Writing and developing a blog requires patience, hard work and a little bit of luck.
If you are already a full time blogger, you most likely have a schedule of blogging. You must follow a daily or weekly schedule – when you will write content, what content you will work on and which days of the week you will do what type of activity.
But if you are a new blogger and just starting out, it is possible that you will already have a hectic schedule at work. You have to devote 10-12 hours to your day job and earn a living, as well as devote time to your blogs to develop a passive income stream.
That sounds like quite a lot of hard work since managing a day job, a side hustle and a family is not an easy job. But there are ways to get around this and I will explain how you can go about it and strike a balance.
The most difficult part of starting a blog is to get started and write content on a regular basis. That is the most difficult thing to do even for seasoned bloggers who earn a full time living from their blogs. Now, full time bloggers already have some revenue to their sites so they can hire writers and outsource some of that work but new bloggers cannot afford to do that. So if you are just starting out, you will have to do all the dirty work yourself. You have to generate the content yourself, earn some revenue and then decide the next course of action. You can kick your day job away and do this full time or you can hire someone else to write and develop content for your sites and keep the day job.
I have always advised not to quit your day job unless you are able to generate revenue from your side hustle. Generating substantial revenue from your sites is going to take a lot of hard work, perseverance, hustling and sweating to get there. So until you get there, it might not be a good idea to quit your day job.
So how do you maintain a blogging schedule without quitting your day job. Here is how I did it when I started this site, you can take this as a template, tweak it acording to your requirements and use it.
4:00 AM: Wake up, get some fresh air, open your laptop and start writing content.
8.00 AM: Keep developing content until 8 AM. You should be able to write 2-3 posts within this time.
8.00 – 9.00 AM: Done creating content. Have breakfast, shower and leave for office.
9.00 AM – 6 PM: While you continue to do your day job, keep the feed reader open and read as much content as possible. Make a note of important things and come back home.
6-10 PM: Spend some time with family and work on the blog on the side. Tweak the design a bit, tinker with SEO, do some social media posts. Generate ideas for the next day from the notes you made.
10-6: Have dinner and sleep.
This is the routine I follow for developing this blog of mine, It takes lot of hard work, self discipline, effort and perseverance. I focus mainly on generating content on a daily basis and growing the content base of this site as of now. Once revenue kicks in, I can employ a writer and grow the content base even more.
On weekends, I focus mainly on developing long form of content, lists, detailed guides and sneeze pages. Weekdays are spent mostly creating hot and fresh content to keep the momentum rolling but weekends are spend on creating evergreen content, deep content which will bring readership for a sustained period of time.
I do not want to quit my day job for other reasons so this schedule works for me. However, this schedule may not work for you and you will have to tweak this according to your requirements.
Whatever it is, you need to maintain a schedule for maintain your blog, otherwise the content of your site will never grow. Unless the content grows, you will not have traffic / readership and unless there is readership, the revenue will never come.
Most bloggers quit their jobs and start doing it full time – which is the way to go if you are serious about building a solid business out of your website or blog. However, if you are not too sure whether you will be able to make it or not, this schedule should work out until you get to the point where you are able to generate substantial revenue out of your sites.
What blogging schedule works for you? How do you manage your full time day job and blogging on the side? Do you post regularly and maintain an editorial calendar? Happy to hear your thoughts in the comments section.