That’s a sure thing, the week end is definitely the favorite time of the week for many people. But how can you use efficiently the spare time you have on week ends to enhance your blog? In this article, I’m going to show you how I use my week end time and give you some tips.
Take the time to relax
Althought this post is about things to do to enhance your blog, taking the time to relax is something essential if you want to make a good job on your blog.When you have too much work to do, it can be very tempting to do it on a “quick and dirty” way, which is never good. If you take the necessary time to relax and be with your family, you’ll build forces for a better blogging all along the week.
Make your schedule for the week
Being organized is very good for efficient blogging. Each week end, I take an average 30 minutes to think about what posts I should write and what improvements I could make to my blogs during the week.
I use a Moleskine notebook to write my ideas, organize my schedule and remeber what I have to do. It is a real life saver for a busy person like me, who own more than 10 blogs!
Upgrade WordPress
WordPress upgrades are boring, but necessary to make sure your blog is secure. I personally like to upgrade WordPress as well as the plugins I use on week ends, to make sure I’ll have the required time to repair my blog if a problem happens.
WordPress upgrades problems are quite rare, but that doesn’t mean they can’t happen. And if it happen, you’ll be happy to be able to repair your blog right now!
Perform maintenance
You probably have noticied that on week ends, your blog is getting less visitors than during the week. This means week ends are the best time to change your WordPress theme or implement design changes.
Remember to use the maintenance mode WordPress plugin if you want to prevent visitors accessing your blog while performing maintenance.
Work on the week posts
By definition, saturdays and sundays are the days of the week where you have spare time. In order to have less work to do on the other week days, what about starting to work on your scheduled blog posts?
Especially in the case of very long and complex articles, you’ll be very happy to have some advance.
Guest blog
I have already demonstrated how guest blogging is good for you and your blog. So what about using some of your week end spare time to give it a try? You’ll probably be very happy with it!
Read other blogs
Reading other blogs is one of the best – if not the best – way to stay tuned with what’s hot in the blogging world theses days.
When you’re a blogger yourself, it can be hard to find the time to read 15 or 20 blogs on a daily basis. But on week ends, you can easily take the time to read your favorite blogs and stay tuned with the latest news and trends.
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Nice tips Jean. Will surely use the Maintenance Plugin next time I am upgrading or changing the theme.
Guest Blogging is so underrated, its a great way to build reputation, build backlinks and increase long term traffic to your blog.
Writing your articles on weekends is definitely something that helps improve their quality. I mean when you have hectic working days and when you only have a small amount of free time to devote for your articles. But when you have that extra time you think a lot clearer thus improving the quality of your articles.
I liked the part where you discuss about relaxing – that’s something I haven’t done in a pretty long time. Usually I’m always behind the computer doing something. Should definitely start taking it a bit easier and doing other things, like spend some time with my family.
I know it’s pretty unrelated, but is it perhaps your cat? I’d guessed that it’d be black, but so shortly after I asked for a pic of your cat there’s one in your post… :3
The only I agree with is relaxing if you blog the whole week or blogging if you relax the whole week. The rest of this you can do everyday.
I also optimize the weekend for my blog. In fact, almost all of my blog content is written in weekend because in working day i am busy with my working day.
Yes! I will try to make a plan for my next week during the end of the week. i will visit to some good blog to read the weekly roundup from them. I love to do this as i can really learn a lot from the roundup article.
@Eugen R : No, this cute cat isn’t mine
Mine is a tuxedo cat (Black and white), he can be seen on Cats Who Code “About” page.
Nice Tips and thanks for sharing that Maintainence Plugin .
Reading other blogs is indeed a good way to keep in touch with what’s going on. Actually, that’s what I’m doing right now. It’s also inspirational, because you will most likely find an idea for your next blog post.
Great post
Nice post, with some very helpful tips. I am just getting into more blogging and designing a few different sites covering topics that I have passion for, one being design. Thanks again for the info.
Great tips, especially about the maintenance mode plugin – just installed and will be using it (btw, you need to fix the link in your blog post
Thanks!
Nathan
Thanks for this inspiring post!
Just started my own blog and I’ll definitely apply some of your weekend strategies
Some good tips for sure, try to implement them next weekend
As a full time web publisher and blogger, weekends aren’t that different from weekdays for me. Sure, with no school for the kids, we usually spend a lot of time outside of the home, but generally speaking, I work during the weekends same way as I work during weekdays.
Love the notebook btw. I hope they don’t use real moleskin
On the reading other blogs tip, another suggestion you can add is make that time where you also comment on other blogs. I know I not only try and take a day to focus on my blogs competition every week, but I also leave viable comments when I can on the sites I look at. It allows that time to both inform me on trends and strategies other sites are using, but also improve my own blogs exposure.
I’ve noticed traffic is often down at the weekends, I tend to do the maintainance in the early morning. The web is also faster and FTP transfers take a lot less time as well.
I’ve never tried guest blogging but I’ll give that a go.
I try and save my weekends for working on my blogs. Everything from upgrades to researching new topics for blog postings. As for reading other blogs, I do that but I do that everyday. Leaving that to the weekends, just makes a bigger stack to read, when I have other things that need to be done. If I leave it to the weekend I will never get through all the blogs I ready daily.
These are great tips. Unfortunately, I do most of these during the week. But you make some good points so I think I will change some of my habits.
I do most of my writing on the weekends and schedule my posts for the week. I do video editing or screenshot videos as well if needed.
With my current blog I’ve created a posting schedule which I stick to furiously, and that has helped alot.