Tag: cleaning

Spring Cleaning Your Blog

Have you unnoticed when the season changes, your thoughts immediately turn to having a clear out of everything? We are drawn to sorting through cupboards, cleaning everything thoroughly, and having garage sales to reduce the amount of things we seem to have collected over the winter months. Carpets cry out to be cleaned, wardrobes beg for a sort-out to move from one season to the next, and we’re seized with the drive to get everything cleared as the weather improves.

Just as we spring clean our house, we also need to make sure we apply the same kind of rigor to our blogs. Blogs are friendly beasts – they rumble on without us happily, bringing new custom and working for us while we focus on other things. Because they are so amiable, we can often overlook the fact that they need a bit of a helping hand from time to time, to make sure they are working at optimum.
Cleaning supplies
Blogs are a bit like a well-behaved dog. We only really take notice of their inner workings when something goes wrong. We give our dogs flea treatment if they scratch, walk them every day and give them affection, but it’s only when something changes – for example if they go off their food, or seem upset, that we take them to the vet for a check-up. Blogs are the same – we do certain tasks with them each day (answering comments and posting up articles), but we don’t consider the platform unless a glitch makes us sit up and take notice that all is not as it should be.

Your blog benefits from a bit of a spring clean every now and then. Basics such as emptying your spam folder can free up your site to run more effectively, and using an image re-sizer can make sure that your pictures don’t take up valuable loading time. When new software comes out on your blog platform, it’s worth spring cleaning and uploading the latest technology to benefit from the changes and enhancements that your service provider has developed. Another great spring cleaning exercise you can do is to consider a re-brand, waking your site up and giving you a good reason to contact your clients, get feedback and re-launch with a new look and feel.

So, the next time you’re taken over by the urge to clean the house and get the garden set up ready for summer, why not make the most of the feeling and apply the same kind of energies to your blog? It will thank you for it, making life easier, running more effectively and staying clean, neat and organized.

De-cluttering Your Business

If you’ve ever been exposed to any sort of life coaching, then you’ll know that de-cluttering is the order of the day for people that want to make more time for themselves, achieve their ambitions and get enough space to relax. However, how often do we apply the principles of de-cluttering to our work lives? Running a blogging business is a time-consuming job, and the platform we work on, keeping up with our online community and generally keeping ahead of our things to do list can all give rise to a large amount of clutter.

When I talk about clutter in a business sense, I’m not thinking so much of physical mess (although that’s a part of it), as the various things that seem to drag on and on – the jobs that never get quite finished, the colleagues you are forever trying to keep up communications with, the comments that don’t ever get responded to, and the constant feeling that every day you are fighting to stay ahead of what needs to be done. These kinds of feelings leave us stressed and unproductive, floundering about in a sea of confusion while other people seem to manage to run their blogging businesses neatly, to a tight schedule.
Cleaning
If you’re one of those people who are struggling to keep on top of everything, follow these tips to de-clutter your business and get to a happy place in the blogosphere.

Tackle the physical mess first

If you work from home with an online business, it’s easy to get immersed in your job from morning to night, leaving your environment messy and disorganized. It’s important to keep your work space clear – even if that space happens to be in a corner of your kitchen or on the sofa in the living room. A space which is full of toys, empty mugs, laundry or papers is not going to help you when you need to run a tight ship. At the end of every work day, as you shut down your laptop or PC for the evening, make sure you spend a few minutes clearing up the mess ready for the next morning’s work. You’ll become more efficient and feel much more relaxed when you find your space is completely geared towards concentrating on your business.

Write a list of things which sap your time

Every day at work, I notice I have different categories of job to do. Some are fundamental – such as answering blog posts, speaking with customers or providing support for blogs. Others, such as wading through my e-mails, getting sidetracked by colleagues or checking up on the latest blogs for my competitors are not so critical and yet seem to take up the most time. I write a list every morning and prioritize what needs to be done, so I can tackle the big stuff first. It’s only if I have time that I can then move on to the other things that aren’t as important for my business. Keeping track of what you need to do each day doesn’t just leave you more organized – it also lets you review which aspects of your daily job you can reduce, outsource or get help with to up your productivity and declutter your task list.

Refer back to your strategy

If you find yourself getting sidetracked by an overwhelming amount of work, try revisiting your strategy for business to make sure that everything you do is always working towards achieving your aims as a blogging entrepreneur. If your activities each day don’t help you to achieve your goals (financially or otherwise), then it could be a good way of going through your activities and establishing if you are on the right track. It’s amazing how many activities you can get rid of, once you sit down and analyze whether they are working towards you achieving business success or not!

%d bloggers like this: