Niche Blogging For Profit

When working at home it is important to not let routine tasks suck up too much of your valuable time. Niche  bloggers need to focus as much time on writing and marketing as possible. Answering emails, surfing, commenting on other blogs and networking should be of secondary priority. While those activities are necessary for success, the majority of your time should be devoted to the most important tasks for niche blogging success.

Email – Set aside 15-30 minutes once a day to deal with email. Resist the urge to check email and shut off any automatic email notification.

Surfing - Also known as research. You’ll probably need an hour or so each day but you really should need much more research than that.

Networking- Sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and Warrior Forum, while helpful for building a reputation, are also major time-suckers. Update or post only when you have something worth saying of when introducing a new niche blog.

When you spend eight (or more) hours writing, searching, surfing and networking on your computer it doesn’t take long for that computer to get gunked up. Cookies, cache files, temporary documents, files you downloaded and never looked at or had no use for, ebooks that you’re read or that weren’t any good – all these load up our computer and affect its performance.

That’s why it is so important to perform regular maintenance on your computer. Here’s a list of simple tasks to perform on a routine basis.

Disk Cleanup – This should be done about once a month. You’ll find this task by clicking on your computer, then right click on the disk drive you use most and select properties. A small window will open with a pie graph and a button that says disk cleanup. Disk cleanup will get rid of all the unnecessary files on your hard drive. Your recycle bin, temporary files, etc. will be recommended for deletion. Choose the files you no longer want and hit delete.

Defragment – As you put little bits of information on your computer, they get stored but not always in the most efficient space. “Defraging” reorganizes these files for maximum space efficiency

Clean cookies – Under Internet options on your browser toolbar (at least in Internet Explorer) you’ll find ways to clean your history, cookies and cached files.

Antivirus/Antispyware – You should scan your computer for viruses and harmful spyware weekly at least. Of you have one program that does both great, but if your antivirus doesn’t also scan for spyware you will need to get a separate program.

Add and Remove Programs – If you’re anything like me, you are constantly downloading trial versions of new things to try out. It’s a good idea once a month to go through the programs installed on your computer and uninstall any that you don’t want or that are no longer useful.

Additionally you should schedule some time every three or four months to go through your emails, ebooks, old articles, draft posts, and other tidbit trash taking up space on your computer.

This post assumes that not only do you work from home but that you are also responsible for household tasks and errands and possibly a family.

Working from home is a lot harder than most people assume. When you work outside the home your work time and your home time are clearly defined. However when you work from home sometimes it is hard to know if your next post or the dirty dishes should come first. And sometimes, no matter how many times you tell them not to, children can be distracting and demanding.

So how can you schedule work, home, and play in one day and still get everything done? Beats me, but I have come up with a method that works pretty well.

First I got smart and didn’t even try to schedule work when I knew my kids would be creating chaos. So I clean up, cook, play with the kids and do laundry while the kids are at their most active. This allows me to work on my computer one and off most of the morning while I work on brainstorming and non-computer tasks during the evening when my older children are on the computer and my younger child is in bed.

I also try to simplify my life by assigning certain tasks to certain days. For example I go grocery shopping on Fridays, I do my best to schedule doctor and other appointments on Mondays, and I call my mom every Saturday, etc.

Finally, don’t allow yourself to be too hard on you. Everything isn’t always going to get done, things will be forgotten, deadlines broken.

And the world (and you) will go on just fine.