What happens when you don’t have time to blog

The last 6 weeks have been particularly hectic, and I have not had time to post as much as I would have liked. The irony, of course, is that I get clients through my blog, but once the workload reaches critical mass, I don’t have enough time to write on my blog. That old catch-22! It’s a great problem to have, and I am not unaware of how lucky I am to be a full-time professional blogger. But finding that balance between creating new and exciting content for myself, even if the posts are not paid for, and creating new and exciting content for other platforms, that’s where the blogger’s challenge lie.

So here’s what happened in a nutshell: I have published a few successful guest posts on another website, which meant that my traffic sky-rocketed and my credibility rose. So suddenly, I have marketing klout. That means more and more brands would like me to produce content for them, either on Homeology, or for their own platforms.

A few years ago, when I did research on how to be a pro-blogger, all that the research emphasized the importance of guest blogging. Did I listen? No! But it wasn’t because I didn’t WANT to listen. I just couldn’t figure out how you produce content for your own platform and then produce unique content for another platform without getting paid for either.

So let me share a big secret about guest blogging:

If you’re going to write FREE guest posts, the trick is to find a platform that allows you to publish content that already exists on your blog, AND they allow you link back to that content in order to drive traffic your way. So you write the first half of your post, and then they have to click through to your website to read the rest. Simple, right?! And it does exist, you just need to go look for it!

Once you’ve established credibility, then you will get the chance to create paid guest posts, where you write as yourself AND get paid to do it. But first, you’ll need to create traffic to your blog.

In this post last year, my income looked like this:

Under “Content”, I put paid guest post as well as ghost writing.

Now, 6 months later, it looks like this:

• 47% Ghost Blogging: writing blog posts for other blogs, under their name.
• 24% Guest Blogging: writing posts for other blogs, under my own name.
• 20% Blog: paid content on my own blog, both blog posts and banner ads*
• 9% Ebooks: books that I write for clients, under their name.

So things are looking VERY different from what they did a few months ago. If anything, I am streamlining my business and becoming more specific about what I work on. In the last 8 weeks, there have been only 11 posts published on Homeology. I created 7 of them and the other 4 were by guest bloggers on my site. Out of those 11, 7 were sponsored posts for clients. And on top of that, we created 33 blog posts for other blogs all around the world – and they were all paid for by clients.

While it’s important to keep content on your own blog fresh and new, you have to be realistic about where your income is coming from. And while I am working on getting that paid percentage on my own blog higher, I am just really grateful that I get to blog and get paid to do it – whether it’s on my own site, or someone else’s.

I’d love to get feedback on this post – and if there any aspiring bloggers out there who want more info, don’t hesitate to contact me!

Happy Blogging!

*Just a quick note on banner ads again. I have ALWAYS been against them, but I am happy to put a client’s add in the side bar if they regularly commission a post. Only then!

Background images in this post is from Shutterstock.