How to Manage your Business Blog and Social Media in 2 Hours a Week

Today’s post is by Erica Douglas of AceInspire. You’ll find some really useful tips here if you find it a struggle to think of what to write on your business blog or if  business blogging is eating up too much of your time. Over to you, Erica…

Many of our clients have told us that it’s the time factor that keeps them from starting a business blog and harnessing the power of social media.

Everyone seems to agree now (sensibly!) that blogging and social media are seriously powerful (and practically free) marketing tools that can help you build your brand and raise sales both online and off, but how can you manage this new media whilst simultaneously running your business?

In our course we teach our clients how to manage their blogging and social media in 2 hours a week and now I want to share some of the tools and techniques we use with you.

First up though I have a small confession, you knew two hours was too good to be true didn’t you? Well once a month you also need to spend a couple of hours doing a bit of prep work. But that still isn’t too bad is it, say 10 hours a month to manage your blogging and social media. I’m sure that’s still either a huge improvement on what you’re doing now or much less than you expected to have to spend on managing an entire online marketing campaign

In that couple of hours a month we basically brainstorm a month’s worth of blog post ideas using our content generation strategy. Watch this video tutorial to find out about the content generation technique that all the major bloggers use.

So every month you spend a couple of hours doing the content generation technique, then you add the posts into your drafts and add some extra content ie details, resources, images etc. As you become a master blogger you’ll have time leftover, spend this time creating a monthly newsletter for email list subscribers.

So that leaves us with two whole hours a week left!

Which breaks down like this…

Spend 30 minutes finishing your posts for the week and get them scheduled for posting. Upload any videos your using to Youtube, tag them properly and make sure your blog address is prominent. Your Youtube channel will continue to send qualified traffic back to your main blog.

Your facebook should be linked to your blog using networked blogs, which means your posts are posted there automatically. Zero minutes required!

Spend 30 minutes creating tweets to go out all week, upload them to Social Oomph or a similar tool offering autmoated tweets.

Spend 10 minutes (take sunday off!) a day answering comments on your blog, engaging with clients in twitter and on facebook.

Total: Two Hours a Week (and a couple of hours a month!)

Be strict with the time you spend and don’t forget to analyse your results using the 80/20 rule. Adjust your schedule as time goes on so that you’re spending the majority of your time on the activities that are converting the best.