Speaking of Blog Systems

As you know, his year, I will be speaking in  FinCon13 a work session, The session is for advanced bloggers and is called “How to Build Systems for Your blog”.

During the conference I will share input I have already received from others. Ahead of the conference I hope to highlight some of that information and share it with all of you.

In this post, we hear from Jeff Rose at Good Financial Cents.  Jeff writes that:

Good Financial Cents (and my other site Soldier of Finance) is all about:

• Helping you prevent making simple yet detrimental investment mistakes
• Giving you quality information to empower your financial life
• Take charge of your life. Period.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on these questions related to blog systems, Jeff.

In bold are the questions I posed to him, followed by his answers.

What blogging tasks do you think are most important to spend time on?  How do you stay focused on these?

First and foremost, I think you need to stay in tune with your readers.  What do they want to know?  What do you need to show them?  Staying engaged with them through your email newsletter, comments on your blog, social media, will help deliver content better suited to meet their needs.

What tasks are your blogs’ main time suckers?

For me, my main time suckers have been managing affiliate links, responding to guest post inquiries, scheduling posts, uploading catchy pictures.

How have you worked towards getting those areas under control and organized?

The first thing I ever did that freed up time on my blog is when I hired a virtual assistant to mainly upload and optimize pictures for my site.  At the time I figured I was spending three to four hours a week wasting time doing this.  As the blog has grown, I have since brought on a “blog editor” that proofreads my posts, schedules posts for that week, and also, manages all affiliate links.  These were tasks that I just basically got fed up with and wanted to focus more on the things I enjoyed.  For me, that enjoyment is writing posts, producing video content, and coming up with new ideas for the site.

What trouble spots have you overcome by defining steps to handle the issues or by automating things and how did you do it.  What did you use?

Mostly minor things as I how I format my posts is a bit different that what my editor does.   If there’s ever any issue, I just tell them how I would have done it so they can get used to my style of how I do things.

Do you run your blog by yourself or do enlist others?  If others, what roles do they play and how do you define the roles to them?

I ran my blog by myself for the first four years.  Just recently I brought on a blog editor that also manages affiliate links, blog scheduling, optimizing the posts for SEO, etcetera.  Since this person has a revenue share agreement with me, I defined their roles in a contract, so that we were both clear on what each other would be doing.