My Best Advice for Part-Time Bloggers

If any of you reading this are part-time bloggers, then you are probably already very familiar with some of the challenges that come with having a full-time position and juggling a blog on the side. I’ve been a part-time blogger now for five years (with both college and full-time employment) and I’ve tried lots of different methods over the years from posting at random to crazy schedules. Recently, I vlogged a week in my life as a part-time blogger so that people could see the day-to-day of how much time I actually spend on my blog during the week and when I get the work done (I’m finishing this post up at 7:45AM so that should give you some idea.) After watching the video back, here are four of my main takeaways that all part-time bloggers should keep in mind as they work to grow their side hustles.

Make the most of your time

One of the things I hear a lot when people tell me they want to start a blog is that they don’t have the time to do it and to do it well. We’re all busy, but even the busiest people can carve out time in their schedule for what’s really important to them. So if your blog is important to you, make sure you’re dedicating time to work on it. Figure out when you’re most productive (maybe it’s before work or maybe it’s in the evenings when you get home, or on the weekends when you have time to really focus) and find some time that you can devote to your blog. It doesn’t have to be a crazy long work session either—sometimes 30 minutes can make a huge difference. I know for me weekends are super important for getting blog work done and one of my favorite things to do is plant myself in a café on a Saturday morning and totally dive in to my work.

Create a plan and stick to it

At the beginning of each month I create two documents. The first is an editorial calendar that plans out all of the posts and videos I want to create for that month. This is super easy and can be done in a Google doc (that’s where mine is) but it will give you an overview of what you’re hoping to accomplish in a given month. For me that means two posts a week, ideally two for each of the main categories of my site (fashion, beauty, travel, lifestyle, and career) and one YouTube video a week. The second is a list of blog goals that I’m hoping to accomplish in the coming month. These tend to be more big picture goals that I can’t necessarily tackle in one 30 minute work session before I head off to work, but are things that I can have in the back of my mind to find small ways to work towards them. If you’d like to read more about my goal-setting tips, click here.

Work ahead and leave room for things to go wrong

When I do a shoot with one of my talented photog friends like Sarah or Jessie, it helps if I can shoot multiple looks at once while I have them around. By doing this, I have a large library of photos for upcoming posts so that if I want a post to go up on Wednesday but it’s raining on Monday and Tuesday, I can just look into my little archive of images that I’ve pre-shot to go along with any text that I write to accompany it. For example the image above is one I've saved from the shoot I did with Jessie for my blog post about dressing up even when I feel like crap. Because of my full-time job, I find it hard to post on consistent dates (which, as a Virgo, drives me nuts and one of my blog goals for this month is to create more of a consistent schedule for myself so stay tuned for that) but the more you can do that the better because your followers will know when to expect new posts from you.

Focus on one thing at a time

If you do only have a 30 minute block of time to work on your blog, figure out what your priorities are and then pick one thing to tackle at that time. Do you need to write a blog post? Edit a video? Schedule your social media posts? Reply to comments on Instagram? By giving yourself one task to focus on and identifying a set amount of time to complete it in, you increase the likelihood that you’ll actually finish the task. And trust me once you start seeing check marks appear next to tasks on your to-do list you’ll feel a sense of accomplishment and feel motivated to continue moving forward.