Things to do in Spare Time To Improve Your Blog

You being a blogger, get free time more often.

Instead of scratching your head, you must spend your spare time productively.

This post outlines what are all the productive ways in which a blogger could spend his spare time.

You have maintained a schedule to publish 2 blog posts a week. After publishing those blog posts, you sit back tight, occasionally staring at your traffic and Analytics. Some of you may spend some of your time in promoting the posts you have written.

But most of the time, you are idle without any work at your hand. This is not uncommon among full-time bloggers!

You must agree with this! Because this is the reality…

You got a good amount of time at your disposal and don’t know what to do.

The very first step in starting to spend your spare time productively is to prepare yourself a blogging timetable. At the beginning of the day, you need to just list out all the blogging related tasks you need to do on that day. Sort the to do list items in the descending order of priority. Allot the time slot for each of the task, and plan your blogging time. Make sure you have no free time to spend idle.

In spite of preparing a schedule for your blogging day, you may get some spare time. You keep switching between your browser tabs in the endless search of what to do. Oh, man. I’ve been there too!!!

Here are the things that you can do in your spare time to help improve your blog.

Betterment of old posts

Whenever you get extra spare time to spend on your blog, treat it like it’s an opportunity for you to spend time upgrading your old blog posts to their latest version.

Before carrying out the editing process, the first question that hits your mind is – “What posts to edit first?”. Here I’ve got the answer. Edit and upgrade the blogs posts that receive more traffic on your blog daily; content which your readers are spending most of the time on your blog daily.

Upgrade for freshness. Google released the freshness update on 2011, and this update was known to affect 35% of the total search queries. After this update, the posts that have not been updated for a longer period of time lost value and demoted down the search pages.

It is now very important for you to head over to old content and do the following:

• upgrade the content to the latest version
• include the latest information
• link out to recent awesome articles around the web
• make sure that the last modified date is changed.
• keep the evergreen or timelessness factor in mind

Proofread and edit the content you published earlier. While editing, try reducing clutter, and replace less effective words with strong words. Especially, be careful about your word choice. Using the right words at the right time convey the right message to your readers. You may also make use of some proofreading tools for the process.

I strongly suggest you to manually proofread your content for perfection; at least twice. Read your content on the shoes of your readers, and spot out the imperfections in your way of expressing ideas. Make sure that what you have penned down is fully comprehensible.

Reconsider the images that you’ve used in your old posts. Create some more visually appealing images with the help of tools like Canva, Pablo by Buffer, Visme, etc.  When your text posts are accompanied with eye-catching images, it increases the audience retention rate. Posts with good graphics tend to go viral on sites like Pinterest.

Always keep the screenshots in PNG format, crisp-clear. For markup and annotations, you could make use of Skitch by Evernote. Make use of tools like MockUPhone to apply device frames for some of the screenshots you take. It makes your screenshots look great.

Interlink your blog posts. Search your blog for some of the keywords that have the potential to become anchor texts. Link to newer blog posts in your old blog posts. This process is never-ending. You should do it, as soon as you publish a new blog post. So why not spend your free time, interlinking the posts?

Make a way to explore. If you’ve forgotten to include relevant links, resources in your old blog posts, do so. In any of your old blog posts, if you have presented a less obvious fact or statement; include a proof link to it. I advise you to include at least 2-3 outbound links to recent content of authoritative sites in your posts.

Edit to reduce bounce rate. Bounce rate quickly tells whether your content is read-worthy or not. It’s the powerful signal that Google looks at. Lowering the bounce rate by editing and restructuring your old posts helps a lot in long-term.

Like this, upgrading your old content is the most important job you got to do in your spare time.

Boosting search traffic

You could use your free time to help your blog get ranked for more keywords in search engines. This can be made possible with some techniques you can implement when you feel empty.

Just head over to Google search console >Search Analytics.

Sort the column CTR in ascending order. Take a note of all the keywords that are getting good impressions, but no enough clicks.

These are the keywords for which you are ranking for, but not getting traffic.

