10 Distractions You Must Avoid If You’re A Blogger

As bloggers most of us don’t have a lot of extra free time to justify wasting it on activities that don’t actually help build our blog, however, there are a lot of things these days that can really distract us from being able to do just that.

So we pulled our community to find out what some of the biggest time wasters are that most bloggers are doing. I can attest that even I have been guilty of many of these myself and I want to share with you this list of 10 distractions you must avoid to Become A Successful Real Blogger so that you can identify those and stop wasting your time so you can keep your eye on the prize.

Now with this blog post, we want to have a little bit of fun so I want you to keep track of how many of these currently apply to you. And at the end, we’re going to tell you what kind of blogger that means you currently are. But let’s not waste any more time. Let’s Check out what distractions you must avoid If you’re a Real Blogger.

Distractions You Must Avoid To Become A Successful Blogger

Blogging is a journey that needs commitment, dedication, passion, and concentration. However, the way to becoming a successful blogger is very difficult and problem-facing as well as you may frequently with distractions that can cause you to fail in your progress & improvement. These annoying distractions you may face from social media notifications to the charm of immediate success schemes. These distractions are essential and must be avoided to keep your productivity and remain on the path toward acquiring your blogging purposes and goal. Here are the 10 Distractions You Must avoid As a real blogger who wants to become a successful blogger. I’m also providing you the distraction with Solution For Time Wasters that every curious blogger needs to know.

1. Checking Your Analytics, Email, and News.

The first of the top 10 things that distract a lot of bloggers is checking your analytics, your email, and news. Basically checking anything you can check to make sure that you know everything that’s going on at any given point in time with your blog with the industry. Even watching YouTube videos although that one I do recommend definitely keep doing that one.

The reality is that the normal variability that happens in your blog traffic from day to day isn’t something you should take any action on and so checking our analytics needs to be something that we do methodically and specifically when we intend to.

We should have a purpose when we do it not just to see that oh things are getting better or however things are getting worse. If you liked being able to see at a high level how your website’s doing.

It’s probably a good idea to have an analytics dashboard that just is visible and that doesn’t pull you away, but rather that you know once a day. If you’ve glanced at it you could be like the numbers are going up.

Solution For Time Wasters: Time Blocking

With email and other little tasks like that even watching YouTube videos, I recommend time blocking. Time blocking is one of the best ways to make sure that we make the best use of our time and that’s where we dedicate specific time to specific activities.

If you should be writing a blog post and you think hmm I wonder what Neil Patel said in the latest YouTube video and then you go watch the video. You’ve just pulled yourself away from a task and every time we switch tasks we’re wasting a lot more time and mental bandwidth.

For any of these activities that you do block out as much time as you’re going to need to and plan that time specifically for that activity and then plan other specific time for the important things you need to do. There’s a lot of advice in just number one we’re gonna go through the next few a little bit more quickly.

2. Wasting Time With FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, And Doubt)

Number two applies to kind of the news piece from number one and that is wasting time with fud which stands for fear, uncertainty and doubt as well as worrying about Google updates uh what’s going to happen with AI all this kind of new stuff and changes in the industry.

Yes, when big changes happen we are probably going to need to know what’s going on. Again do some time blocking set aside some time to do some research but also find a few trusted resources for people who spend all their time worrying about industry updates.

And trust them in the things that they say so that you don’t have to spend all your time doing all the analysis that they’re doing. It’s good to know a lot of stuff but fear uncertainty and doubt are going to destroy your blog’s success.

Solutions For Time Wasters: Move Forward

They really don’t help anyone it’s better to move forward with confidence and only when we need to keep doing what we know works and then when we find out something needs to change that’s when it’s going to be appropriate to start changing it.

3. Shiny Object Syndrome

Number three this is shiny object syndrome. This is something that I have definitely been very guilty of in My previous project sometimes. That is when something interesting comes along and we suddenly shift our Focus from whatever we’re doing or should be doing to that.

It could be a new project idea, maybe it’s like oh you know what I want to do some product testing and suddenly you’re ordering a bunch of products but these other blog posts you’ve already done the search analysis for you’re ready to write you don’t finish them.

And then while you’re working on this new project you’re like oh I gotta work on those blog posts and we keep switching tasks. It kills the mental bandwidth, don’t do it.

Solutions For Time Wasters: Make A List

If there’s an interesting idea for a new project that comes up fantastic. Put it in your mind and then take it from your mind and put it on a list that you know you’re going to come back to later. When you do that it gives your brain permission to let it go. So you can continue focusing on the thing you’re doing right now.

