Tools for Profitable Blogging for Crazy-Busy Schedules

Weighing the options

There are a lot of online business models that you might consider starting, and it seems like all of them promise the world, right? Um, loads and loads of money. Not that much work, right?

A lot of them have problems. Okay? Uh, Etsy or drop shipping. Uh, if you’re a parent and you have little kids, if you’re doing Etsy or Shopify, you’re creating any product, you’re going to have stuff for kids to get into. You’re probably going to have pretty limited space. Having to manage inventory isn’t straightforward to do. Wanna you do a YouTube channel or a podcast? I have two words for you. Background noise. What about freelancing? I love freelancing as a business model, but if you have an unpredictable schedule, it can be hard to keep up with the deadlines you need to hit to make that business model work. I’ll share these reasons and several others in just a second.

My favorite business model for stay-at-home parents and anybody wanting to create a side business with all sorts of flexibility. We’ll talk about some of its incredible upsides. Still, one of my favorite business models is blogging, creating a content-based business around a blog. One reason for this is that you can do it all on your own time.

You can work quickly, or you can work slowly. You can put in hours a day, You can put in minutes a day, you work on your schedule, and the deadlines don’t matter.

Number two, it can be done quickly, and it can be done from home or anywhere as long as you have access to a computer, maybe a Chromebook, a tablet, or even a phone. It will be a little tougher with a phone, but you can even do it with a phone. You’re not going to need any other supplies. You’re not. There are not a whole bunch of upfront expenses. It’s just you some time and some device with access to the internet.

Number three, eventually, you can outsource most of the work if that’s something you want. You don’t have to run this entire business yourself. A lot of the legwork that needs to be done once you put the sort of a process in place, you can have a lot of it done for you.

Number four, I alluded to already, but the startup cost for this is so unbelievably low compared to what you can earn with it that it’s barely even worth mentioning.

Number five, this is awesome. If you’re a parent as much or as little as you want to, you can involve your kids in the process, and it could be a fantastic learning experience for them. So no matter what your lifestyle is, parent, not a parent. Suppose you have limited time to work on a business model. In that case, blogging is a secret to flexibility and a business model that can become increasingly passive.

We collected information for this video from a lot of people, specifically parents and, in many cases stay at home, parents who are building this kind of business on the side. I was amazed, even shocked, at how much of the information they shared applied to everyone and would help a lot of people with their time management and just running their business in a way that’s very doable no matter your situation. So whether you’re a parent or not, regardless of your life situation, stick around because some of the tips in this video will be specifically applicable to your situation.

Blogging for Stay-at-Home Parents

While I love blogging as a business model for everyone, I think it’s a fantastic opportunity for stay-at-home parents. Look, I’m a parent, and today I know. I have an office, I have, um, I can leave home. I can work all day long and build my business, right? But it wasn’t always that way. For the first several years that I was blogging, I was doing it while working a job, so I had to do it during my free time at home, which was very limited. And I do have children. When I started, I had two small children, and now I have five. And it can be complicated to get free time to work on this stuff. When I left my day job, I was still working from home for a while. And so, in that case, especially during summer when my kids were on break from school, I had to deal with the constant interruptions. I had to deal with all of that stuff.

There were a lot of things that I had to learn how to do to separate my personal life from my work life to get things done. And honestly, back then, I wish I’d had some of the advice I now have from many members of our membership, which is our program. That’s all about building your online business from the beginning, or wherever you are today, to a full-time income. Many members of this program have shared feedback with us on what they do to make this work for them as a stay at home parents. I think you’re going to love this advice. Now, I will categorize the direction and put time stamps in this video for any of you who aren’t parents. You can see them in the description that way. If you want to skip the ones that maybe aren’t, don’t apply to you in your situation, that’s just fine. Find the advice in this article that will be practical for you.

Tips for Time Management

All right. This first set of tips is overall time management.

As I look through these, I have to say that one of the things that stands out to me most is you have to figure out the schedule that’s going to work for you. Now, as you hear this advice, you’ll see some conflict with each other. And that’s because, depending on your situation, one approach might work best in a different case. The other might be perfectly applicable. You’ll see an example here in a moment.

The first one says, Look for and use pockets of time when you can work. So they’re saying be flexible with your time. Some members said they use even as little as 62nd intervals throughout the day as they find pockets of time. So have your life set up so you can use those to your advantage when you have a couple of free time.

That may not be that helpful when you need to sit down and write a whole blog post. But for research, I find it’s beneficial. I have my phone. I might have my, um, earbuds just like in my pocket. I can put one in, and I can start watching a couple more minutes of a YouTube video to learn more about a subject. So when I sit down and write the blog post, I already have all the information in my head. Another person said here doing the same schedule every day doesn’t work. You’ll never have a perfect day. So you might as well write a blog, Tune out the chaos and be flexible. They’re saying it’s. You’re never going to have that perfect day. Don’t schedule your day to cover all of the tasks you need to do. If you have free time, sit down, and write a blog post. That will be much better than doing nothing or trying to figure out the perfect day. Another one here that’s important. This person wrote this in all caps. Please do not get carried away with socials or Pinterest when you don’t have much time. These things can be huge, huge time was, and they really can. We need to focus on our content first on our site.

