How Many Hours Do You Spend Working On Your Blog?

This post is part of the Friday Q&A section. If you want to ask a question just send it via the contact form.

Bill Yann asks:

How many hours do you spend working on your blog every day? I am a new blogger, and I am having trouble to set a schedule for my blog.

There were basically three periods in my blogging journey, and during each I would work a different amount of time on the blogs.

When I first started blogging it was just a hobby, and I remember I used to work around one hour per day on it, usually at night, before going to sleep. This period lasted around one year.

After that I started monetizing the blogs, and eventually I quit my job to work full time on the Internet. The three blogs I was running at the time represented the bulk of my revenues, so I spent all day working on them (around 8 hours per day). Activities included search engine optimization, web design, research, content writing, promotion and networking. This period last around three years.

Then around one year ago I started diversifying my projects, and launched new websites. Some of these make money with affiliate marketing, others selling products directly to the end user. As a result I sold a couple of blogs, and kept only this one and Daily Writing Tips (where I have staff writers so I don’t need to put too much work).

So right now I spend around 2 hours per day on both blogs. Half of that time is spent moderating comments, answering to emails and running other maintenance related tasks, and the other half is spent writing content here.

I have some tips regarding how you can create an efficient schedule for your blog, but I’ll save that for a separate post.

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How Do You Keep Motivated?

This post is part of the Friday Q&A section. If you want to ask a question just send it via the contact form.

Lye Kuek Hin asks:

You have been blogging since 2006. How do you actually keep your motivation at a consistently high level to maintain your blog?

Actually I have been blogging since 2005. That year I started FutureTechWeb.com, which was my very first blog about technology. I still remember purchasing the domain on GoDaddy, getting a hosting plan, and starting to build it with raw HTML pages (yeah, it was a pain…).

After that I started a couple of other blogs, and one of them started growing pretty fast, and that is when I decided to create Daily Blog Tips. I basically wanted a place to share the tips and tricks I was learning with my other sites.

Since then I wrote 1,590 posts here, pretty much never missing a week day over the past four years.

So where does the motivation come from? I am not really sure.

Some things certainly help. The first being the readers. If no one was reading my stuff I probably would have tried something else after one year or so. The feedback I get via emails and comments is very rewarding.

Second comes the money. Just by selling ads on this blog I am able to pay all my bills. On top of that it also helped to launch other projects over the years, so it’s definitely an important part of my overall online business. If this was not the case I probably would not be as motivated.

Third comes my interest to the topics I write about. I have been working on the Internet since 2006, and pretty much all aspects of Internet marketing fascinate me, and that is where most of my post ideas come from. Usually it’s stuff I either tried personally or saw other people trying.

Even with all the motivational factors above, however, I still have days when I just don’t feel like writing. But I push myself and write anyway, because I know that if I want readers to respect my site (i.e., to visit it often and trust its content) I need to respect them first, and that involves writing quality content regularly.

Summing up: In my opinion if you want to stay motivated with your blog you should a) build a community around it, b) get something back from your efforts and c) focus on stuff you are actually interested about. On top of that you’ll also need to have the discipline to do your homework even on the days you don’t feel like it.

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