4. Website Build & Design

Number four spending a lot of time on website design and just making things look cool. Special features and design are great but not nearly as important as content. The design will come to focus on that when the time is right which is usually after you have a bunch of content on your website.

Solutions For Time Wasters: Design Later

First of all, you have to write content on your website then after this look at its design, structure, and layout.

5. Seo Vs Helpfulness

Number five creating content that’s very much focused on a search engine rather than on a reader. The reason that we end up wasting a lot of time on this is we do a lot of research to find out what are the most important SEO tricks to make sure that the search engines like Google are going to rank this content very highly.

The irony is that Google is specifically targeting websites that are doing this and de-ranking them. That’s because content that’s written for a search engine and not a person isn’t actually very helpful.

Solution For Time Wasters: Help People

The best thing that you can do is write content in a way that would be the most helpful for other people and the search engine is going to pick up on it. That a lot of the SEO tools you know even the plugins on our websites your rankmaster Yoast, they’re going to give you all sorts of recommendations and give you an SEO score.

And if you don’t write for the algorithm that SEO score might look pretty bad. Most of the SEO scores on my articles are pretty bad and yet a lot of those articles rank number one outranking Higher Domain Authority websites all the time.

So those tools are again an algorithm in Google’s algorithm it’s a lot smarter than those ones. So again write your content for people not for search engines and don’t worry about what those tools say your SEO score is.

6. The Perfect Post

Number six this is spending way too much time on a specific individual article trying to make it absolutely perfect. Here’s the reality, every time you publish a piece of content by the time you hit publish it will no longer be perfect in your eyes.

I’ve discovered that for myself basically every video I’ve ever made I don’t like to watch it after I’m done filming it because I’m always going to judge it as not good enough for me. So I’ve had to learn to take a step back the same goes for articles. I can spend eight hours on a blog post or I can spend one hour on it. The difference in the output is not that big, especially if I already know the topic pretty well.

The wpbeginner article said: “When writing a blog, I recommend not obsessing over perfection. It’s completely ok to make mistakes as long as you fix them.”

In the beginning, you need a lot of content on your website to build topical Authority we need to write a lot of articles on every subtopic for our website. So you must write unique, original and high-quality content for your readers to build topical Authority as well as engage users for a long time on your site to build Google trust.

Solution For Time Wasters: 80-90% Target

So what do? We do get our articles about 80 to 90 percent of the way to where we would think they’re really good. Usually, that takes 10 percent of the time that it would take to get them perfect. Do that.

Eventually, when we see big opportunities we can come back and craft some really perfect articles that actually have a lot of value. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to craft a perfect article that’s going to attract zero views.

7. Analysis Paralysis

The next one is analysis paralysis or paralysis by analysis. I’ve heard it both ways. This is basically where we overthink something and then we actually take zero action. People do this a lot when picking a niche.

They say well this one’s maybe a little too competitive or you know this one I don’t know maybe it’s kind of seasonal and they pick one weakness of it and they get so fixated on that, that they end up actually not moving forward with it.

We do the same thing with specific article topics you look at it and you say well this one seems kind of competitive, um I don’t know what should I rate this competition level. Uh, there are a few other blogs but some of them are on point and some aren’t. There’s a government website in the mix but it also isn’t very helpful and there are a few forums.

productiveblogging stated that: “One of the reasons why we get so easily distracted is because we have multiple tabs and documents open at a time”

Next thing you know they’re like well I don’t know how to rate that, I think this is just going to be high competition and then you don’t do anything.

Solutions For Time Wasters: Just Write It.

So really the default should be. If I think there’s any chance just write it. You’re better off writing it than spending three or four or five hours debating whether or not to write it.

8. Mass Content Without a Plan

Number eight this is wasting time producing and Publishing Mass amounts of content without any sort of brand plan or any cohesive way that it all is going to tie together. This one we were guilty of with readmorr.com for sure and a few sites we created at that time.

We had a hypothesis at the time people weren’t really talking about topical Authority. The hypothesis was that if we just write a lot of Articles across the entire Niche, that is just pretty low competition.

blog.hubspot.com article said “Bloggers fail because they don’t realize that blogging is a business that requires effort, time, and attention. Some bloggers fail because they don’t research their audience, they don’t tailor their content accordingly'”

We should be able to win right and we did until about last May and from then on it started to see a decline. We’ve since had to go in and we’ve had to sort of restructure the website, grouping together articles that are closely related and then adding additional content within those sorts of subtopics to build topical Authority.

