Top Five Time Tips For Better Blog Posts

Time is possibly the most important word you know.  It has many meanings and most of them carry quite a weight. 

Blogging is of course intimately involved with time since that is what defines a blog.  It is a website that has extra pages added from time to time.  It also can soak up quite a deal of time in creating blog posts that perform well in attracting and communicating with readers.

To bring out the importance of time, I thought it might be useful to develop a list of the top five time tips that could help you write more effective blog posts.  In developing these ideas, I realized that I was only covering a fraction of the important issues relating to time.  So I have decided to do a few myself and then pass the baton to you all.  Hopefully in that way we can together bring out the most valuable tips on time as they affect blogging and how to do it effectively.

To illustrate the diversity of meanings, I very rapidly reeled off the following phrases, each of which captures a particular sense of time. I believe these each cover a different aspect of time without too much overlap.  I have then taken the first five of these and developed a tip around each.  You may wish to look at the longer list and see whether you think one of the others is more important than the first five I chose and that should have been one of the top five.  If so please add a comment and say what your tip would then be covering that particular concept of time. 

33 Common Time phrases

Of course each of you may have a different perception of what any particular time phrase means to you.  I suggest that each of these phrases can have an impact in improving your blogging if you think through the implications.  Here you have what came to my mind as I looked at the first five phrases.  Perhaps you will agree, perhaps not.  Certainly some will find one or two that are controversial.

1.  No time like the present - Time Is Precious

You only get each minute once.  You can do something valuable with that minute or you can let it flow by so that at the end of the minute nothing has changed.  If you are using that minute to write something in a blog post, stay aware of what is happening around you and make the post remarkable.  Don't settle for the boring and humdrum. 

Tip: Make each minute count. If you find that tough, take a break.

2.  Never enough time - Time Management

It is too easy to let the world inundate you with news and events so that you are constantly stressed.  There's lots of good advice out there whether it's Dave Allen with his Get Things Done philosophy or Stephen Covey with his encouragement to do only the Urgent and Important tasks.

In all of these approaches, what counts is applying time to some things and not to others.  That involves how often you do things and how much you do.  One thing I am now doing is to use Outlook much more often to set a daily time or times to do particular tasks. 

For example I look for possible blogging topics by checking on news feeds from important news sources.  I use Bloglines since it has a format that works for me.  However recently I no longer read excerpts of each feed but read only the title.  I am now covering many more feeds in the allotted time but of course do run the risk that I will miss something important where the author has produced a less than satisfactory title.  Nevertheless my productivity on this has increased markedly.

Tip: Be ruthless in choosing what you read by looking only at titles.  If in doubt, move on quickly.

3.  What's up? - Now Is The Time

There are a variety of ways you can find out what is attracting attention in the communities you get involved in (Twitter, Google Hot Trends, Google Alerts).  When a topic is hot, then people tend to Google it to find more information.  Google also seems to favor blog posts in keyword searches and shows them rapidly. By writing on hot topics and thinking of those keywords, you improve your chances that your blog posts will be seen in response to these queries.

Tip: Blog on hot items and SEO them for best Google visibility.

4.  Things change with time - History is fun

Readers often like to read how things have changed so you can produce an interesting post if you refer to others who in the past have covered important aspects of a topic.  Do Google searches to find other bloggers who have covered the subject and give links back to significant posts.  Your account of the way things have developed may well become an authority post on the topic.

Tip:  For a memorable post on some significant change, describe what has happened in the past giving credit (and links) to those who have gone before.

5.  Time waster - Twitter Time

I am sure that many will think instinctively of Twitter when they hear the phrase 'time waster'.  It certainly can be if you do not exercise discipline and time management.  Using an interface like Tweetdeck gives you a better view of what is going on, since Twitter itself is so simple as to be overwhelming.  Twitter is not something where you should go with the flow.  Decide how often during the day you wish to spend on Twitter and for how long. 

Tip: Use Tweetdeck on a defined schedule to avoid drowning in Twitter.

6.  Do You Have The Time?

So from the first five phrases, those are the tips that came to my mind as important in making time work for you in your blogging.  The sixth phrase is your invitation. 

Do you have an important time tip that you think others could benefit from?  Do any of those other time phrases suggest to you some tip that could help others blog more effectively?  Please add your comments.  From all the comments, perhaps a  much better To
p Ten Time Tips For Better Blog Posts article can be produced, with credit given to those whose suggestions are included.