How to Save Time Running Your Blog – 8 Tips!
The first thing I’d like to point out is how much I came to love WordPress. If you’ve ever worked with a CMS like Drupal (which btw is incredibly powerful for building sites and communities) you’ll know the pain of having to do everything manually; no neat, user-friendly interface, no shortcuts, no “just do it” button. Searching for plugins through the admin-section of your blog and installing them with just a click? A blessing!
Over the years, WordPress has grown into an amazing piece of software. Simply because it is so perfectly adapted to the various needs of bloggers, without requiring them to have any coding skills. But whether you know how to code or not, when you write a blog, you want to focus on the quality of your content. You want to write great articles which are useful or interesting for your readership. If you have a full time job (like me) and blogging is what you do in your free time, there is little time left for anything else beside researching and writing down your thoughts.
Luckily WP can support you in many ways :
1. Backup your database automatically
WP-DB-Backup – hands down my favorite WP Plugin. No need to manually backup your database on a daily basis anymore. Have the plugin do that automatically for you and ship the zipped backup file right into your email account!
2. Use SEO Smartlinks
SEO Smartlinks will automatically scan an article you just wrote for a predefined set of keywords and link those to the corresponding sites secified in the options. A real time saver as you won’t have to spend a minute every time you just want to link to a source quickly which you reference from frequently for example. Also this helps greatly to increase the number of cross-references within your own blog, which improves your ranking in search results.
3. Fully integrate Google Analytics
There is nothing that can potentially eat up as much time as analyzing your site’s traffic. Google Analytics is a great analyzing tool, but if you’ve ever clicked your way through all the options there, you might have realized that 80% are things you simply don’t need – especially at the start. The Google Analyticator Plugin will not only integrate the Google Analytics code into your site smartly (e.g. excluding the page views you generate as admin) but it will also display a box for your dashboard with a summary of all the important data. That way, you see everything you need to know, at a glance, right as you log into your WP account to write your post – time saved again!
4. Ping update services
Update services are sites that specialize in pinging all relevant blog directories and search engines (e.g. Technorati) with just one ping from you, whenever you submit a post. Ping-o-Matic is one of the best update services available out there. That’s why WP uses Ping-o-Matic’s server by default. But just to make sure, go to Settings > Writing and enter “http://rpc.pingomatic.com/” under Update Services if it isn’t there already. That way, every time you publish an article on your blog, Technorati and 30+ other services will be notified without you even thinking about it.
5. Inform your Twitter followers automatically
Twitter Tools has many useful functions. One of them is that you can set it up to automatically make a tweet whenever you publish an article, informing your followers and linking to the post right away (with shortened URL!). If you like, the tool can also summarize your daily and weekly tweets in a digest post at a scheduled time.
6. Don’t lose time with SEO
The All in One SEO Plugin is a well known tool for WP. It will help you by automatically rewriting the titles of your articles, optimized for being read by search engines. It will also help you to integrate keywords which you can set individually right after every post. It has many more features, just take a look at them! Most importantly though, it works right out of the box with a simple setup…
7. Set up your Dashboard
Did you know, that you can freely move around and activate/deactivate the boxes that appear on your WP Dashboard as well as those on the article creation page? Try it out! You can save a lot of time by moving boxes/functions that you use frequently to the top and positioning them in an optimal way for speed posting, analyzing and moderating.
8. Be sure to activate Akismet
Akismet comes with WP for a reason. It does a great job at cleaning up spam comments without you ever seeing them. That alone saves you an incredible amount of time, because you don’t have to dig through loads of spam in order to moderate the few real comments. No captcha challenges needed, nothing, just get an API key and go through the initial process of activating the plugin. It’ll be worth it.
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Girl Goes Tech (GGT) is about a 26-year-old, female tech-addict exploring her geeky side and writing about social media, mobile trends and applications.