2 Tips To Save Time and Become More Efficient by Clever Elimination

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Blogging has become so time consuming and exhaustive nowadays that even a little of it can take hours. Look at it: When you sit down to write a post which would normally take 30 minutes, you finish it in 2 hours. Seriously, isn’t that correct? There are so many disturbances, like email alerts, feed alerts, and so on.

If your blog is quite a big one, you might have had to moderate tens of comments everyday and reply to them. This takes up time. You also might have had to negotiate advertisement deals with advertisers and publishers, and manage your third party affiliate accounts. See how much time and resources that takes up?

Image: Mike9Alive

At the end of the day, you’re so tired that you are not able to do other things that you’ve planned or want to do.

Common case scenario for most of you, isn’t it?

But what if you could cut down on all this wasted time and save time by clever elimination? By clever elimination I mean identifying time-guzzling elements of your blog and eliminating them as far as possible. Have I got you interested by now? Good!

Here are two things you can do to save time and achieve more in less time

Turn Off Comment Moderation

Yeah really, do it. Moderating comments is probably the most time consuming activity of bloggers with medium to huge blogs. Suppose you spend two hours a day moderating comments. By turning comment moderation off, you can take back those two hours!

I know you get the ‘kick’ of knowing someone has commented on your blog when that comment lands in the moderation queue. But you gotta sacrifice something to gain something, right?

Not really sure whether you should turn it off? Try this: Monitor the number of comments your blog receives over a week. If that number is pretty high (20-50 comments per day), you should really turn comment moderation off. If the number is low (around one to two comments per day) you can leave comment moderation on.

I know, you must be worried about getting spammed by turning comments moderation on. Don’t worry, since your spam filter(all hail Akismet!) will probably catch it all. If you are still worried, try the above experiment again. Take a look at the number of spammy looking

comments which escaped your spam filter and landed in the moderation queue (very rare). If that number is pretty high, you can leave comment moderation on, since you’re probably going to have a hard time sifting through all the comments and deleting the spammy ones. But if the number of escaped spam comments is very low, turn comment moderation off. For extra security and protection, try installing more anti-spam plugins, such as SpamKarma (for WordPress).

I know this can be a little difficult, but turning off comment moderation can really save loads of time.

Or better, hire someone to do the dirty work for you

What you could also do is out-source the comment moderation work to some one else, paying them a decent salary. You’ll have no difficulty in finding such people, who’re looking for some extra cash. But be careful to pick a person you trust!

Out-source your Blogging

Ever heard of guest blogging? Finding ideas and writing posts can be difficult some times and often you don’t have the time. If you go ahead with a poorly researched idea, you produce posts which are devoid of quality. And you waste your time too.

Why not request other bloggers to write for you? There are literally dillions of bloggers out there who’ll happily guest blog on your blog(in return for a linkback, or even payment). Some of these bloggers might even be better than you! What my point here is that instead of you having to write posts your self, you can get them written by someone else and then use the spare time to do something else. (Note: I’m always happy to guest blog for anyone and accept guest posts too on this blog. Contact me!)

Most guest bloggers will guest blog for free, but if you really want to show your appreciation, you should pay them, regardless of the amount.

If your blog is a really big one with different sections, and you’re the only one managing it, consider employing capable people to manage each section. This way, it will be like 5 of you managing the 5 sections of your blog at the same time! After some time, you can even form a company or something and employ even more people (and make even more money!).

Do you have any tips you would like to share about saving time? If yes, please do so!

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