How To Mix Blogging And Working Successfully

Warning: people blogging! (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s a well-known fact that many bloggers have to juggle working at a full-time job and writing a blog*, and they often complain that their work encroaches on their blogging time, and vice versa. Both activities are very time consuming, and nosy co-workers and managers can make it very difficult to dedicate even a few hours of your workday to blogging. Remember, while blogging and working are both important, your company probably has other employees to move the work forward, but there is no one else to write your blog for you. However, the importance of keeping your job cannot be underestimated either: it helps you pay for your internet and therefore for blogging, provides blog fodder and hundreds of potential blog followers in your co-workers. Here are some tips on how to blog yet make it seem like you’re working.

• Make sure to factor in blog-related deadlines along with your work-related deadlines. Add blog deadlines to your Outlook calendar as well. When planning how long your work-related projects will take, always factor in 6-10 hours of blogging time every day, and allow an extra day in case your post gets Freshly Pressed and you have to respond to hundreds of comments. (In the unlikely event that your post doesn’t get Freshly Pressed, you can always troll Freshly Pressed posts of other bloggers.)

• Write comments in the Outlook E-mail messages rather than in the comments sections of the blogs where you plan to comment, and return to the blog to paste the completed comment. Not only you are actually blogging, but you also create an appearance of passionately typing a work-related e-mail. However, make sure that you don’t click on “send”, unless you’re absolutely sure that your manager is interested in your opinion on Michele Bachmann, anime or farts.

• If your manager is interested in your opinion on Michele Bachmann, anime or farts, ask him/her to follow your blog. Didn’t s/he ask you to cc: him/her on all important stuff? And isn’t your blog important to you?

• When your co-workers ask you to do something, agree to help on the condition that they follow your blog. Yes, they may complain to HR, but you can use this opportunity to convert your HR representative into your loyal follower.

• Hint for Twitter users: Adding a #work hashtag automatically makes any tweet work-related.

• When making a PowerPoint presentation for a team meeting, “accidentally” slip your latest and greatest post into the presentation. Let attendees read it in full before you “notice” the “mistake”. After the meeting, log out of your WordPress account and refresh the blog post page as many times as there were people at meeting: unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t count the PowerPoint views, and you probably want your stats page to reflect the accurate count of blog post views.

• Spend a lot of time on your Stats page. It looks very professional at a cursory view, and if anyone asks, you can always explain that it’s a new productivity metric. Well, it is! It measures how productive your blog readers are: if you see a lot of views and comments, they are not very productive.

• For your blog, pick a theme that most closely resembles the screen view of an application you have to use for work. There is a reason WordPress carries so many blog themes and even lets you customize them.

* Note that some people claim to juggle a full-time job, a blog, and raising multiple kids. However, that is physically impossible and we will not even discuss it here.