It’s all a matter of time. It’s a numbers game. You need the numbers or you become disheartened. What am I writing about? Blogging of course. I know, blogging requires some experience in words, not numbers. Well, I beg to differ. Many of my contemporaries on social media platforms, like Twitter or Facebook, are clearly wanting to either start a blog, continue writing for a blog or resurrect their blog which has lain dormant for some time. Why do so many wannabe bloggers find it so hard to blog? Not enough time is the answer. Time is a matter of numbers, because we only have 24 hours in a day and in most of that time we’re either sleeping, eating, working, looking after the family, relaxing or we’re too tired and stressed to write anything. As I said, not enough hours in the day which make blogging a numbers game.
Well, what if I told you that all you need to make a start on writing regularly for your blog is about 10 minutes on a Sunday. Yep, 10 minutes on a Sunday is easy to find time for. And what can you achieve in 10 minutes. You can write the titles for seven blog pieces on your site. If you use WordPress like me, mine is self-hosted but WordPress hosted is probably the same, you can hit the Add New button, type in your title, save that as draft and then repeat until you have seven draft titles on your blog. Why seven. There are seven days in a week. Told you numbers came into blogging.
Now you have seven titles to work towards and from that point on you have a target to work to. Personally, I always used to do what everyone else does, claim I haven’t got the time to do anything. That’s procrastination talking. That’s not me anymore. I now use this method to get a number of titles on my blog so that I can then think about what to write. The title has to be something catchy and it can be an Idea for a blog piece, or something you overhear someone saying, or a variation on a phrase heard on the TV or radio. Even if you haven’t a clear idea of what you are going to write, you have something to aim towards. If you’re stuck for an idea for a title, take a look at phrases.com and see what they have to offer, it’s useful to give you an idea of moving forward. You can always alter the title later.
Once I have some sort of idea about what my seven titles are going to be about then I look for an image . I use pixabay.com to find an image because they are good quality and free. That will usually trigger an idea inside me and even if the idea you had for the blog piece changes at this point, that’s okay. You can change the subject and the title but the point is you now have an idea to where you are headed.
Next I write a first sentence and after that my brain takes over and I’m in the zone. I write about 500 words on average and voila, I have a blog piece that requires a little knocking about and it’s then ready to go.
In all I find I’m writing more, in less time and I’m getting more blog pieces out into the social media world. This in turn means more people have more to read and I seem to be getting a lot more visits to my blog and consequently my website. I rarely actually post one blog piece a day, but even if I never use the seven titles in a week I am never short of an idea in the pipeline ready to be used.
It’s all about having a target to aim for and that requires you to have a way to manipulate what little time you have to work for you. It’s all in the numbers.
Copyright © Tom Kane 2020
The post Blogging by Numbers appeared first on Tom Kane's Blog.
