How Long Does it Take to Manage a Blog?

This is a question that comes up more often these days. Several years ago, when blogging was becoming popular, most blogs were just that: personal web journals, or web logs (hence blog). People would share their thoughts with friends and as that led to politics, religion, sex, automobiles, etc, a marketing medium was born.

Today, many personal blogs are now tweets. Twitter is today’s quickie blog. And, there’s a reason, too. Blogging has become time consuming. And, if you’re successful, it can be a lot of work. Of course, many people want to make money from their blog. That’s a different story, but one we’ll cover soon.

Setting up a blog can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few days, depending on the software used, the design implemented, plug-in support, and so on. But, once the blog is in place, content is king.

The act of creating a blog entry is pretty simple. This blog, for example took 27 minutes to create. Here’s the breakdown:

• authoring: 15 minutes
• tagging: 1 minute
• adding links: 5 minutes
• editing: 5 minutes
• publishing: 1 minute

What took time for this blog was the research and “thinking” part of the entry. And, come to think of it, the many conversations that led up to the writing of this entry. So, maybe this entry had a day of my time invested in it. And that has nothing to do with managing the site. Oh, and when you’re busy creating an entry, time flies. I really thought this took me ten minutes. Ack!

Aside from writing and publishing, we do a lot of other things related to the blogs we work on. For this blog, here are a few of the things I do each day that I work on this blog:

• read related blogs: 1 hours
• manage our stats: 10 minutes
• respond to comments, questions: 20 minutes
• research content, photos, etc.: 15 minutes
• discuss blog content with team: 10 minutes

So, not including the authoring part, I personally spend at least nearly two hours a day on this blog alone. Thankfully, I don’t personally work on a lot of blogs, but just this one requires a lot of attention, which is why I don’t post every day. There are just so many hours in the day.

And, this is not a high-traffic blog (yet) either. As your blog becomes more popular, the need to post daily and even more than daily will increase as well. As you begin to add Google ads, other resources, and art to your blog, your day will disappear before you realize it. Wham. It’s dinner time. Or worse, it’s Letterman time (for you oldsters). For me, I often forget to go to sleep and it’s almost time to get up. Whoops!

If your blog is to become successful, there is a lot more than just creating entries. Tags are hugely important. And, it’s not just the tags themselves, it’s knowing (and learning) what people will type into search engines.

Titles are also huge. We’ve done a lot of experiments with titles and not only does that affect the amount of traffic your post gets, it impacts the overal popularity of the blog. Titles must describe the content of your post, and in such a way as to answer the question: do I want to read this?

And, a good blog entry won’t be too long. So, I’ll wrap this entry up with a reference to another blog story that’s related, and although it’s two years old, it’s still valuable. Read on.