How to Balance Blogging With School

Hey yall!

So I know not every college student has a blog, but many of us do! And for those of you who are thinking about starting a blog you might have been thinking how you could possibly do it all?! It can be challenging sometimes but I have learned some tricks of the trade throughout my time blogging and being a college student and I wanted to share my tips with those who may be struggling!

Plan Ahead

First of all, I plan ahead what posts I am going to publish for the week, or sometimes when I am feeling extra motivated I’ll plan out my whole month ahead of time! I even have a separate blogging planner to help plan and jot down notes for my blog posts to help me keep it all organized.

Pre-Write

I usually start all the posts for the week or month ahead in a drafts section so I can jot down my ideas in bullet note form for what the post will contain without actually writing the entire thing at once. This helps me do a brain dump of everything I want included while it’s on my mind without taking too much time.

Schedule Time

Make a Schedule of what your typical week will consist of and block off times for sleep, eating, classes, work, studying, extra curricular activities, etc. and also plan your blogging time! By actually planning time aside to blog you will more likely get those posts finished.

Assign a Day

Writing a blog post can take anywhere to 30 minutes to 3 hours to write, edit, and fill with images, hyperlinks, etc. That’s A LOT of time to devote to something else other than school. The key to handling this amount of workload without going crazy is to assign days to do everything. For example, Sunday’s I write all my posts for the next week. Tuesday’s I’ll edit them all + add extra hyperlinks, Thursday’s I’ll add in my pictures and graphics and the featured images to the posts so that by the end of the week I am totally finished with a whole weeks worth of posts without going crazy. This way I am only spending about an hour on each day working on 2-3 posts for the next week. This is more manageable than sitting down and doing EVERYTHING for multiple posts in one setting.

Academics Comes First

First and foremost your academics should come first and if you have a lot on your plate with school then it’s okay to take the week off from blogging to hit the books. But in times like this, I already know when I am going to have a jam packed week for school and I’ll write up next week’s posts the week before and schedule them to go live so I don’t even have to think about publishing them! They’re pre written and I don’t have to worry about it.

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I believe the key to balancing blogging with school is just to plan ahead and be organized. It can be overwhelming if you try to do too much. You can’t have too much on your plate or spread yourself too thin. Know what you can handle and only do that. Some people can post 3-5 times a week, others 1-2 times a week. See what’s best for you and run with it! And most of all, HAVE FUN!! 

♥ Marissa