5 Essential Yet Distracting Tasks for a Blogger

Bloggers are you being distracted by some tasks which might be essential for your blog? Well I have always been a firm believer of priorities. You need to know your priority! For a blogger, the number one priority is write quality blog posts. Everything else comes afterwards. Now just blogging never got anyone anywhere. So in this posts, I will talk about some tasks that we all need to do, but watch ourselves because some of these can get addicting and then distract us from our blogging.

Social Media Networking

YES, it is important. But sometimes bloggers get distracted in updating their twitter, plurk, or something else like that. Maybe they are too busy interacting with their friends on facebook, or creating profiles at other networks. While they are all necessary, always know your priority and for bloggers it is blogging. Another common one is bookmarking. Bloggers are too busy becoming a power digger or a high profile social media celebrity on stumbleupon. Do that, but don’t let it distract you.

Design and SEO

For people who are extremely crazy about designs like me, this is a huge distraction. You worry too much about your blog design. You spend hours upon hours developing a new design, and then more hours on coding this new template, but is it necessary. You can spend this time searching for good resources to write an awesome post. Learn how to stick with one design which is good. Same thing goes with SEO. Yes Search Engine Ranking is important, but do I try to optimize my site daily? NO! Write a good meta tag and description. Work on your titles rather than checking your rankings and so on.

Interacting with Readers and Fellow Bloggers

It is very important to reply to all your readers emails and interact with them in the comment box. Same goes with your fellow bloggers. It is essential that you make good relationship with them. But since there are thousands of blogs out there, it becomes an endless task. Learn how to allocate your time and focus on writing good blog posts first.

Monetizing and Analyzing Stats

Alright now this is where it becomes trouble. This step is extremely important if you are running some affiliate marketing campaign on your blog and you are using adwords because you better be checking stats otherwise you might lose some money, but don’t let it distract you. Same goes on with checking your subscribers daily or updaing your traffic stats every 2 hours. It is essential to check your traffic, and see how and where are you getting the traffic from, but this can often become very distracting, and it effects your writing.

Being Emotional/Upset

I have learn’t this the hard way but being emotional and upset with others don’t really work on the blog because it kills your blog’s life. So it is pointless to get into argument with other bloggers. Might be some linkbait, but not all link baits work. It also drive your readers away. Another time when bloggers really get upset is when their content is being copied. Stop worrying about it because you can’t stop these guys. How many sites are you going to send a DMCA notice. You will get one shut down, and ten others will pop up. It waste your time, and time is money for us.

I am not saying that these tasks you shouldn’t do, but I am saying is that allocate your time. Blogging for every blogger should come first, and everything should come second in business. Learn how to prioritize your actions. Set goals for the day, so you know exactly what you want to accomplish each day. Keep track of time for everything that you do because that will make you more aware of what you are doing, and you can knock yourself in the head if you waste time.