Sometimes you can feel like you just don’t have enough time to blog. Perhaps you have a full time job. A child or two to raise. Or maybe you just want to take some time for yourself and forget about the blog all together.

If you’ve been feeling like blogging is a lot of work, takes a lot of time, or is just too much of a consuming effort to make it worthwhile–think again. Here are 9 ways to find the time to keep your blog at the top of its game.

1. Set Aside Time to Blog
They always say the first step’s the hardest. They’re right. If you don’t have a lot of free time on your hands, forcing yourself to allot even a half an hour a day to blogging is going to tightly constrict your daily routine. However, there are two easy ways to go about giving yourself time to blog. First, you can add more waking hours to your day by getting up earlier or going to bed later. Second, you should evaluate what you do every day and see if there are times you can shave a few minutes from your activities. For example, if your favorite TV shows come on at a certain time, TiVO them and start watching a little later than when they start. You’ll save yourself at least ten minutes on an hour long show when you don’t watch commercials. Devote that time to blogging instead.

2. Let Your Computer Work for You
There are a number of ways to let your computer do the work for you. If your blog posts are formulaic, make a template of your average post and use that each time you draft a new post. If you manage multiple blogs, use blogging software instead of visiting each site’s dashboard one by one. If you maintain a general blog, bookmark all of the trend sites you use so that you can pop them open at once instead of doing it manually. The point here is that even though each little task may only take a few seconds, they can add up to save you plenty of minutes during a full day’s work.

3. Live By a Schedule or Calendar
We all tend to establish routines. Wake up in the morning, go to work (or school), come home, have some dinner, and so on. While your routine may be deeply engrained in your mind, if you actually map it out in a calendar program or on a piece of paper, you’ll often find that you may have more large breaks in your day than you thought you did. By maintaining a real calendar, you can plan your time more effectively and free up some valuable blogging time even though you thought your days were packed from morning to night.

4. Set (Realistic) Goals for Posts, Readers, and Subscribers
If you’re pulling 80 hour work weeks, don’t expect to be able to post 10 times a day. Easily the most common problem with blogging is that you end up setting these amazingly unrealistic goals when you first start out blogging and you find that you can never hope to keep them. I’m speaking from personal experience here. This started out as a daily post blog, if you’ve been with me from the beginning. In any event, it’s important to keep your head level and not fall into the trap thinking that you’re going to post way more than you could ever possibly hope for.

5. Find Images Before You Write
Finding images takes time. Lots of time. Do it well in advance during the time between when you think up a good idea for a post and when you actually draft that post.

6. Knock Out Several Posts Each Day You Blog
Have a day with a particularly long amount of free time? Use it to your advantage to plow through several posts at a time. Long, short, whatever. The more posts you can do in a sitting, the more backups you have in case you are unable to get a post done later in the week. This tip goes hand in hand with using the publish at a later date feature built into WordPress. Schedule your posts as necessary to avoid missing your self imposed deadlines.

7. Take Notes and Save Bookmarks
Whenever you think of a great topic to post about, write it down. Did someone else think of it first? Save their post as a bookmark and incorporate some of their ideas into your own posts. Just don’t plagiarize their ideas or their verbiage. Being able to maximize your time means minimizing the amount of time you sit in front of your computer trying to think of what you should write about next. You’ll never have to fear writer’s block again if you write down ideas well before you write about them.

8. Spread Out Your Research Over Time
This goes with point #7. If you’ve been writing multiple posts a day and thinking up ideas for posts in advance, then there’s no reason you shouldn’t be doing your research in advance too. Once you have your idea in hand, do whatever research you need to in order to write your post. Heck, you can even do research for posts while you’re at work, talking on the phone, or watching your favorite sitcom.

9. Brainstorm On the Go
Finally, brainstorm about your blog, your theme, your posts, and your pages while you’re away from your computer. Then bring those ideas to fruition when you finally sit down at your computer. If you’ve finished up with all of the tough mental work before you get to work on your blog, you’ll find that the ideas have a lot more room to run. Changes to your theme come faster. Posts flow better. And you might even experience that magical moment when you realize that this whole blogging thing you’ve been trying out may just be successful yet.

Image by Wordle

Tiger and his wife, Elin Woods, are expecting their second baby. A big congratulations to them. According to various sources, they’re expecting the child in the late winter.

Great news for Tiger and Elin Woods–but this is a blog about blogging, writing, content, and the like. Not about sports stars and their children.

But what can celebrities like Tiger and Elin Woods teach us about blogging?