Another one here says that they batch their tasks. So they’ll do a lot of search analysis, which is our, uh, approach to, uh, keyword research. It’s how you find the topics of what you should write about for your blog in another batch of time or another group of time. They might do a whole bunch of research and create an entire bunch of outlines for their blog posts. And then, um, during another batch of time, they might write multiple blog posts in a row and get various posts done in one day because they’ve already done the research for those.

Limiting the switching between tasks helps to ma to optimize the way that we use our brain. It makes it much more efficient. Another person here says blogging can feel like forced time away from your family. So it’s essential to ensure that you’re taking time away from your business and your blog to give to your family. Be deliberate about the way that you spend time. I found this for myself. Suppose I was trying to do everything all the time. In that case, if I was working and then during the work, I was trying to be attentive to my kids whenever they came in to, um, to ask me something or talk to me about something and then be alert to my blog and go back and forth, I wasn’t giving either one enough attention.

But if I could say, Hey, you know what, kids, I need 30 minutes here, but after that’s passed, I’m going to come out, and we’re going to go, we’re going to do this thing for a little while. That worked well. Another person shared feedback that they found that if they spend an hour with their kids during the day, it was straightforward to take half an hour and do some work, and then they could go out and spend some more time with their family. Speaking of time and switching tasks, time management’s critical.

Right now, I need to check on a couple of pies. Believe it or not, I have some pies baking, so I’m going to manage my time because pies can’t wait. If the pies are done now and I wait until the end of the video, they’ll be overdone. I am so going to check on some pie.

All right, the pie’s not entirely done yet. Back to time management. Another piece of advice was to make weekly and monthly goals instead of daily ones. Another person says, Don’t book any other appointments, check, email, or do other things. When you have time blacked out for work, you can take those one or two-minute breaks during the day to check your email.

You don’t need to be checking your email while you need to be writing your blog post. And then the last piece of advice under time management was don’t try to work on too many things at once. Don’t try to build a blog. Um, a second blog, a third blog, a YouTube channel, a podcast. Do a bunch of social media. Build up one thing and establish it before you move on to another. That way, you can focus appropriately and give it the attention it needs to succeed.

Tips for Managing Your Kids

The next segment is on managing your kids. So specifically for stay-at-home parents. This is where if you’re not a parent, this might not be as applicable to you.

Uh, one says they use flexible time blocking. This is the one I talked about before. They’ll spend an hour with their kids, 30 minutes of work, power time, and then they go back to the kids for a while. And then, maybe back to, uh, back to work.

Another one says they, uh, you’d like to use noise canceling headphones while they watch the kids so they can be in the room with the kids, keeping an eye on things, making sure things are okay. This might be more important when you have tiny ones that maybe you need to be able to keep an eye on them. But with noise-canceling headphones, you’re not as distracted while you do your work. So you sit in the room with a laptop, do your job, and put your computer in a space next to the kids, like a craft table or something. That way, they can sit there doing an activity and be with you in the room doing their thing. So their attention is on that while your attention is on your work, but you’re still together, and they still get to spend time with you.

Another one says, Do your work while the kids do their work. If they have chores or if they’re homeschooling while they’re doing independent work themselves, they’re distracted. They’re not going to need your attention nearly as much. I love this one involving your kids in experimentation and original research. If you’re doing any experiments or testing, product research, that kind of stuff, and getting your kids involved, it will be a huge learning experience for them. It’s going to be a lot of fun, um, and it’s just, it’s going to be great. So involve your kids in things that you can.

This is another great one. This person makes busy boxes for their kids. These are full of little toys and things that only come out during work time. Those of us who are parents know that if it’s just the classic toys, they will get bored with those pretty quickly. But if it’s a special thing that comes out once a day for that hour or two while you’re doing your work, that might be a great way to keep them, um, focused and enjoying those toys a bit more working while they nap.

When you have tiny ones that nap still, that can be a great way to do it. Uh, I have a lot of options for independent play. Summertime can be excellent for this. You can send them outside. Trampoline. Um, ha, we got this like a splash pad thing from Costco. It’s like 20 bucks are impressive. We’ve been using it all summer. I don’t even have an affiliate link for Costco, but it was terrific. Um, it was only 20 bucks. You would’ve thought this thing would pop after using it twice. No, it lasted all summer, and it’s going to last all next summer, too.

This person says a baby’s life was stressful until they figured out that they do pretty well on their own, um, on a blanket on the floor. Like they’re, they’re pretty okay most of the time.

