Think you don’t have time for a blog?

Sure, on the surface, that seems like a valid objection, right?

But the truth is, we make time for what we deem important.

So if you think you don’t have time to blog, you’re actually not convinced that blogging is worth your time.

In this post, I’m going to change that by sharing three ways you can start blogging without it taking over your life.

Tip #1: Begin with a clear blogging plan

Willy-nilly publishing content, whenever you have time, is a recipe for disaster.

Sure, you’ll have all the time in the beginning, when your blog is new and fun and fresh, but as time goes on and life gets busy, it’s all too easy to let things fall to the side if you don’t have systems and routines set up to help you stay consistent.

So let’s not do that.

So my tip number one for seeing success and not feeling stressed and overwhelmed all the time about your blog or your online business is to develop a plan and then stick to it.

Why are you blogging?

And what does that look like in reality? Well, that first looks like understanding why you’re blogging in the first place.

Do you want your blog to be your business and drive passive income through things like display ads, affiliate links, or sponsored content?

Or do you want your blog to be an attractive marketing mechanism for your business? To draw people to your brand and then get them to purchase something from you, like an online course, a membership, a group program, or services.

And if you haven’t watched my previous video on the three blogging business models, definitely carve out some time to do that. It’s a really critical first step that often gets missed by new bloggers.

Once you know your business model, you can simply reverse engineer a plan for success.

Is it going to be hard work to execute? Of course, but having a plan gives you the confidence to know that over time if you follow through with these steps, you should see good results.

What type of content do you need to create and how often?

So, things you need to think about: What type of content do you need to be publishing? How often do you need to be publishing?

Most people who blog as a business publish at least once a week, many times two or three times per week.

But people who blog to attract customers can still see good results with less publishing. Even just once or twice a month can still bring good results.

For example, when I was blogging to attract people to sign up for a paid membership site, I only published new content once a month.

How will blogging lead to revenue?

You also need to understand how the content that you’re publishing is going to lead to money in your business.

So for example, if you are a content creator and you’re trying to monetize with ads, if you create content around topics that are searched for at least a thousand times per month, that’s going to bring you faster results because you need eyeballs on your content.

Whereas if you’re trying to sell something, you should create content that’s relevant to your niche and your ideal customer and your product, even if it’s only searched maybe a hundred times per month.

Attracting 100 of the right person to your website every single month is going to be so much more powerful than a thousand of the wrong people who would never want to buy from you, right?

Create your content calendar

So once you know where you’re trying to go, then you just need to create your plan.

And this is probably going to look like a content calendar.

Do some research ahead of time to find topics that are going to bring the right audience to your website.

Then you just come up with a publishing frequency and slot those topics into your calendar.

For example, you might decide to publish content every Friday. Once you know that, you can just slot your blog topics into your publishing calendar with a new topic each Friday.

This is going to save you miles of brain space in the future. It completely eliminates time wasted when you show up ready to write, but then have no idea what to write about.

Instead, you do the research and plan it out once, in bulk, and then you simply have to show up and execute.

Look at your content calendar, figure out what you’re writing about, and dive right in.

And if you’re like me, and sometimes you rebel a little bit around too much structure, it’s okay if you don’t have every single post planned out on a calendar.

Instead, you can create a bank of ideas that have been vetted and then you can just pick the one each week that feels like something you want to write about.

But the point is you’ve done the research, you have a backlog of ideas that are all good, and you just pick one and go for it.

And you can do this pretty far in advance, maybe quarterly or six months in advance, and then you don’t have to worry about your content again for quite some time. The mental load is off.

Tip #2: It’s not all on you

Another common misconception is that a blog needs to be written in a very personal style, by one specific expert, but that’s definitely not the case.

One of the easiest ways to get more done and publish more content that will actually move the needle in your business is to outsource.

And this can be done by hiring freelance writers or recipe developers to help you, hiring an assistant, or even using AI to help you outline and draft posts so that you can hit the ground running when you’re sitting down to write.

You could also accept guest posts from other professionals that you trust and respect, or even have students or interns create content for your site as a part of their rotation with you.

And all of these are great ways to boost your output without requiring more direct time from you.