Sometimes you have to jump on the bandwagon and jump on it fast. Riding the trends is a great way to get your blog out there into the limelight and even stir up a new audience while you’re at it. That’s exactly what I’m trying to prove with this post.

So why did I choose Tiger and Elin Woods and her pregnancy as my topic of choice? I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading about the positives of using tools like Google Trends to help boost traffic to a blog. For some people, it seems to work like a dream–possibly bringing in thousands of unique visitors in a matter of hours. Just as good as social bookmarking without all of that high school popularity contest crap to go along with it.

By capitalizing on what’s hot at the moment, you can cash in on the hoards of visitors looking for a specific topic. Just give your piece its own unique spin and see where it goes from there.

However, a word of warning. Do try to keep your blog posts on topic when you’re recruiting ideas from Google Trends. Otherwise you may risk alienating your readers–which will ultimately show that you care far more about attracting uniques than keeping people coming back time and time again.

August was a great month for Contented Niche. With quite a bit of traffic flowing in, I’m pleased with the success this blog has experienced so far.

But now is the time to take it in a new direction. I’ve noticed that resource posts and other, longer, articles are drawing in the most attention, so I’m going to focus on those for a few months until I can sustain my numbers at a comfortable place. Then I’ll be back to daily posts and see where things go from there.

Does this mean I’m not going to highlight some of the best and most unique icons and WordPress themes? Of course not, just not as often.

And did I mention that I’m hard at work on building a few themes of my own? I don’t want to give any set in stone deadlines, but expect to see the first one posted by mid month.

So expect to see the changes come this week with fewer, but better (and certainly more in depth) blog posts to come.

Oh, and if you have any suggestions for a post you’d like to see, just drop me a comment below.

Thanks for sticking around.

I’ve read a lot of comments on other blogs as of late that talk about how long it takes them to post. We’re talking a half hour, an hour, sometimes more.

That’s too long for you to be spending on a single post.

Now, there’s a time and a place for a long post. I tend to spend a lot of time on resource lists or how-to guides I’ve posted on other blogs, but I know some of you out there are spending at least that much time on short, choppy posts like this one.

Sometimes people write slow. My old roommate was a very slow writer. It would take him days to finish a short four page double spaced essay–no matter the topic. And aside from “practice makes perfect”, conquering your slow writing isn’t going away any time soon. Unless, of course, you’re a slow typist. Then you just need to train yourself.

But enough rambling. Let’s get to the point.

There are a number of ways that you can improve your posting speed, and they won’t take you too long at all.

First, start a word processor file that you can use to keep your post notes on. Title ideas, topic ideas, websites that you’re drawing inspiration from, and anything else that can help you become a faster poster. Keeping all of your ideas in one place will significantly improve your posting times.

Next, visit your favorite free photo site, or one of the photo search engines I’ve previously recommended, and download a ton of pictures that you can use with your posts. Do they have to fit with the subject matter? Nah, the more unique the picture, the better. (And yes, I know I haven’t been using post images myself–but I’m working on it.)

Finally, keep your RSS reader updating as quickly as possible. When you get the scoop about a news story or something else that’s fast breaking, write up a couple of paragraphs on it as fast as you can, slide in a few links, and submit the post. If you can do a few of those a day, you’ll be well on your way to hundreds of posts in a couple of months.

This post took only 10 minutes to write. Simple as that, I had all of my research in front of me and all I had to do was type.

A few days ago, I posted on an awesome way to bring unique fonts to your website using just the tools at your disposal (PHP and JavaScript) and a handy tool called FLIR. The drawback was you had to do all of the installation yourself, which can be a real drag if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing.

WordPress users rejoice. There’s a brand new plugin that gives you all of the power of FLIR without all of the do it yourself work. If you can install any other plugins, you can install and configure this one in a snap.

It’s not totally complete, but it is functional. So give it a download, see how you like it, and keep a look out for some updates in the very near future.

Traffic makes the world go round. And after getting Stumbled and Dugg this last week for the first time on this blog, social media is a great way to score big traffic numbers in mere moments. But you guys already knew all of that, right?

What I’m going to be talking about today is which social media site should you focus on. This is, by no means, a scientific study, but simply a survey of which social media site works best for individual blogs and the blogosphere as a whole.

Let’s start with StumbleUpon. It covers a huge array of subjects, so you’re bound to find one that your blog or website fits into nicely. Furthermore, if you’ve got money to burn and you want to send some new visitors your way, they offer a fairly cheap advertising program for just pennies per visitor. However, the problem with all of this stumbling is that very few people stick around. A lot of stumblers, myself included, keep their fingers on the Stumble! button just ready to hammer it the moment they lose interest. The ease of stumbling to a new site makes your bounce rate suffer.

