The Drum recently published the results of research carried out by Tamar, a digital marketing firm, stating that over half of bloggers spend over 10 hours a week creating content for their blog outside their full time job.
The research was carried out to tie into Social Media Week and asked over 100 bloggers about their sites and how they felt about being approached by brands looking for coverage. The results of the research are interesting as it will show brands and agencies that as bloggers, we take this little hobby of ours quite serious but are the figures truly representative?
10 hours a week is about an hour or so every day – if this is just the time taken to actually write the blog post and take/edit the photos, then this sounds a fairly reasonable number, especially for those who don’t publish daily – but as we all know, there’s more to being a blogger than just writing a blog post!
There’s the time it takes to reply to emails (which you can speed up with pre written responses, but it still takes time to go through everything and decide whether it’s relevant to you), the time you spend working on your site (redesigns, working on SEO, promoting yourself in places like Pinterest, etc) and it can even be argued that your tweets, especially in hashtag chats, are all a part of you developing your blog. (Just joining in with one or two of the chats each week will eat up a few hours of your time!)
We’d love to hear your opinion on how busy you are – how long do you spend working on your blog, and what do you consider to be work? Comment or tweet us your response!
(Oh, and because it’s Friday, and because it fitted in with the post, check out the video below from Rubber Republic about being just so busy!)
I’ve never really thought about how long I spend on my blog because I see it as such a hobby. Still, I guess for a hobby – including actually doing the things I post about, around 10 hours is probably accurate. Scary when you think about it given that that’s longer than a full working day!
This struck such a chord with me today!
I started a new career this year and my time for blogging is just whittling away. When I do find a few minutes to devote to it, I don’t have the brain power to follow it through. So where before I was perhaps finding a couple of hours a day for blogging, I’m now lucky if I find that in a fortnight. I started off worrying massively about the impact that it would have on my blog but actually the lack of time has meant that my posts have changed and become more and more about me, my feelings, my little world – it’s turning into the online journal I always wanted it to be…I do feel bloody guilty when I don’t post anything for a couple of days though.
And that video? Perfect.
M x
I go on Pinterest and look at other blogs in my spare time. Whilst I am doing this, I gather ideas for future blogs and either pin images or save them onto my desktop. Then I gather resources/images for my next blog and enhance these in Photoshop.
To write a blog post, it normally takes me about 2 hours max. So altogether, it’s about 4 – 5 hours.
I work at home as a graphic designer/illustrator and I find blogging develops my creative skills.
I’m still finding ways to blog in quicker time – perhaps do 1 big post and 2 smaller ones :-)
emmajayne x
That depends whether you count the time I spend reading the books I review. If not, then 6-8 hours per week, I’d guess. If you do count reading time, then it’s 20+ hours per week. But I’d be doing some of that reading anyway, and it’s hard to say which of it is extra. I do look at how much of my time it’s taking every so often, but I consider my blog a key part of my CV, not just a hobby, so the time isn’t really an issue.