How to organize your blogging life

Let's think about the following nightmare scenario:

Happy mother, with a high academic profile, with a busy happy family life, and a lot of social networking, and a lot of passion for writing, reading - as many domains as possible, and many blogs to manage on a daily basis. Please add to the list a new job and some extra business projects I need to continue at least for a couple of months. I also love to cook and to blog about my recipes. I need to attend conferences, improve two foreign languages and other 'must to' at least twice the day.

Sounds crazy, I know, but I use to sleep maximum 5 hours the day and I am perfectly healthy. However, when it comes to my small blogging empire, I suffer a lot for neglecting the regular contributions. As one day - and many years later -  I hope I will be professional enough to focus exclusively on managing my blogging portfolio, I need to prepare the official launch of my free life. But how?

The easiest way to plan is to dedicate at least one hour the day updating two of the blogs and another 30 minutes later the day to keep the track of the social media from the domains close to those blogs. It is important that I create thus a certain regularity of the posts, instead of the current pace when I use to dedicate a couple of days in a row to updating one or two of the blogs and not returning for the next 2 weeks. On the other hand, as blogging is the only activity without deadlines, it was healthier for a while to refrain from being too intensive, as I need to draw the separation line between 'freedom' and 'financial slavery'.

I will try to keep this program at least for two weeks from now and evaluate if it is feasible or not. I decided - 100% randomly - to dedicate the Mondays and Tuesdays to this blog, so hope to be back then!

Find the right blog

Are you working for a company interested to collaborate with various categories of bloggers? Do you have problems in finding out which blogs are the best to promote your products? Here are a couple of advices about how to make the right choices:

1. Most probably, the products that you are ready to distribute for free are limited and thus, you should be very careful with the category of blogs offered for distribution. The first step is to make a short and long list of networks where you will be interested to see your products presented as well as to define your target group.

2. You should always look for active bloggers - meaning with at least 1-2 posts the week. 

3. Be careful with the new blogs: some people would be happy to use your products for free and for this, they will set up a blog especially for this. Take your time and watch what is going on with the blog in the next weeks and months and start the collaboration only if you are sure that you deal with a committed blogger.

4. The volume of comments is also very important: the best case scenarios are the blogs with more than 5-6 comments for each posts.

5. Other big numbers in social media networks are important: the 'likes' of the Facebook pages, the 'followers' on Twitter or the 'daily ratio' of the readership will automatically pledge the cause of a medium or long term collaboration with a blogger.

6. Beyond those statistical aspects, you should take care of the language and the general design of the blog. Not anyone will be happy to associate his or her products with bloggers assuming vulgarity  or rasist messages whatever the impressive readership, isn't it?

7. Your geographical area of interest is also important. If you want to increase your customers from Asia, you should focus especially on the (big) blogs from this area.

Finding the right key words

As I am trying to get the best from my professional experiences, I've learned a lot lately from my SEO-related work and regardless of where my professional path will lead me to, it will help me to better sell my 'products'.

First, I knew that there are many tools that could use you to evaluate the density of required keywords on your website. This might work very well when it comes to the websites of the companies, but it applied as well to the blogs as you can easily outline your profile for your requested niche. 

Second lesson, but by far the most important relates to the keywords that you associate with your posts - the 'labels', for the users of Blogger. At the beginning of my blogging activity, I wanted to add the keywords that define my field of writing, but in a very general way - as, for instance, writing, blogging, marketing advertising etc. However, the key to increase the readership is to use very specific words that define exactly what you are writing about. People will not have time to read thousand of Google search results after typing a very general term: they need to be around very specific topics and thus, the more specific you are the better for being found exactly by people that are supposed to be interested in your work. It means as well that you should be very good and offer a good return to your first time visitors in order to encourage them to return on your page.