Sunday, funday and the day on which I sometimes like to write a more personal blog. Even though I post daily, blogging is not my day job. It’s just a hobby that I thoroughly enjoy. In ‘real life’ I’m an English teacher, teaching communication skills to Dutch college students. It’s a 32 hour job and it being education, I usually make more hours than my contract stipulates. Yet, I post daily blogs without fail most of the time. Here’s 5 tips on how I combine the two.
Picture taking: essential to my blog
1.) Prioritize
Blogging can take up quite a bit of time. By prioritizing what is truly important and factoring in how much time you have left to do other things, is essential. I always blog from home and sometimes write 2 – 3 blogs at a time over the weekend to have some nights a week off. I did the same for my trip last summer: I wrote 25 blog posts in advance so I wouldn’t have to write blog posts while I was away. Pretty much what I do, is that I factor in about 30 mins – 60 minutes for each blog post and see when I can do it. Some blog posts takes less time than others, so some nights I spend much more time blogging than others. But at the end of the day, my teaching job always comes first.
2.) Work in advance
My main reason why I can put something up every day, is because I have a complete folder system on my laptop with blog ideas. Some folders are empty (indicated by a dash, pushing them to the top of the list), others have already been filled with pictures and are ready to go. Pretty much, what I’ll do when I have an idea for a blog is create a folder on my computer. Then when I have time, usually on days off, the weekend, or during holidays, I will gather all the ideas I have and spend a few hours taking pictures or making posts more concrete. Sometimes all I’ll have to do is take a few pictures of a product on my face or I can just start writing the blog post. Just to give you an idea: I have a total of just over 450 folders with blog ideas, 75% of them already filled with pictures and ready for posting.
3.) Work with a schedule
The minute I started working with a schedule, my blogging life became a lot easier to combine with an actual job. I know what I am roughly going to write about and I simply pick 7 blog ideas from my pile of blog ideas every week. All I need to do is add a few pictures here or there, edit the pictures, put them in a blog post and write the actual text. The process of editing the pictures to the writing of a post takes me anything from 15 minutes to 2 hours depending on how long the blog posts ends up being. Beauty reviews are the most time consuming, whereas a recipe usually takes around 25 minutes.
4.) Don’t strive for perfection
I blog because I have fun doing it. Not because I am trying to be the most creative and original blogger out there. Seeing I only have limited time available to fill up this space, I do not strive for the best content out there. However, I want it to be good enough so the reviews make sense and are useful. I believe the power of blogs isn’t how beautiful everything looks, you can buy magazines for that type of content in my opinion. No, I read blogs because they are created by ‘real’ people, and reviews are based on real opinions of people who actually tried out the products. That is why I don’t want my blog to be 100% perfect, but good enough so you can get something out of it.
5.) Don’t over-complicate things
Finally, I try to keep things simple on here. With that I mean my topic choices. My blog topics are frivolous to say the least. I mean, make up and fashion aren’t live changing subjects, but they are topics I enjoy. And that is a conscious choice. After a long day at work, I cannot be bothered to write a well-researched piece on language, teaching, world politics, issues I care about, or the meaning of life. It’s not that I don’t engage with that type of content, I just don’t have the time and mind space to wrap my head around these topic enough to write a blog about it that is concise and makes sense.
How do you combine your blog?
Also, let me know in a comment below if you would like to see my blog ideas ‘filing system’.
7 responses to “Blogger & teacher: On how I combine my job with my blog”
I would definitely appreciate seeing your filing system! Your blogging strategy is really smart and logical. I still do think that it’s incredible that you manage to post everyday. How long did it take you to really make a habit of constantly creating content?
I did a 30 day blog challenge right at the start of this blog. That got me hooked to daily posting, only after a few years, I couldn’t keep up with it anymore due to work. I then went back to every other day, but missed daily posting. Then I decided on a schedule and spent some time taking pictures and writing up ideas and now all I have to do is keep it up.
Wow! That’s really awesome!! I guess the key really is in time management. Also, I love how you said you prefer usefulness over perfection. I think it’s really smart that you realized that and that that has allowed you to have such an enjoyable blog!
Thank you! That’s very sweet of you. I just think of it as a hobby. One that is time consuming and definitely gotten a bit out of hand, but it’s a hobby nevertheless.
Love hearing how other bloggers w/dayjobs find time & stay organized.
It’s so much easier when your blog is your full time job 😉
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