Solution For Time Wasters: Create A Plan

You need a plan for the structure of your website and how the information all fits together. Don’t just produce a ton of content. In fact, having a lot of blog posts that Google thinks are unhelpful will actually harm the ranking of the really good blog posts on your website. e can’t treat every blog post independently we used to be able to you can’t now. More is not always better.

9. Monetization Too Early

Number nine this is working on those really big out-there monetization strategies. When your website’s still brand new and really nobody’s coming to the website.

As per Neil Patel The Founder Of Neilpatel.com Said:

“Many startups fall into the trap of believing they won’t have revenue in the beginning stages. But why shouldn’t you have revenue?
If there’s no revenue, it’s easy to get distracted.”

You can spend a lot of time trying to create the perfect product and then it doesn’t sell to anybody because nobody’s coming to your site. You’re going to understand your audience a lot better as you get more traffic and as you are able to interact with that audience.

Solutions For Time Wasters: Content First

So what we need to do is focus on content first and then we need to focus on building some kind of community some sort of interaction. We need to be able to get feedback from our audience. You can do some surveys, you can build an email list, and start with those things the info products come a little bit down the road.

You’re going to waste potentially weeks and even months creating a course or some sort of info product that might not be what your audience actually wants or needs.

10. The Perfect Ad Network

And number 10 debating with people about what’s the perfect ad Network. And just wait until you find the perfect one before signing up. We see this in our community all the time. We get someone who says Hey I’ve heard some things about a zoic that it’s hard to use that some people had a bad experience tell me about that.

And all of a sudden you’ll get people that come from both sides and some people that say zoic is awful wait till you can be on Mediavine and go straight to Mediavine. Other people will say what are you talking about it looks awesome I’ve been with them from the beginning and once I was big enough for Mediavine I stayed with the Zoic because I’m making a ton of money and it’s working really well.

For me, both sides have justification for the way that they believe and the way that they feel. The reality is, if you’re spending a lot of time figuring out which network is perfect and debating with other people about which network is perfect you know what you’re not doing creating content and you’re not making money from ads.

Go put content on your website and then when you get to a point where you could place ads on your website just decide. At this point do I want to make a little bit of money maybe around 10,000 page views a month do I want to make a little bit of money from ads? Great let’s go sign up with the EZoic. And get some ads on my website and grow it from there.

Solutions For Time Wasters: Just Pick One

If you say you know what I’m okay I’m not hurting for money right now, I just want to focus on growing the website. I think I’m excited for mediavine I’m just gonna wait a little while. That’s fine do that. Just make a quick decision and stick with it.

The biggest waste of time here is when you can’t decide which one to do and so you do nothing and you miss out on the opportunity to earn a good income from ads.

Final Thought: 10 Distractions You Must Avoid To Become A Successful Real Blogger

Those really are 10 of the biggest time-wasters a lot of bloggers are guilty of. So here is the fun part what type of blogger are you? If you’re guilty of all 10 of these we’re going to classify you as a goldfish. You just can’t stay focused on one thing for very long.

If you’re seven through nine we’re gonna classify you as the squirrel. I don’t know if squirrels have a hard time focusing but certainly other animals have a hard time focusing when they see a squirrel. So seven through nine you’re the squirrel.

If you’re currently guilty of four to six of these we’ll classify you as the monkey. Swinging around and doing things that are productive but still very very energetic. If you’re only guilty of two or three of these things, first of all, congratulations. We are going to classify you as a beaver, who stays extremely focused on the task at hand until it finishes building that Dam.

For those of you who are guilty of none or just one of these things, you are an aunt. You are the person who is dedicated and working and building something. Basically incredible that most people look at it from the outside and probably don’t fully understand but what you’re building is amazing and awesome.

So congratulations and now I encourage you to comment below what was the category of blogger that you fell into right now. And what are some of the most common wastes of time that you find maybe some that aren’t even on this list?

No matter where you are work on this work on becoming more like an ant or a beaver than you know a squirrel or a goldfish. We only have so much time. So let’s use that time to be as productive as we possibly can.

You may also like:
Select 10 Huge Mistakes to Avoid When Creating Your Domain Name
Best CMS: WordPress 6.2.2 Features And Issues
Forbes Uncovered 2023: A Former Employee Tells All

FAQs