Hire some help

For example, many private practice dietitians are really busy seeing clients, so they might hire other freelance dietitians who specialize in writing to create content on their websites that can drive traffic and get them more customers.

Or perhaps you can hire an assistant to speed up your process. When I was a freelance writer, I paid an assistant to help me do research in PubMed and draft outlines of articles before I started writing.

This helped me avoid the dreaded PubMed rabbit hole that I kept falling into, better focus, and churn out the articles at a faster clip.

Utilize AI

And you could easily do something similar with ChatGPT today.

You could ask ChatGPT to draft an outline for your blog topic or even start writing a first draft for you.

Then your job is to beef it up, edit, make sure it’s accurate, add references, personal experience, anecdotes, anything you can do to boost that EEAT (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) and show off that this is real content from a real expert.

Build a team

Many blogs, especially larger ones, run on this contributor model, where there’s actually a team of paid writers creating content for the site, so that they can grow and monetize really fast.

The financial risk in that model is on the website owner initially, because you are going to be paying money up front to create the content, perhaps before you’re really getting much of a return on that.

But once you’re able to get a lot of traffic, you’re going to be earning a lot more money in ad revenue, affiliate income, etc. than you’re going to be paying out to those writers. So that’s another business model that you could consider.

Accept guest posts

And you could also decide to accept unpaid guest posts in order to have more content to share, that isn’t written directly by you.

And the benefit is that the person submitting the guest post will get a link back to their website within that content, which will help boost the domain authority and visibility of their own website as well.

Work with interns

And the final popular model is to have interns create content for you while they’re doing their rotation with you.

That’s a win-win for both parties because the interns get to learn about blogging and content marketing, which is an incredibly valuable skill for them to gain, and you get more content published on your site than you could ever do on your own.

So those are all suggestions and make it so that your blog is not all on your shoulders. It really doesn’t need to be like that.

Tip #3: Quality over quantity

There seems to be the perception that blogging requires a ton of content creation 24/7, perhaps because people think social media and blogging are more similar than they really are, but that’s not true.

As I’ve mentioned before, once I actually got serious with my blogging strategy, in 10 months, with only 10 blog posts, I was able to get 20, 000 visitors per month from Google searches alone.

A percentage of those website visitors would then join my email list and go on to purchase my paid membership program.

It was an exciting, hands-off way of marketing that I really enjoy, and still enjoy to this day.

So the key is really focusing on the quality of your content over quantity.

One excellent, well-written, optimized blog post that is strategically crafted around a topic that you know is going to bring you lots and lots of visitors or potential customers is worth a billion times more than a hundred short, unoptimized, low-quality blog posts that aren’t going to be seen by anyone.

So don’t make the mistake of treating your blog as an extension of social media, because it’s not.

It serves a very different purpose, and it’s meant to be a more in-depth, high-quality, evergreen resource on whatever topic your niche is in.

And the content you publish on your blog will continue to work for you for literally years to come.

If you do it right, it doesn’t get lost in an endless stream of other influencers.

Instead, when your ideal customer or reader Googles a question, you are going to be the one who comes up as the answer in the search results.

And that’s freaking amazing. And it’s a free strategy. No paying for ads, no paying for followers. It’s a long-term play that really pays off.

The Bottom Line

The number one reason people don’t have a blog is because they’re not convinced that blogging is going to be worth their time.

And that’s usually because they lack a strategy for creating content in a way that won’t overwhelm them or require a billion hours of their direct personal time.

So I’ve outlined three ways that you can run a successful blog in a low-stress way.

Number one, go in with a plan.

Number two, stop thinking that it all needs to be on you.

And number three, focus on quality over quantity.

If you do these three things, you’ll be able to start blogging and reap the benefits as soon as possible.

So, that’s it for today. I’d love to continue this conversation inside my Facebook group, The Unconventional RD Community.

And please subscribe to my YouTube channel for more blogging and online business tips!

Erica Julson is a registered dietitian turned digital marketing pro. She has over 12 years of experience blogging and building online businesses and has taught over 900 wellness professionals inside her signature program, SEO Made Simple.