It’s time for you to head over to respective posts and optimize them for the above keywords. Add some content related to the keywords. Wait for some days for Google to recrawl the content. You will get search traffic from those keywords also.

In your free time, if you are thinking what to do, this is the perfect task to do.

Creating slides, infographics, and videos

Many people like to consume information in the format of slides. They find the slides effective to perceive facts and information. During your spare time, it’s worthwhile to create some slides out of your old blog posts. Remember to create visually appealing slides. Once you create slides out of your blog posts, upload them to slide uploading sites like SlideShare.

In most of the slide sharing sites, you could include the link back to your original article in slide description. By this, if your slide goes viral, you receive a great deal of traffic.

You could also produce infographics with the help of the slides that you created. If the slide that you created is visually appealing and uniform, then upload your slide to Zamzar. It will extract the images from of your every slide and sends you the link to download the images. Later you could use these images, join them and produce infographic with ease.

You could also produce videos, regarding your blog posts. Upload them to YouTube, embed the videos in your blog posts, thus increasing the average visit duration of the readers.

As a bonus, you could extract audio from your videos, upload them to iTunes, and create a Podcast

The process that I outlined in this section of the blog post is called content repurposing.

Read other articles around the web

In your free time, it’s the best habit to learn reading other articles on the web, related to the niche of your blog.

Reading helps you in the betterment of writing skills. It enhances your vocabulary, usage of words and command over the subject you are blogging about in your blog. While reading the articles of others, you construct your own view about a concept. It in turn gives rise to more creative ideas.

According to Brain Tracy, reading an hour daily, preferably in the mornings helps you be productive throughout the day. It will help you quickly obtain expertise in your field. Reading an hour daily, translates itself to reading one book a week and 50 books a year.

Reading is an exercise for your brain. It helps your brain to remain mentally stimulated according to a research. It sharpens your mind and expands your creative thinking powers.

But remember – You gotta study the matter only regarding the field you are blogging in. By this, you will gain command over the way of expressing things related to your niche. You master the art of expressing complex stuff in your subject of matter.

It in turn increases your productivity and helps you write more in less time with ease. While you are reading the articles on the web, make sure you make a note of potential ideas, that you come across. It helps you to never run out of ideas for your next blog posts and never again hit writer’s block.

Social media things to do

Social media promotion is quintessential for the growth of a blog. In the spare time, you could work upon improving your social media presence carrying out the things below.

1. Use Buffer or Hootsuite to share awesome content across the web to your followers and circles. They are both available as browser extensions, Android and iOS apps. So you could use them to schedule your tweets, shares and maintain your online presence. Sharing the awesome content of others, helps you to build relations with the bloggers and help you grow exponentially.
2. Head over to JustRetweet. It is a platform in which you earn credits for sharing awesome content across the web. You could use those credits to get your own content shared across various social media channels. The platform automatically schedules your retweets. So, when you got some free time to spare on your social media presence, just head over to the tool, log in with your Twitter account and start earning credits. In turn promote your blog posts.
3. Follow influencers in your niche. Retweet the awesome tweets in your niche. Use hashtags, and mention the person in your tweet. By this, you increase your chances of getting more Twitter followers. In the process, take a note of all the users that your competitor is following in Twitter. Follow them too. It helps you to apply the same strategy your competitor is following to drive Twitter traffic to his site.
4. Interact with communities. When it comes to this part, Google Plus and LinkedIn groups work the best. Search for some of the best communities in your niche, which have great interaction daily. Regularly participate in the community by sharing and leaving comments on the posts. Showcase your expertise in your niche. Get noticed among the members of the community. Then it leads to your strong social media presence and in turn leads to traffic. The same applies to forums. Find some of the forums in your niche, participate in them. Help the members of the forums to solve their various problems.

Finally.

I hope you found the tips that I mentioned in this blog post helpful. I am sure that you never again scratch your head, thinking what to do in your spare time. The more time you spend in improving your blog, the quick results you get. Never ever waste your time. Grab a book read it, or grab your Laptop and start proofreading your old articles. They help you in the long term.