We've all got our own blogging routine, and I thought I'd write a bit about my own. I say I'm a "full-time" blogger only because of the amount of time I spend on it. A full-time income is never going to happen, nor is it something I' aiming for. I spend a lot of time on all things blog-related simply because it's a meaningful way to spend my time.
I'm an early bird. I'm usually up around 3am. I watch some TV on demand while I eat my breakfast, then check my Amazon ad campaigns for my books to see if any tweaking is required. After that, I dive into the WordPress Reader and scroll down to where I've left off the day before. I work my way up to the top while I drink copious amounts of tea. How many posts I read out of what appears in my feed depends partly on my concentration and partly on how much time I have.
The guinea pigs expect their celery around 6am. They have some sense of what time of day it is, but they also go by when I get up, so if I get up earlier than usual, Peanut will start chewing the cage bars closer to 5:00. Most guinea pigs make "wheek" noises when they want food, but Peanut prefers to chew the cage bars. I guess he thinks it's more insistent and therefore more likely to get mama's attention. The other piggies seem to feel no need to wheek when Peanut is essentially ringing the dinner bell.
My posts are almost all scheduled in advance. I got into a pattern of posting at 8am my local time back when I first started blogging, and it seems to work well for me, so I've had to reason to change. If I have a guest blogger or a second post, I usually schedule that for 7am.
At some point in the morning, I usually pop over to Medium to do some reading there. Lately, I've been having a hard time finding any motivation to write posts there. I cross-post some of my MH@H blog posts, but a lot of them don't seem to translate all that well to that platform.
I usually spend quite a bit of time on WordPress in the morning, both reading and responding to comments. I tend to do most of my writing in the afternoon. My writing isn't consistent; sometimes I'll write three posts in a day, sometimes I'll write once a week. My daily posting schedule is not at all reflective of my writing pattern, and on an average day, you as readers are seeing a post that was written a couple of weeks beforehand. I find it helpful that I have certain days devoted to certain themes, as it lets me see what kind of post is most in need of being written, and that makes it a bit easier to get going.
Early afternoon is when the boys come out to roam around on my bed and ogle the girls. Everyone gets a treat after that. The boys get excited about seeing the girls, while the girls only care because they know it means their treats are coming.
Most days I spend some time reading books I intend to review. Books by fellow bloggers I'll try to read in a few days so I can get a review published quickly, but aside from that, I don't spend all that much time each time reading books.
I'm also doing some research for my next book. That's progressing quite slowly at the moment as I'm not spending much time on it, but that's fine. I'm not in any hurry.
I spend some time on Pinterest every day, as well as time on Canva creating new graphics to pin. I used to spend a bit of time each day on Twitter, but now I just check my notifications, and my blog posts are automatically shared there. I'm quite sporadic on Instagram, but I've never made much of an attempt there to drive people to my blog. It's mostly just a way to post guinea pig pictures. I have no idea how people maintain an active presence on WordPress and across multiple social media channels.
There are assorted housekeeping tasks associated with maintaining my blog that I do every week or two; that happens on weekends just because that's the pattern I've gotten into. Pattern makes life easier.
Sometimes I'll have a browse through mental health-related tags in the WordPress Reader to look for new bloggers to follow, but that doesn't happen if I'm at my undefined yet real limit of the number of blogs I'm able to keep up with.
Even though I was working a bit the last couple of years and not at all now, my overall writing output has declined. I'm most focused on the blog, so there hasn't been a change here, but my other writing has really dropped off. I probably spend more time reading than I used to, as I follow more blogs now. The biggest factor, though, is probably that my thinking is slower, and that means writing doesn't come as easily, and everything else takes longer too. If I were so inclined I could shift more time to writing, but I like reading other people's blogs, and so I'm quite content to have that take up a lot of my time.
So that's my general blogging routine for my "full-time" days. Since I'm not working and I don't really have in-much person contact in my life, blogging is my main way of spending time.
What does your blogging routine look like?
You can find more posts about blogging on the Blogging & Writing Tips page and in A New Blogger's Guide to the WordPress Community.
Want more blogging tips?
The MH@H Store has a FREE how-to guide on building a WordPress.com blog from the ground up. It's got lots of useful tips whether you're just getting started or wanting to take advantage of more of WordPress's features.
A blog is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Webconsisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text e...
No comments:
Post a Comment