trendpreneur

The final part of a series looking into the realities of professional blogging for others. Check out part 1 and part 2 if you missed them!

The day-to-day life of a blogger can be a lonely one. Although you may be working as part of a large team, you don’t end up face to face with them on a daily basis; generally it’s you, your laptop and… that’s it. The very technologies that allow us to form large, multidisciplinary teleworking teams are also the same ones that cause us to be more isolated than ever.

Fortunately, loneworkers, writers, entrepreneurs and stay-at-home parents have all perfected the art of not going off your rocker while you’re alone with your thoughts and nowt else all day. Here are a few of the ’stay healthy, stay sane’ working and living habits I’ve picked up, both as an entrepreneur and blogger, with a slant towards the cheap ‘n’ cheerful — after all, blogging doesn’t pay that well! [...]

Following on from last week’s post about finding sources, today I’m looking at the rest of the professional blogger’s daily pipeline.

Once you’ve found something to write about, it’s time to sit back, relax and let your blogger instincts do the rest. Right? Perhaps. Once you get into the habit of posting multiple times a day on the same site, a lot of the following stages in a post’s lifecycle do become second nature, but when you’re starting out it’s useful to run through the checklist in your head.

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It’s a nice dream, that of the aspiring problogger. Address a fascinated Internet audience daily about a topic you – and they – love, while earning money? Too good to be true!

If you work as part of a blogging team for a large site, chances are you will be tasked to come up with multiple daily posts on the blog’s topic. While inspiration and introspection can get you so far, the job of keeping content fresh and covering breaking news means you need to establish good work habits, particularly if you’ve only blogged as a hobby before.

Blogging breaks down into handy steps:

• Find something interesting to write about
• Write about it
• Add appropriate images
• Add metadata: internal and external links, tags, etc
• Schedule
• (Optional) Promote
• Babysit – Edit, update, monitor comments

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