As paul said, “One hour per day might actually make for better blogging!”

If we really took Tim Ferriss’ ideas on the Pareto Principle and Parkinson’s Law to heart and truly implemented them, we would only spend the time we had on what most impacted our blogging success.

To me, that’s:

1. Writing valuable, original, entertaining, informative, and provocative content. If this is the only thing you have time for, do this.

2. Respond to comments on your own blog. After writing quality content, interact with your readers so you truly have a conversation.

3. Read a few blogs in your genre (or anywhere actually) and comment regularly to get some name recognition by participating in the discussion.

Writing posts, moderating comments, and commenting on fellow blogs are far more valuable than any social media stuff or SEO or forum or offline promotion.

I’m thinking about adopting this approach–I have only one hour per day to conduct any blogging activities. This will necessarily sharpen my focus and force me to concentrate on truly high-impact aspects of blogging.

Seriously. I think I’m going to do this.

I spend about 1 hour per day on Saturday’s and Sunday’s writing content. I try to write three or four posts each day, and schedule them to *go live* once each day. Since I have more than 1 hour I *can* spend on these two days, I do anything left over from the previous week as well.

I spend Monday tweaking the blog – what you are calling Blog Design. I find that I don’t get as many visitors on Monday, so it’s a good day to make changes that might *mess up my blog*.

I spend Tuesday on my SEO. This includes inbound links and on page factors. I research plugins that help, update my SEO (All in one SEO pack) titles and descriptions and adding keywords I didn’t think of when I made the posts.

I spend Wednesday commenting on other people’s blogs, responding to my commenter’s (woefully few but I am adding new features to encourage this, like removing the nofollow, allowing commenter’s to follow via email, etc).

I spend Thursday and Friday with various other tasks like posting on social media like Facebook or MySpace, adding new features (plugins) and networking with other bloggers. I also try to spend a little time in forums adding content and posts, and each one has a link back to one of my blogs.

It’s a great topic and I personally thank you for sparking the conversation.

Cenay’

The rest of the time is spent analysing the markets.

If you are completely new then 45 minutes on content and 15 mins submitting to directories and social sites.

To juggle day job and blogs and other online publishing, I have started designating Monday for this blog, Tuesday for that one…. and another day for site development (my blogs are pretty new) and another day for checking out others’ blogs and for Digging, etc.

The content I often line up ahead of time. When it’s Monday blog time, I post a few items, scheduled to spread through the week. Same with the other days and blogs/sites.

Adam

Firstly, I read “what activities should I do if I can only get online for one hour a day?”

If I could only access the Internet for an hour each day, but had more time to dedicate to other tasks, then I would make sure that I’d only do tasks that required a Net connection to complete.

* Spend around half to three-quarters of the time researching stories that require online information. Push as much information to offline storage as possible (email, offline RSS reader, etc.) for later perusal.

* Spend the rest of the time commenting (but remember you could write the comment offline and then copy and paste it once a connection is available), networking on one or maybe two social network sites, briefly checking stats and doing optimisation, and so on.

DO NOT spend that time writing articles, composing email replies / approaches, etc. This can be done offline and recalled quickly once a Net connection is established.

Then it’s up to you to take the time away from the Net to write articles, spend time crafting emails and comments. Makes it easier if you still have a computer which can later be connected to the Net, or at least save content on a memory stick to then be taken to a Net-connected PC.

HOWEVER

If you only have one hour per day to spend on all aspects of blogging, I’d say it’d be very difficult. Perhaps don’t look to publish an article every day, but maybe every third day, but make it a good one! You can still carry round a notepad or a dictaphone when away from the computer to capture ideas as they come, for later expansion into posts.

Though linking and commenting is important, I’d suggest spending less time (maybe just 5%) doing that, while you’re building your “pillar” content.

Don’t get bogged down in statistics checking, and if you get stuck on one article, save it as a draft rather than wasting your valuable time staring at the screen, and move on to something else.

Try to find a niche where you can do significant research offline as well as online, so you don’t have to be tied to RSS feeds and other web sites.

I thought this would actually be a simple thing to answer (and do), but according to many previous comments apparently not… First of all, you don’t need to be online when you write your blog, plan your marketing activities, prepare emails/newsletters etc., analyze your statistics and so on. One day (1.) you use the hour to publish and adjust, maybe some social networking. Next day (2.) checking/answering comments/questions, one day (3.) to check and download statistics for later analysis, one day (4.) to read related articles and comment on other blogs – download/print for later reading, one day (5.) for research and analytics + maybe adjusting ads and stuff, and this would still leave you 2 days per week for any other activity or more of these before. You could either publish more often than the once a week considered here, you could divide these into half an hour parts and do 2 things in one day – publishing 2-3 times a week maybe… If you are only 1 hour per day online, that should leave you plenty of time to do offline work – writing, planning, analysing, offline marketing, writing emails/responses/comments/newsletters, and so on. Just stay in focus and plan well, it’s very do-able. Being online all the time is highly over appreciated!

Regards,

Tom Laine

I just try to split my time most effectively, say 50% writing, and 10% each on social, comments, design, features, and theme development (ie making themes, not tweaking my own).

Makes for relatively slow throughput and limited attention for each thing, but I just try to keep the quality up.