8 Useful Tips for Putting Your Blog on Auto-Pilot

Money-making blogs fall into two main categories: small, very focused niche blogs that generate a decent amount of traffic each, and large, rather broad blogs on popular topics that generate tons of traffic.

Whether you have tons of small blogs or one large blog, the key to turning a profit is automation. Automation is found in nearly all types of successful businesses. At some point, in order to be profitable, you have to learn how to systemize some of the less profitable things so you can focus on making deals and ultimately making more money.

#1 Use Plugins to automate social bookmarking

Once you’ve decided which social bookmarks really work for you and which ones don’t, ditch the ones that don’t work, and then set up automation for the remaining ones. Social bookmarking needs to be very focused, otherwise you can waste a lot of time and effort, and possibly even penalize your blog in regards to search engines.

#2 Stick to a marketing routine

Marketing is one of those activities that can go way off the rails if you’re not careful. One day you’re commenting on 40 blogs for 2 hours and the next day you’re spending 5 hours on Twitter and the next day you’re writing 10 guest posts. Going all over the place won’t work. Try developing a routine that you can do in one hour or less each day for large blogs, and no more than 20 minutes each day for small blogs. This means you have to be really, really focused on only the activities that drive traffic.

#3 Start outsourcing

This is another money-making trick of the trade. At some point you have to learn to invest in outsourcing so that you can pay attention to things you cannot outsource. When it comes to your money-making blog, though, you can outsource the writing, the link building, and some aspects of the social media marketing. I would advise against outsourcing commenting or even responding to comments. I would also advise against outsourcing interaction on Twitter and Facebook (however, posting links there can certainly be and should be automated).

#4 Develop a blogging schedule and start scheduling posts

If you outsource your blog writing, you can certainly develop a nice backlog of content to publish on a regular basis. Then all you will have to do is respond to comments, since the promotion should be largely automated anyway. And if your blog gets little to no comments then it’s even less work for you.

#5 Use syndication where available

Sites like Amplify.com, Ping.fm, and Posterous.com are all great syndication sites. They allow you to syndicate a portion (like a description) of your blog posts to many different channels including micro-blogs like Tumblr. Don’t post your entire article all over the place, though. Create a description that contains a single back link back to the original source.

You only need one of those services, because they cross-post to each other, so just choose the one that works for you. Amplify is quickly becoming a favorite of mine, but Ping.fm posts to many, many more places and also contains social bookmarking services.

#6 Resist distraction by planning

In the blogging world, we as bloggers are always coming up with new ways to do everything and new tricks and new products. This is great, but it leads to distraction sometimes. We get so tempted to go out and try the new thing before you’ve even decided if the existing one is working or not. To combat this urge, decide that you’ll just bookmark or write down the new, useful things and come back to them when you have time.

#7 Develop a solid Frequently Asked Questions section

If you have a busy blog and people tend to contact you a lot, put together a useful FAQ to reduce how much contact you have to make personally. The FAQ in your case (the busy blog) is going to be the most well-spent time investment you’ll make! Not only will it be a great way to call out special sections of your site that you want people to see, but you’ll provide yourself much needed relief from all of the repetitive questions. Tip: Force people to find the answer by not providing a contact form directly on the FAQ page. Just organize your FAQ in such a way that they can find what they need in a matter of seconds.

#8 Re-invest money into more outsourcing

Evaluate and tweak your methods until your money-making blog practically runs itself. As you start to make money, roll that money into more outsourcing. Eventually, all you will need to do is the outside, face-to-face marketing and joint venture building. You can hire a virtual assistant to take on tasks like answering email messages and contact requests, for just a few hours per week.

Your Turn

Is your blog on auto-pilot? Wouldn’t it be nice if we were all sitting on the beach while our blogs were making money on their own? Cha-ching! If you know something that works or if you have a question about any of the above, leave a reply.

Image Credit: Kossy@FINEDAYS

Tagged as: auto-pilot, Blogging, marketing, outsourcing, social bookmarking