, it’s just so tough sometimes to hit the off switch!