How to Accomplish More with the 80/20 Rule of Blogging
If you’ve never heard of the 80/20 rule it goes something like this:
80% of your results come from 20% of your effort.
And it applies to blogging as well as several other aspects of your life.
80% of your blogging results will come from 20% of your effort.
So naturally, the next question becomes how to focus on that 20% and multiply that effort.
Most bloggers think that the most important part of blogging is creating the content.
While creating the content is very important, we don’t live in a world of if you write it they will come.
So if you are spending the majority of your time creating content and only say 20% of your time promoting it, then it’s likely that 80% of your results are coming from that 20%
In this post, I’m going to share strategies to help you flip that percentage on its head so you can start seeing even greater results. I’m going to show you how to spend more time promoting and less time creating content without sacrificing your editorial calendar.
The key is to build your promotion efforts into your creation efforts….
Have A System In Place
Having a system in place for publishing content helps to make sure you don’t miss a step and are being as efficient as possible.
This is why I use a template I created in ClickUp [link] – the tool I use to manage all the things, including my editorial calendar. Each post is it’s own task and has the checklist of everything that needs to happen as a subtask.
If you haven’t created a posting checklist, give it a try and edit it as you work through posts to make sure everything is in there. It took two or three tries to get my list just right.
Make sure your list also includes the after publishing steps too, like posting on social media and emailing your list
Optimize Every Part Of Your Post
Ever heard the saying, work smarter not harder? Making sure every element of your blog post is optimized for search engines and other promotion techniques is working smarter.
If you don’t have a checklist on what to do with your post to ensure it is fully optimized, the folks from Elite Blog Academy have you covered with this freebie:
The Essential Blog Post Promotion Checklist
Automate Where You Can
If there is a task you have to repeatedly do, see if there is a way you can automate it completely or at least speed up how long it takes you. Some things to consider automating include:
- Creating graphics
- Scheduling promotion
- Writing content
Creating Graphics
Use a template to help speed up the process of creating graphics for your content and then resize them to suit your other needs. You can use the paid version of Canva to do this, or my preferred tool is Google Slides.
Scheduling Promotion
Online tools can help to save you tons of time when it comes to promoting your content or special offers. Missinglettr can help to automate the creation of social media posts. While SocialBee will promote evergreen offers with a queue of content. When it comes to using Pinterest, Tailwind can make it easy to schedule out content for weeks in just an hour or two.
Related: 6 Budget Friendly Social Media Scheduling Tools
Writing Content
If you’re thinking it’s impossible to speed up how quickly you write, you could be correct. However, how quickly do you talk? If it takes you forever to write content, consider using a talk to text tool to speed things up.
Related: How to Create Content Super Fast
Don’t Forget The Other Tools At Your Disposal
When it comes to promotion it can be easy to focus on social media but that is hardly the only method of promotion. You also have your email list and your network of friends.
Make sure you keep your email list up to date on what you’re doing and let them know when new content is live.
Also make sure you let friends, in particular ones in your niche know if you’ve produced content that might be of interest to them and their audience.
Bottom Line
When it comes to blogging, chances are you’re spending most of your time creating content, but not nearly as much time promoting it. But the strategies in this post should help you to work more efficiently and promote your content more. Here are the four strategies again:
- Have a system in place to make sure you don’t miss a step
- Work smarter not harder by optimizing every part of your post
- Review your repetitive tasks to see which ones can be automated
- Don’t forget to use all the resources at your disposal to promote your content, including your email list and network
Do you have other strategies to help make promoting your content easier? Let me know in the comments!
