Ultimate Guide to time saving for Bloggers – Tips and Resources
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Blogging has become your hobby, or is your profession. You’re loving it, yet you’re getting too little time to focus on content. Time management is a good thing to do, and here go some time saving tips for you:
Desktop Blog Clients
Desktop blogging clients like Windows Live Writer and BlogDesk can save you quite a lot of time in fact. You no longer need to wait for your admin panel WYSIWYG writer to load. In fact, you can blog painlessly inside your offline client’s editor – do the usual stuff – write posts, categorize, insert and upload images, and save drafts for publishing later.
I just fire up my blogging editor right when I return from school, and start writing. I no longer need to wait for web page loads. It’s all easy and effortless.
Some blogging clients come with even more powerful features – like integration with your Browser, an inbuilt RSS reader etc.
Overall, blogging clients save you loads and loads of time
Firefox Extensions
Split Browser add-on splits Firefox’s viewing screen into fragments such that you can view more websites at a time. You can easily copy links and access references between different pages. (Via Lorelle)
Speed Dial extension can help you quickly access the sites you use most often. For example, you can add your site analytics page to speed dial for speedy landing.
Page Addict monitors the amount of time you spend on Web Pages. It can give you a detailed summary on the time you’ve wasted lavishly on pretty useless pages
Leech Block can block web sites for particular time periods, preventing you from getting getting distracted from your main jobs (via Amit).
Greasemonkey Scripts
If you’re an avid commentator and share your views across many blogs, you may feel lazy to type in your name, blog URL and email. This script does the job for you. It auto fills fields in comment forms. (Via Freakitude)
If you know of any more Greasemonkey scripts, please inform others in the comments. Highly appreciated.
Reduce your Instant Messenger Usage
Over a short period of time, most bloggers find their Instant Messenger buddy lists overloaded with too many contacts. That isn’t bad. Building up a community around you is an essential part of blogging.
What’s wrong is the amount of time you spend for chatting and other such stuff. Too many people buzzing you over your IM is terrible.
Plan a good schedule, allocate a reasonable amount of time to connect with people. Help newbies, offer some guiding tips – spread the knowledge. This will help in building your online personality.
Use Screen Capture software
As a blogger, you may need to create a lot of screen captures for your blog posts. It’s a bit of a time consuming task, so what you can do is install some nifty screen capturing tools that make the job terribly easy for you.
Amit recommends FastStone Screen Capture and other such tools that have special features built in. These may actually save some minutes of your precious time.
Many of these tools have the ability in-built to convert and save images in a variety of formats as well.
Organize your email
Once your blog gets quite active in terms of visitors and comments, your email inbox is inundated with lots of mails. Cluttered.
The best way to tackle this is to organize your emails. That involves labeling mails, or using folders to organizing them.
Most people now use Gmail, so you could label your messages. To set up and use labels on Gmail, refer to this guide.
Also, periodically check your account and delete unneeded emails. That would de-clutter things.
Learn the Shortcuts
Shortcuts are one of the most efficient ways of saving time. They can greatly reduce the time you take to get things done on your computer.
Learning the basic shortcuts of programs are essential, and mastering those of softwares that will aid in faster completion of your tasks.
Most people use WordPress, so here go a list of WordPress shortcuts as compiled by TipMonkies:
Bold: Alt+SHIFT+b
Italics: Alt+SHIFT+i
Link: Alt+SHIFT+a
Blockquote: Alt+SHIFT+q
Code: Alt+SHIFT+c
Read More: Alt+SHIFT+tUnordered List (ul): Alt+SHIFT+u
Ordered List (ol): Alt+SHIFT+o
List Item (li): Alt+SHIFT+l
A complete list of available Firefox and Internet explorer shortcuts is here
Smashing Magazine has drawn together a very useful list of shortcuts of some popular applications in this post.
Are you following too many blogs?
As a Blogger, you must have subscribed to a lot of post on your reader. The list gets bigger and bigger. Check your feed reader periodically and unsubscribe from blogs that you do not want to follow.
This action will considerably reduce the time you spend on your feed reader, and will give you more time to spare for your own blog.
Statistics, and Design Addiction
Quite a number of bloggers get addicted to checking their blog’s statistics, checking their stats too many times a day. Also, people like me tend to make some modifications to their blog design quite often, ending up in pretty much nothing great.
Blogger PCHere mentions in his post on 10 common time wasting habits of bloggers:
Leave the Template Alone – Would a link color of #0033cc look better, or maybe #0066cc would seem more blended. Maybe the sidebar could be wider, or footer look better in gray. Making your blog look better and SEO is a never ending process, so I convinced myself to not waste blogging time daily. Instead I decided to set aside a particular time slot in the weekend.
Beyond Statistics – How many people are on your site right now? Is it really necessary to check stats every minute and see which site referred the last visitor. Now I check the traffic stats only once a day. Not only does it help get a broad idea of your daily traffic, but see how your SEO is working.
Summing it all up, trying to cut the time you spend on such things and focusing on producing quality content to your readers will make you a blog better, and you a better blogger.
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