Blogging Pointers

Intro - - Welcome, this is part five of the multi-part series The Bloggers Guide to Time Saving Techniques. This series covers the ever important topic of time management and how it directly relates to your success as a blogger. I will be covering some key issues many bloggers, myself included, have battled with in the past and how you can overcome them with a few simple tricks to managing your time more efficiently.

First, I wanted to mention that you don’t have to try and write multi-part series’ or two thousand word posts everyday in order to satisfy your readers. Many bloggers, yes even pro bloggers, use what they term as “filler content” at least two days a week. Filler content in short, is very simple posts often times its a quick review of another blog/product or a simple link list thats sole purpose is to fill a void for that particular day. Filler content is often a great thing to post for the weekend, just to add something new or use it if you fall behind one day. I very highly recommend that you keep a couple simple posts like these on hand for those slack days when there are no thoughts present in your head, it happens to all of us, and is sure to happen to you.

Well, I know this particular portion of the series is about product research, but I wanted to mention everything above to give you an idea of what to keep your eyes open for when you are doing your research. So with that said, content research is a very important step in the blogging process. Whether you are in need of a little inspiration or researching the hottest news in your niche, you will find yourself hitting the dusty internet trail in search of new material.

I often tend to keep a Firefox tab open while I am writing, so I can hit google to verify what I said is correct. There is nothing worse than getting an email from someone saying your material is outdated or that program doesn’t have that function anymore, something like that. So to keep this from happening, anytime I use a fact or mention, I quickly verify to make sure it is still accurate, because things change and on the net they tend to change quicker than usual.

So that is one tip, always keep a tab open for verification research as you write your posts. This willprevent you from bringing everything to a halt opening a new tab so on and so forth.

Try to research non time sensitive material in advance. I cant stress this enough, every time you do something in advance you save time and headaches down the road when its time to write.

When you are researching stay focused. It is very easy to lose track of what you are doing online. I have started searching for some new web host and an hour later found myself wanting to buy a new video game that I just spent forty-five minutes hunting for the best deal. So keep focused on your searches or you will easily double your work time.

Always check the biggest resources for your topic first. Jump over to the biggest blogs and see what they have been writing about or maybe they wrote your same idea a few months ago. By no means should you copy their writings it is against the law and just plain ethical, but using it as an inspirational piece is often why they write it, to inspire.

But, don’t forget the small guy. Even though by now you have scoured the biggest resources available to you, you should not stop there, everyone that started out was once a new guy. Which means that you can find equally great content from many of the smaller resources.

Let Google do the work. Google is a very powerful tool at your fingertips, that holds a vast amount of information. If you are searching for something specific wrap it with quotation marks, this will pull only the results that math that phrase exactly. Imagine how much time you can save if you cut the results down from two million to two hundred, its a lot.

Let the content come to you. Sign up for email newsletters and rss feeds, this way you receive ideas for your articles straight to your inbox. This can be very handy and you never know what will come in any given morning, that you would enjoy writing about. Anytime an idea comes to you instead of you looking for it, you have made it one step further ahead of the game.

If you stumble across something of interest one day, bookmark the page and save it for a a time that you can’t find anything else to write about. Always think to the future if you plan on staying ahead, I can’t stress the importance of this enough.

I considered giving you a list of resources along with this article, but I felt it would be impossible to cover something for everyone, being that there are just so many topics. But I will tell you to just keep up on the day to day happenings in your field and you should have a pretty good idea of where to look when you go hunting. Any free time you may hav, take the opportunity to check out some of the blogs of interest to you and then revisit them on a regular basis, you never know what you may find.

Here are the links to the other parts of this series:

• Part 1 - The Bloggers Guide to Time Saving Techniques
• Part 2 - Sensible Posting - Writing for the Future
• Part 3 - 6 Time Saving Tips for Interacting With Your Readers
• Part 4 - One Blog to Another - Multiple Blog Management Syndrome
• Part 5 - Productive Content Research for Bloggers

blogging, content research, finding content for your blog, writing content for your blog, blog