You already know blogging can be hard work! When you throw a full-time job (and then some), family responsibilities, and the unavoidable hiccups of life into the mix…it’s no walk in the park. So if you’re going to create a successful and profitable blogging business in the spare time that remains, it makes a whole lot of sense to go about it in the most efficient way possible.
Enter the 80/20 Principle
You may have heard of the 80/20 Principle before in various forms. I most recently saw it applied in Tim Ferris’ Book: The Four Hour Work Week. The basic gist is this:
80% of Your Results Come From 20% of Your Efforts
Tim uses the principle to illustrate how in one month he was able to increase online affiliate income for his business by 50%, while actually decreaseing his weekly management time by 80-90%.
Think about it for a while. Odds are pretty good that the 80/20 principle applies to whatever you do on a daily basis. 20% is just an estimate—the point is, there’s probably a small subset of the tasks you accomplish each day that has a disproportionate impact on your bottom line. It’s your mission to identify those golden nuggets and focus on them while eliminating as much of the remaining work as possible.
Blogging is no exception to the rule. Here are my 20% and 80% tasks, as they apply to my situation as a relatively new blog that’s trying to establish itself:
| 20% Tasks (80+% of My Results) |
80% Tasks
(0-20% of My Results) |
|
Writing Pillar Content |
Checking pMetrics Stats |
|
Link Building |
Reading Blogs and Internet Sites |
| Writing Pillar Content |
Checking Affiliate Program Stats |
| Social Networking |
Tweaking Blog’s Look Again |
| Writing Pillar Content |
Checking to See if Google |
It’s no mystery where I need to be concentrating my effort. Less time checking stats, reading unrelated websites, and tweaking things that don’t need tweaked at this point in my blogs life cycle. More time writing pillar content, and building a strong foundation of traffic. Easy to say–we’ll see how easy it is to put into practice.
What are your 80/20 tasks?
Sphere: Related Content
3 responses so far ↓
1 Skellie // Aug 20, 2007 at 11:58 pm
I think my own 80/20 chart would look different, though I do probably spend most of my time (trying) to write pillar content. There’s definitely too much stat checking going on, though. I’d like to meet a blogger who could resist checking live stats more than once a day ;).
2 The Courage to Commit // Aug 21, 2007 at 11:25 pm
[…] admit it. I’m completely ignoring my own advice tonight and spending way too much time on the 80% of my tasks that only contribute to 20% of my results. No, I wasn’t compulsively checking my stats. I’m watching TV when I should be focusing […]
3 Zen Zoomie // Aug 21, 2007 at 11:51 pm
@Skellie, thanks for stopping by! I usually start out with the intent of spending most of my time writing, but my biggest time trap is getting caught up blog surfing with all the interesting content out there. The good thing about that is that I usually get some good new ideas for my own posts, but at this stage in the blog’s development that’s time that would definitely be better spent writing. Give me plenty of room to improve I guess.
Leave a Comment