Helping bloggers keep their balls in the air!

Nadine Hill. A busy mum like all of us but she’s found time to write and keep her blog updated, here she shares those tips with us and even wrote a successful book too!

How many of us have wished we could be paid to stay at home, look after our kids and write about what we do with them all day, AND be courted by big business who can’t wait for us to tell them what we think of their products and seek our opinions for their research and development?

But to do this, you need to be blogging consistently.

Even if we are not blogging to make money, but to record childhood memories for geographically distant family, or to showcase a talent or passion, the key to keeping a blog alive is regular, dependable nurturing but sometimes with our busy lives it can feel like an uphill struggle to keep all those balls in the air.

I’ve always been passionate about making the most of every minute.  My love of organising the details led me to my first career in PR and after I married and had my eldest, what better business to start than being a Virtual Assistant so I could work from home?  Then I’d be paid to organise everyone else!

I started blogging after my second child was born and fell in love with it immediately.  I loved making a structure around my thoughts to pull the jumble of words out of my head in a coherent fashion.  I loved the regularity of putting out posts every few days to keep things looking fresh and alive.  I loved learning new skills like HTML, Photoshop and SEO and I loved how with all the chaos of a new baby in the house, that I could carve out some time to be creative.  It sounds like a contradiction – being creative to a schedule but as blogging mums, we all know that particular juggle.

But some days are easier than others and I’ve had conversations with many bloggers who find it tough to keep the plates spinning.  Their blog becomes just another ‘to do’ in a very long list and they feel defeated before they’ve even started.  I too have days when I struggle and don’t get fingers to keyboard but fortunately I have a couple of weeks’ worth of posts in the bag for such an occasion, when I can bring forward any completed posts to plug the bloggy gap so that I can have my meltdown without feeling that it is public knowledge for the pure fact that the blog hasn’t been updated in a week!

Having a book published and becoming a best-seller is a thrill unlike no other.  This was what happened with my first book.  When I started blogging I had a new passion to write about, and on a buzz from having done it before, I wanted to create a book to help people like me.  Bloggers, aspiring writers and people who need to write for business.  I wanted to put down my strategies for finding the time to write, when your life is busy to overflowing.

I wrote the book ‘I Don’t Have Time To Write’ in the pockets of time between waking and the school run.  Between taking client calls for my small business and feeding my baby.  Between doing the supermarket shop and knocking out another blog post, then in the period when hubby walked through the door at night and before sleeping.

Bloggers who have purchased the book have told me how useful it has been to them in helping them to see space in their life that was obscured before.  My feedback is that it helped things become clear- order has risen out of chaos, and they are actively making their dream happen.  Whether that be completing a draft of a novel or getting their blog into a regular posting schedule.  Their feedback makes the time I spent writing the book all worthwhile.

Blogging has brought richness into my life in a way I couldn’t have imagined at the start.  From something I did as a kind of therapy, a hobby, it has become the backbone of my business.  A platform to showcase my published books, a way to earn an income from sponsored posts, a digital time capsule to record my children’s lives to look back upon in the future and an entity that stretches me to acquire new skills all the time.  It has also brought many new likeminded, treasured friends into my life.  When you are at home with young children, your world can seem to narrow.  Blogging has burst the doors right back open again and brought with it exciting opportunities for the future.

As Woody Allen famously said “Eighty percent of success is showing up.”  Keeping your blog regularly updated is your way of showing up.

I Don’t Have Time To Write; Time Taming Tips for Writers, Bloggers & Infopreneurs is out now.

Nadine Hill is a busy mum (“Is there any other kind?!”) who has a fascination with time management which borders on the obsessive!  She loves to find more effective ways of doing the daily juggle whilst enjoying the journey and has lots of practise through raising her two children, managing her home, running a small business, writing books (one was an Amazon best-seller!), and creating articles for magazines and websites whilst finding time to get to the gym!  Nadine’s ambition is to shift the last two stone in her six stone weight loss journey then write a book about the mind-set behind it because she believes that any weight loss starts in the head and not the body.
You can follow her story on the blog – Juggle Mum or catch her micro blogs on Twitter where she is @Businessmum.  Nadine’s latest book is on sale at Amazon now and is called “I Don’t Have Time To Write; Time Taming Tips for Writers, Bloggers, & Infopreneurs”

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