6 Ways to Better Your Blog While You Watch TV

Last week I watched about three seasons worth of episodes of The Mindy Project. It’s currently my favorite show and my roommate hadn’t seen most of it so she was catching up and let’s just say we both got a bit into it.

Netflix pulled the “Are you still watching?” shame card on us more times than I’d like to admit.

Mindy cut into my blogging hours last week pretty significantly. I usually do some sort of blogging activity about 3 nights/week these days. When I’m obsessing over a show or book, that takes over blog time.

Luckily, through binge-watching a few shows over the past few years of my blogging life (Suits, Friday Night Lights, Parenthood and Law & Order: SVU remain the favorites) I have learned that there are some things that can get done around here with minimal mental effort…

So I often do these things while watching TV.

Today I’m sharing six of these little “blog chores” with my fellow bloggers for the next time you’re in the mood to watch TV but still want to feel like you’re “getting something done” on your blog.

6 Ways to Better Your Blog While You Watch TV

Tend to your community.

One of the first things I usually do when I go into “blog-mode” is respond to any recent comments that I haven’t gotten to – it is important to me to talk back to the people that take the time to talk to me in the comment section of this blog. If there aren’t any new comments awaiting a response, I often go back a few posts and click through to other bloggers that have left me comments and catch up on their blogs, pin some of their posts or leave them a few nice comments. I seriously love every person that hangs out in my comments section regularly so I try to stay up on their blogs whenever I find myself with some downtime.

A good place to build community? Twitter. Here’s how I use it.

Give your old posts a bit of a facelift.

One thing that a lot of bloggers (me included) forget about are how valuable our archives are – there is a serious wealth of great stuff you create once and then totally forget about. Revisiting and cleaning up old posts just a bit, removing non-relevant blabber and giving them a new pin-able image is easy, mindless work that has the potential to really boost your traffic from Pinterest and search in the long run. I did this to this old post a few months ago and now it’s a big Pinterest traffic driver.

Take some time to catch up with your good ol’ friend Google.

SEO isn’t a huge priority for me when I’m writing new posts here but on occasion, I’ll go back through and update some of my old posts with new titles and better meta descriptions. I usually use Yoast’s bulk update feature to do this. Just over half of my blog’s traffic is from organic search so I do think doing this every now and then has contributed positively to the growth of All Things E.

Curious about SEO? Start here: 5 SEO Tips for Lifestyle Bloggers

Fill up your Buffer/Hootsuite.

Most of my social media content (except for the random quips about my life that I usually tweet from my desk) is scheduled in advance. Sometimes while I wait in line or watch a TV show, I’ll go cruise through Feedly and mark posts that seem appealing to me to Save for Later so that when I have the time to buffer new articles I’ve read and enjoyed, I already have a shorter list to choose from. I try hard to be a good curator of Internet awesomeness and doing this really helps.

Two places to get you started: Blogs I Love & A Link Round-Up of the Best Link Round-Ups

Make a few fun lists.

I have about 10 different random notepads that inevitably have multiple lists of “potential blog post ideas” I’ve written down while watching TV or waiting for something to happen (i.e. a plane to take off or the line at the DMV to get shorter). Bloggers put a lot of pressure on the idea of creating an Editorial Calendar and coming up with million dollar ideas but once I started treating the idea process a bit more casually, I found that it was easier to come up with fun and interesting things to talk about. Plus, if I’m watching a funny show, the ideas are way more fun!

Two examples of posts that came from this idea: 10 Reasons Sean Lowe’s Is The Best Season of The Bachelor & Things I Learned While Binge-Watching Suits

Clear out energy drains.

The Internet can be such an overwhelming thing to deal with – everywhere you turn there’s someone that wants to sell you something or get you to do something for them. It is so important to cut the crap out wherever you can so that you can simplify your online life to actually serve you and enable you to be a steward of your time and energy. Every so often I find it beneficial to clear out things that don’t excite me anymore from a few places – my Twitter timeline, my email inbox (unsubscribing from a bunch of things at a time is almost as satisfying as cleaning out my closet!), my Bloglovin’ feed, my unread feeds in Feedly, etc. etc.

What small “chores” do you do for your blog when you don’t want to exert a ton of mental effort on writing?

I would love to hear your suggestions in the comments!

Anddd in case you’re interested, more posts on blogging about blogging:

Happy blogging,

xoxox -E

The post 6 Ways to Better Your Blog While You Watch TV appeared first on All Things E.