One of the hard things to do when you are working for yourself is to learn how to manage your time wisely. If you have a day job it is easy to know what to do with your time. You go to your job, and you do the job that you’re assigned. But if you work for yourself, you have to decide for yourself what the best investment of your time should be. And you choose poorly, or slack off, you aren’t hurting anyone but yourself.
So if you run a website, and are your own boss, how much time should you devote to different topics. What is the best use of your time in order to make yourself money?
I consider my time to be very valuable. I have a regular job, so I only get to work on my website during nights and weekends. As such I am always looking to try to get more efficient and improve my site quicker. Here is the most successful breakdown of time that I have found so far.
50% New Content – Content is the engine which drives people to your page. You need to have lots of content in order to get search engine hits and to get people to come back. Although quality content is key, I believe a large quantity of content is just as important and is often overlooked. Here are some good reasons to have a large quantity of content on your site.
20% SEO - Getting links and building search engine rankings can seem like drudgery at times. It can seem like you are pouring a lot of time and effort into something which doesn’t seem to be paying back at all. SEO is a long drawn out process, but it is an important one. 20% of your time should be devoted to getting backlinks, should it be through writing in forums, networking with other bloggers, or submitting your work to sites such as Blog-Op
10% Reading Other Sites - I generally spend about 10% of my time reading other sites. I use Bloglines as my news aggregator so that the best information is brought to me, I don’t have to go looking for it. Other people’s sites are a great source of new ideas for you. Additionally, by leaving comments and trackbacks and interacting with the authors, you can build up your personal brand in the blogging community. Blogging is all about establishing relationships. You should not ignore this essential aspect of being a webmaster.
10% Monetization - Lets fact it, most people are into blogging and having a website for money. Even if they have another reason to do it, people still like to get money for their work. In order to maximize your income, you should spend about 10% of your time optimizing your site for revenue. You should play with your existing ads, and look for new sources of income. You should try to maximize your ad click through rates, as well as their pay rate. More details on how to maximize your income can be found at my blog.
5% Productivity Aides - That’s right, not only businesses need to worry about productivity. You need to spend some of your time making sure you are as productive as possible. That is why you should devote some time each week to researching new tools out there that can make your site better with less work from you. I always look for the best new Wordpress plugins that I can incorporate on my site.
5% Site Design – Have a great site? Well it can be better. Spend at least 5% of your time working on improving your site design. Whether it be a complete rework or a simple color tweak, constant updating of your site is essential if you want to compete on the internet.
Want more tips on how to make money with your website? Check out Savvy Affiliate which is devoted to helping webmasters make money and increase their traffic
This post was written by Scott of the Savvy Affiliate blog.
10 users commented in " Splitting Up Your Time – By Scott H "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackGreat tips Scott! Ones I really need to implement as well. I can quickly lose track of time visiting and reading other blogs and sites – two hours can go by without me even realizing it.
Thanks for this
Excellent time management points. I’ve been struggling with that exact topic the last couple weeks. To better make use of my time, I access bloglines during breaks and my main job. If I come up with a topic to blog about throughout the day, I jot it down in a notebook that I carry with me everywhere, so I don’t forget. My next step is to do what you’ve done and break each step out with a percentage and try to stick with it.
Thanks for your complements.
I’ve recently been carrying around a notebook with me as well. Jot down little article ideas that I have along the way. I have found this is especially good for article series, as most of my one time articles are references to something I saw on the internet, but I like to give more though and time to my series
a good article but i’ve to disagree on the 50% allocation to content creation – after what i’ve been through since the last pagerank in early jan-2007 …
i was bombarded with the conclusion back then that content is king … indeed it was but site-marketing and back-link development is equally important …
i’ve not achieve any increment in pagerank nor in traffic – though i’ve created tons of content … so i’m currently putting 30% each on content creation as well as site promotion … spending more 50% time of content just doesn’t get the result you wish for (i might be wrong) … it also depends on how fast you can create the contents – so there’s plus-minus on it …
cheers …
I think they are great tips as well.
I do agree with StockTube that promotion has to be a bigger priority otherwise whats the point on having the greatest content in the world, if nobody knows about it.
Nice guest post here Chris, and an interesting read Scott. Thanks to both of you.
Good work Scott, an excellent post.
Time management has never been one of my strong points, but it obviously works for you, given the high number of good quality posts you manage to come up with.
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