On the other hand, we have Digg. It’s arguably better known, and has a huge user base, but lacks the massive depth of categories found on StumbleUpon. This makes it best for niches like technology, current events, and even celebrity gossip, but all but useless to make money online bloggers, photography bloggers, and other niches that don’t fit squarely into Digg’s mold. Maybe one post here or there will apply to Digg’s topic guidelines–but don’t expect every one of your great posts to.

Now that we’ve covered the sites themselves, let’s talk traffic. That’s what you’re all here for anyway, right? With StumbleUpon, you have unlimited time to get your site from no stumbles, no reviews, to tens of thousands of stumbles and many reviews. You post something, people find it, they like it, their friends find it, and so on. Traffic from StumbleUpon may start slow, but eventually it will reach a breaking point.

Digg, however, operates in a much more peculiar way. You submit a site, blog post, photo, video, whatever to Digg with a catchy headline and a quick summary that draws visitors in. They click your link, visit your site, go back to Digg and vote it up if they like it. Simple. Except you don’t get much traffic until you actually hit the Digg front page. For as long as you’re in the upcoming section, you’ll see your Diggs go up–but your traffic stays pretty much the same. For the post in question, the story ended up with 108 Diggs, but according to analytics only about 35 people actually came from Digg to read the post. That’s a whole lot of blind Digging going on.

StumbleUpon is the clear winner, though the high bounce rate is a bit disconcerting. Your stumbled posts generate traffic for weeks or months to come, there’s more niches to squeeze into than with Digg, and the system has an air of fairness to it.

Obviously, if you can get your post both Stumbled and on the Digg Front Page, you’re in a win-win situation.

Blogging became somewhat of an addiction for me a few years ago. I guess it’s always been in my blood. Starting new projects. That whole entrepreneurial spirit.

The problem is that, especially with time consuming projects like blogs or businesses, when you get too many going at the same time, you lose the ability to work on each individual project as if it were the only one you have. Hence the need for time management.

Managing time is one of the single most important skills a person can have these days. If you’ve been to college, you know just how important it is. If you’ve found yourself balancing two jobs just to have enough money to live, you know just how important it is. Because proper time management can either make or break you, you have to be on top of how much time you are spending here or there. Anything else and you’re going to have problems keeping up with the crowd.

Here are some of the best ways to balance your time, especially if you have multiple blogs.

• Take Control of Your Time: Realize that you don’t have to do everything every single day. Make specific time for yourself to do all of that day’s or that week’s work. During that time, don’t do anything else. Put distractions aside so you can work specifically on exactly what you need to do. It’s the best way to make sure that your projects get done.
• Focus on a Different Blog Each Day: As long as you don’t have more than seven blogs under your belt, you should try focusing on a different blog each day. That way you allow yourself to get into the mood of your blog, which is great if your multiple blogs happen to be on different topics. Feel free, though, to do work on any of your blogs on the same day if your sites are all occupying the same or similar niches.
• Take Breaks: Unless you’re some kind of blogging machine or the Man of Steel, you need to take breaks from time to time. While you may think that this is a poor way to manage your time, consider that working all the time will certainly burn you out–and there is nothing like being burned out to really put a damper on the rest of the work you do that day. Don’t overwork yourself and you’ll actually become more productive.
• SEO, SEO, SEO: If you just can’t handle the pressure and you miss a day or two, rest assured that your blog won’t go unnoticed just because you’re not flooding it with new content. That’s the role that Search Engine Optimization plays. Take some time (preferably when you start blogging), find your keywords, build your backlinks, and watch as the search engine traffic flows in even on days you weren’t able to muster the energy to post.
• Take a Full Day Off Every Week: Once again, this seems to fly in the face of productivity. Taking a day off is not exactly a good way to advance the status of your blogs–but neither is working so hard that you burn yourself out and never feel like blogging again. You need some rest. You deserve some rest. So give yourself a day each week to not think about blogging. Check your stats if you like, but don’t even think about writing a post.
• Know When to Break From a Blog That is Acting More Like an Anchor: If you’re like me and you’ve managed to get yourself more blogs than you can handle, consider ditching one. That’s right, just don’t post on it anymore. Leave the ads up (someone still may click on them), but don’t post on it anymore. Don’t check the stats. Just leave it be so that you can direct your attention to other, more successful blogs that you’re more passionate about.