I miss the days when blogging was just a hobby I had on the side and I could choose how much (or usually, how little) effort I wanted to put in depending on my current workload at uni.

Now that I’ve been blogging for a while and Playground of Randomness seems to be a permanent part of my life, I’ve made it a priority to take it seriously. In doing so, there are lots of little tricks I use to blog more efficiently. Here are 5 hacks that every blogger should know:

1) Batch your work– Whether it’s generating ideas or creating graphics, make sure to batch your work so that you’re doing it all at once. I used to think of an idea, create the graphic and then write the blog post. Let me tell you- that got old FAST. It is far more efficient (not to mention easy) if you do similar tasks together.

2) Set up a system to respond to emails– I usually only reply to emails between 8AM and 5PM because those are my working hours. I also only ever reply to emails from work and usually from my cellphone (I am really lazy when it comes to switching the laptop on for anything that isn’t writing-related). If you are not swamped with too many emails, load your blog email on your phone or tablet so that you can reply to mails while you are on the go.

3) DO spend time on social media– A large portion of blogging is about writing but an even larger portion is about promotion. Put in the time and effort to promote your blog on social media. It will help you find new readers for your blog.

4) Have a content notebook– Have a notebook or an app where you can list content ideas. This helps if you ever get stuck with thinking about what to blog. This also helps you with deciding what content to publish when.

5) Use Google Analytics– I only learnt about Google Analytics when I signed up for a Digital Marketing course a year back. But from my very first second, I was glued. It was like magic. Google Analytics shows you what your readers are interested in so you can create the content that they want to read.

What other blogging hacks do you use? I’d love to know below.