Do you wonder what it actually takes to be a professional Blogger? I’ve put together A Typical Blogging Work-Week here, for you to get an idea of what the minimum amount of time it takes to dedicate to a blog that will be effective and make money.

Since making this my full-time gig, I have had to get really serious and figure out what it actually takes to make money from anywhere. I am a single Mom of a beautiful toddler and have another business, look after my toddlers friend after daycare for 2 hrs./day and have an exchange student to keep my rent down. I’m juggling a lot, and therefore need to be organized and efficient with my time. I’ve been studying a great blog called Business 2 Blogger & and learning a lot from her.

So each day, I start my day around 7AM(whenever my little guy wakes me up) and we do the whole morning routine. I get him off to daycare, so slooooowly….I can’t seem to make it there by 9AM and then head back home. I make my coffee, set my timer to meditate for 10min. and then get to work. I found this great schedule on Business 2 Blogger and plugged it into my calendar with alarms that go off. Here’s what that looks like and I made an Infographic for it as well, you can find that below….

– 2-3 blog posts (minimum) – 2-3 hours The time per post relies on upon your own particular speed, I would say give 1 hour for each post for a starting blogger.

– Create Images For Blog posts – 3 hours You will need a create a minimum of 6 images, although if you only make 3 images per post, you would have what you need for each social media site. 1 Square for facebook, 1 long vertical for Pinterest and 1 560×292 size for link shares. (Tips for making the best blog images here) 

– Social Media Promotion – hours a week 3.5 hours – 5.5 hours a week

• 5+ minutes a day pinning – your content and other influencers content = 35 minutes/week
• 4 tweets/day (links and non links) = 25 minutes/week
• 2 Instagram posts/day = 35 minutes/week
• 5-10 Facebook shares/day = 2-4 hours a week

– Sharing to other Facebook pages  – 30 minutes a week – Take some time to share your posts on larger facebook pages that allow sharing, while your Facebook page is growing,  (Business to Blogger has a great list of big pages that allow you to share your stuff here). 

– Educate Yourself – 1 hour a week – This is soooooo important! Investing in yourself! I’m always on Pinterest posting to my “Blogging, Marketing, and Growing My Business” Board. I’m committed to learning something new about blogging each week. I always discover new and useful tips from so many other successful bloggers out there. Not only on Pinterest, but also, through podcasts and on Youtube. 

A Typical Blogging Work-Week – Minimum total – 11 hours a week. All-In-all, you will need to be spending about 11 hours/week to have a successful money-making blog. Not bad! Again, you get out what you put in. 

Here’s a simple weekly checklist & the infografic: [Read more…]