When you are a blogger you have to know that your time is vested in so many different areas that it is far to easy to become distracted or lose productivity. So many activities that include: Writing, Optimizing SEO, promoting, guest blogging, social media promotion, article building, backlink building, Site and Theme design tweaks, optimizing plugins, maintaining and upgrading blogs and plugins…etc..
Each activity can chip away at your time and productivity and if you are not careful you can find yourself wasting time with activities that bring little ROI (return on investment) which I try to consider with every activity I do as a blogger. If you find yourself spending time promoting your articles on Facebook, Twitter or whatever other social network you belong to you need to look at your Google Analytics and determine if your media promotion is worth the time you are investing? If you spend 15-30 minutes a day promoting but only see 10 visits per day or less coming from those promotion efforts, then you should refocus on other area’s instead and rely on Feedburner Socialize or plugins to promote your articles for you so you can spend more time writing or working other avenues for growing your website.
Guest Blogging and backlink building are two areas that have permanent long term benefit that are not leveraged often enough by bloggers. These leave lasting links that help with your blogs various online ranking systems plus have the ability to garner audiences that may never previously have read or seen your site. A well written guest post can bring in new readers who will become fans and I myself have made more than a few extra readers by writing guest articles for other sites.
Optimizing SEO was my number one area where I focused too much time over the past two years and at first my ROI seemed pretty good until I lost most of my search engine traffic almost overnight. Then I realized I needed to refocus my time investment into other areas and have decided to revamp my entire site in order to realign my goals.
I have been telling my readers and fellow bloggers who look to me for advice that they want to target the magic 40/30/30 ratio for traffic to their sites. 40% Search traffic, 30% Referral traffic and 30% direct traffic is typically the ideal ratio to have to weather any declines or drops in one traffic source or the other.
I am curious to know what are other bloggers "most productive" activities related to blogging (besides writing the content itself) where do you see the most value and benefit to your site and online presence in general?
-Justin Germino
Chipping Away at Productivity is a post from: Personal Blog of Justin Germino Copyright 2009 Justin Germino. Share it freely, but please link back to this source.
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