Where Does Business Blogging Time Go?

The Book of Times includes facts on how long things take, how long they last, and how often they happen.

Always on the lookout for interesting insights about corporate blogging for business, I first learned of author Lesley Alderman’s fixation with counting stuff through my favorite magazine, Mental Floss, and of course couldn’t resist the temptation to parse time-related data on what I do as an Indianapolis freelance copy writer and professional ghost blogger.  After all, I reasoned, if a day may be thought of as made up of 28,000 hugs (3 seconds apiece), how might I measure the activities I teach in blog marketing training sessions?

"Creativity is a process", explains Vicky Earley of Artichoke Design, "and you need to give it the time necessary." Creativity often "meanders, considers, ponders, and only then delivers". According to ProBlogger, “researching and composing an excellent blog post for a business "can use up the better part of a day".

Early calls it “meandering”, but I teach writers of SEO marketing blogs the importance of “reading around”, and then “curating” others’ material. Finding and reading what other writers are saying and what the latest thought trends are in your field is a big part of successfully keeping up a corporate or professional practitioner blog. Say you’re posting new blog content every three days. Say you’ve allotted two hours of your time for each blog post, or 40 minutes per day, with one fourth of that time devoted to finding, reading, and processing that content. Using Alderman’s method of measuring time, each day of a blogger’s life is worth 144 “reading around”s!

By the same token, finding just the right photo or clip art to capture the theme of a blog post might take 10 minutes, say 3.33 minutes per day.  Since, in blogging for business, words and pictures are my only tools, I spend at least that much time “illustrating” posts. Measuring time the Alderman way, a day in a blog content writer’s life is made up of 432 “illustrations”.

Of course formatting the text to make it more readable, actually writing the copy, researching, editing, strategically employing keyword phrases, and just plain “thinking” about the topic – all these elements figure into the gestation of a  blog post.

Blog content writers – start measuring your time!