In this week’s SBB Live, I’m talking about how to find more time in your blog and business.
Do you feel like you’ve got a never-ending to do list?
And that even when you finish one to-do list, you’re sat down writing a new one?
It can feel like there is never enough time to get what you want to do done.
Quite often we get stuck on this treadmill of doing, doing, doing but not progressing.
This normally happens when we are spending too much time on the “busy work”.
Like obsessing over analytics, perfecting blog posts or content, working on your social media strategy or answering emails.
While those tasks are super important, they are not necessarily the tasks that grow your business.
Find more time in your business: Be the CEO
The aim for any biz owner is to become the CEO, not just the worst paid hardest-working employee. #nerdbossClick To TweetAnd yes, if you’re a blogger and you’re wanting to make money with your blog, then you are a business owner as well!
The CEO isn’t cleaning the toilet, the CEO isn’t doing the grunt work.
What the CEO’s job is, is to do the stuff that makes money.
Even better if you can outsource some of that.
But your job is to make the money and to do the stuff that you love.
That is all you want to have on your plate at the end of the day.
Obviously, when you’re getting started, that’s kind of impossible because it’s just you, right?
So you have to do most of the grunt work also but there is definitely a process that I go through, and I’ve been doing this pretty much since I started my business 10 years ago.
It’s how you build up to be able to start shifting to doing more of the work that grows your business and that makes you the more money.
Less of the stuff that doesn’t.
Basically, it means you’re being more and more productive.
In this post, I am going to show you my process and I try and do it about every six months.
Find more time in your business: When?
Normally I review my business at the start of the year.
This is a great time as you’re most likely doing your planning and everything’s a little bit quiet.
Then, the middle of the year is a really good time to come back to it, check back in, make sure you haven’t gotten off track.
I find that even when I do go through and free up a bunch of time, slowly after a few months, that free time that I’ve freed up, it disappears, and that busy work comes back again.
So you’ve got to keep coming back and resetting yourself.
This is what I do, it’s really, really simple.
Find more time in your business: Track your time
There are some awesome tools you can use to help you in this process too!
RescueTime is a great tool which can help you track what you’re spending your time on each week.
Or for a week, sit down with a pen & paper and make a note of what it is you’re doing when you’re doing your work on your blog or your business, what you’re spending your time on.
You can keep this rough, it doesn’t have to be super specific but if you can estimate how much time you spend on each task then you can work out what is taking up your time.
How long are you spending on answering emails, on responding to people’s comments on social media, on posting on social media, on creating your content?
Then look at that work and say, “Of that work, what is business growing work, money making work, and work that I love; what isn’t?”
The stuff that isn’t, that’s the stuff that we can start trying to eliminate.
Find more time in your business: Dive in
You also want to go through at this point and really dive into what is and isn’t working, particularly around your content.
I find, for most people, content is one of the biggest time sucks. (Include all social media content as well.)
It depends on what your topic and your niche is and what you talk about, exactly how long it takes to do a blog post.
But most people, it’s several hours, some people it’s a whole day.
The thing is, you could just be doing that blindly and it’s not actually the stuff that’s working for you.
So go in, dive into your analytics, have a look see what’s working.
Find more time in your business: Quality over Quantity
What this means as far as getting more time back in your day is that you don’t need to be creating so much stuff.
Right now, it’s really important just to make sure you’re creating the right stuff.
A lot of bloggers I know recently have cut down their posting schedule massively and found it really hasn’t impacted their stats.
You might be able to go from posting two to three times a week, to once or twice a week, and they’re still getting the same amount of traffic, because you repurpose stuff, you re-share old content.
You can go through and refresh old content as well.
It really is about learning to work smarter and not harder.
So diving into your content, what is and isn’t working, and then see what you can simplify down and where you can cut out some time.
Find more time in your business: Video Works
I’ll give you an example:
The SBB Live’s I do every week, they are my content.
I can sit down, do a little bit of prep, a little bit of an outline, and shoot out a newsletter to everyone say, “Hey, I’m about to go live.”
Then I can do a 20 minute chat talking about something that’s come up recently that’s timely, answering a question, and then that’s my content done.
Like, 20 minutes, how cool is that?
Then I can share it on YouTube.
We get it transcribed and turned into a blog post, which we’ll then have on the blog the following week.
All of a sudden, my content creation has gone down from taking up a whole day to around 45 minutes.
This has just given me back so many hours. I’m pretty sure every single blogger can find a way of doing that, particularly in this age of video.
Video is what’s working right now, and you want to make sure you’re doing as much of it as possible.
The downside of this is that a lot of the social media platforms, if that’s what you’re using for a lot of your traffic, they’re now really loving live, in the moment stuff.
Instagram stories are going bananas. If you’re not doing them already, I highly recommend you do them.
But the problem with those is, you can’t pre-schedule them, you can’t have them pre-ready to go.
So you have to work that into your schedule.
If you can free up a bunch of time with your other bigger, chunkier content by doing less but the right stuff, and then try and systemize what you can, you’ll be amazed!
You’ll see how much more effective it is, so how much better results you get, and also how much extra time you then have to then start focusing on your CEO work.
If you want to be an epic empire CEO, you’ll just do the stuff you love.
Other people will do the stuff that makes you money.
That’s part one of the process; is going through, digging into what is working right now and how can you simplify what’s working and do more of that, but in less time, and how can you get rid of what’s not working.
Find more time in your business: Automation
The other thing to look at is what can you start automating or putting a process around?
I’ve found, for doing things like Instagram, it’s been really helpful and a massive time saver to start creating this bank of images in folders, and the folders are in Dropbox so I can access them from my phone.
The thing with Instagram is you can reuse content after a few months, it’s totally fine.
If you’ve taken some beautiful relevant images, it’s totally fine to use them again three months later, no one’s going to remember.
People are so busy they barely remember what they had for lunch, let alone what you posted on Instagram, so don’t be too scared about repurposing.
But just going through that process, it took a few hours to set up, but that has saved me so much time.
Just think about all those things that you still have to do, how can you simplify them? How can you put a bit of process behind them?
Find more time in your business: Outsource
I know this is something that’s a little bit scary for a lot of people, particularly if you’re not making huge income just yet, but it is is a game changer and it is not expensive.
How can you get some help and outsource some of these tasks?
Most people could probably afford $15 to $20 a week to get someone to help them.
That $15 to $20 can gives you back three to four hours of your time.
You can get a really kick-ass VA for about $5 an hour, depending if they’re based in around Asia and things like that.
If you’re going to look for a local, like an Aussie, US, UK one, expect to pay more around the $20 to $30 mark for admin help.
But how much time could you save?
Look at all those things that you are doing and go, “What are the bits that I need to do?”
Maybe when you’re looking at all of your content across the board, go, “Okay, well I need to write it, right? I need to write the captions for my Instagram. I need to write my blog posts.”
But what if you then had someone who came in and took that blog post and took the first couple of paragraphs and popped it into your newsletter template and had that all scheduled out and ready to go?
What if they took that text and put it into your WordPress or into whatever blogging platform you’re using, formatted it for you, set up all the social media shares for it and scheduled all your social media.
How much time could that save you?
Seriously, this stuff can save you so much time.