Another person said Videos are brutal, uh, more complex than articles because of background noise with kids. I found that recording at home is tough for me unless you set up a dedicated space and your family gets used to it, and they’ll leave you alone, or you can soundproof the room. And so that’s why blogging is such a fantastic business model.

I like this one too. This is awesome. Uh, this is from someone who says their parents worked from home on their own business when they were a kid. So not, they are not necessarily in a blogging business, but they work from home on their own business. And it was awesome because their parents were around all the time. They didn’t have to leave during the day, but one of the things they did was as soon as they were old enough to help out in the business, they would give their kids jobs to do in the industry to earn money. And it kept the kids occupied, but it also gave them a great way to earn an income and be involved in the family business.

Tips for Planning and Goal Setting

This next set of tips is on planning and goal setting.

This is great. Do not spend hours planning what you’re going to do with your time. Your time is better spent just writing content, doing more search analysis, and doing the things you know work. When starting a blogging business, there are a few tasks that, if you just did on repeat, you’d be fine.

Suppose you do your search analysis and put together a great hit list. Excellent. That’s done. Now, research if that hit list is on just a few categories within the niche you’re working on it. Doing the research for those is pretty straightforward.

Because you learn about that one bit of information, it can apply to multiple blog posts. So what are we going to do? We’re going to watch YouTube videos, listen to podcasts, read articles, just everything we can do and that we can do just in our, like the filler time between things.

Then we write blog posts day after day after day. We’re just going to write content, write content, and not get caught up in a whole bunch of other things. Now, if you get to a point where we do have other things that we need to get done, sometimes what I’ll do is I’ll spend a short amount of time, maybe one day a week, just listing out these the tasks I want to get done this week. It might be like, write a blog post, write a blog post, write a blog post, write a blog post, right?

I have four blog posts I want to get done, and then the other tasks are. Great, and now I can check them off as I go throughout the week. And that way we don’t miss anything. But don’t worry about spending hours and hours planning out your time. There are just not that many things that you need to worry about when building up a blogging business.

The next one says, Every night, I write what I want to get done on my whiteboard, in the order of importance. They include their household things too. So they just put it all together. So some people, it’s going to work great to segment, to separate, right? Here’s the household stuff that I do. Here’s my business. Here’s the work stuff that I do. In this case, they say they just put all of their tasks on a whiteboard in order, and they say if it doesn’t fit on the whiteboard, it’s probably not all going to get done.

So then they reprioritize, figure out what things they can cut off the list for the next day, and that’s it. That’s what they put on the board. This goes back to sometimes we need to plan out the tasks we need to get done, especially as stay-at-home parents. There are so many things you need to get done, but just listing out, here are my tasks for tomorrow and putting them in order of importance. And that doesn’t need to take more than five or 10 minutes, but it can help you stay focused on the things that matter the most.

This person says I give myself grace. There are days when I can’t get my goals for the day done. So that’s why they order them by priority. They want to be at a full-time income in two years. I don’t want to hate what I do to get there. I think that’s important.

Other Words of Wisdom

The next segment is just other words of wisdom and other pieces of advice.

The first piece of advice was to progress, not perfection. One of the biggest problems many of us have when we start blogging for the first time is we seek perfection in everything we create. Model is not that important on the internet. It just really isn’t. We’re going to do the best we can within the limitations that are available to us. So we want to make progress on our business. If you don’t achieve every goal you set for yourself, or if the article you write, you’re like, Oh, that’s not quite perfect. It’s okay, and we’re going to hit publish because we’re making progress on our business.

Make progress every day, and don’t worry too much about perfection. This next person says they write their blog post in Google Docs instead of writing them directly like in the WordPress editor. And they do that because it means they can register with their phone. Google Docs allows you to use voice-to-text dictation. You press the microphone, talk into your phone, and it writes it for you. They can log on anywhere at any time, which makes them feel better because now they also have a backup of their content. When they copy and paste it into a WordPress, they have the Google Docs version.

I think voice-to-text is going to be an excellent way that a lot of people can, uh, make good use of their time. When they can’t sit down at a computer, you will need to review that content again and ensure that any errors are fixed and that it comes across as written content. Sometimes we speak differently than how we would write, but for the most part, it will be close, and it can save you a ton of time.

I think this next one’s important to call what you’re doing work, even if you’re not earning money from your website. And that way, everyone, including you, knows that it’s essential, that you take it seriously, and that it’s something you need to do. When we call something our work, um, we do, we give it essential when it’s our hobby, it’s something we do on the side. It sort of falls to the bottom of the priority list.

Now, something to keep in mind, even if you are a stay-at-home parent, you don’t want to start a mom blog or a dad blog. That’s not what we’re going for here. We want to create a blog on an actual topic. So, to learn what kind of niche will be the right niche for you, start a blog.

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Title: Tools for Profitable Blogging for Crazy-Busy Schedules