10 AM: Wake Up, Check Emails & Previous Day’s Earnings Stats

I am a bit of a night owl, so it is pretty rare that I get up before 10 a.m. these days.

While you can work whatever hours you want as a blogger, it does help to have several hours of overlap with the 9-5 EST work week (in case you need to reach someone who does stick to traditional hours).

I like to start the day by checking my previous days earnings, stats, and any urgent emails.

It’s pretty rare that I wake up to a jarring email (since I have no boss and no full time employees), so I’m usually just looking at the traffic performance and ad earnings of my portfolio of sites.

Since I run a portfolio of 20+ sites, I try to take a minute or two each day to review the site trends and performance of every site.

I rarely work on more than 4-5 sites per day, but it’s good to scan Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Ahrefs for all the sites in a central dashboard.

Since I make a large chunk of my income from display ads, this also means logging into my various Mediavine and Raptive accounts, as those earnings are updated daily.

I also earn money through affiliate sales, but other than a few specific affiliate programs that I enjoy monitoring, I only tend to check these earnings at the end of the month.

Course and subscription sales I check as they come in, usually via email notification.

Below are some screenshots of the previous days earnings stats.

11 AM: Eat, Exercise, Shower

While I’d love to be able to spend even more time working, it’s important to have some degree of balance in your life to prevent blogger burnout.

For me, exercising twice per day is essential.

The first time I exercise is in the morning after eating and before taking a shower.

This helps me get in the right frame of mind that the work day has “officially started” even though I don’t commute to an office and work from home.

Pre-Covid, I had some success working in various coworking spaces. But as my desk/home office setup has grown, it’s usually most efficient to work from home.

12 PM: Delegate Writing Tasks, Send Any Emails

Around noon, now that I have had a chance to assess my sites and make sue there are no emergency issues, I’ll reach out to my freelance writers or virtual assistants to either check on the status of previously ordered work and assign them any new articles or projects that I have.

Having low cost (yet relaible) freelance assistants is crucial to the success of most bloggers. I have actually been considering hiring some new help, as my team is extremely lean for the amount of content that we produce, but I decide to put a pin in this for now.

Today I receive 2 completed articles and a bunch of custom designed images from my team.

I have 2 more posts that only require a few minutes of last minute formatting before also being able to be published.

This is fairly typical in terms of my content velocity. I try to add at least 4 new articles from freelance writers in the first part of the day.

These are usually split across 4 sites, so that’s about one article per day per site.

Today I also have a quick research project for my virtual assistant. Basically, I need her to identify several affiliate partners for a new affiliate program I am applying to.

Basically, I need her to help me reverse engineer the approval process for this affiliate program. That way, when I apply later, I can present them some page level data relative to their existing affiliates, demonstrating why I have a higher earning potential for this subscription software program.

Most affiliate programs can be accessed through one of the larger affiliate networks like Impact Radius, PartnerStack, or Awin. These are easy as I already have most of the questions that a potential affiliate program would ask answered in a large database of templated responses.

But this particular affiliate program is by “invitation only” and so I’ll need to come a bit more prepared.

This involves a lot of data analysis and some data scraping.

In the past, I would do every role, including tasks like these. But now that my sites generate cash and I have had some level of success, I outsource these one-off research assignments, if possible.

Even if you don’t have a team in place, freelance site like Fiverr have mad it extremely easy to order custom research projects for very reasonable prices.

1 PM: Begin Writing Session (1)

I usually have two writing sessions per day, but today I only end up completing one of them since I needed to spend some extra time on the new website.

These writing sessions are blocks of time where ignore all the other challenges I am facing and focus on producing new content in some shape or form.

Recently, I’ve been experimenting with a lot of AI generated content. While the content produced by tool like Koala is fantastic, it definitely needs some editing.

At some point, the editing role will be something I can outsource, but for now, there are so few writers who are familiar with editing high quality AI content, that it is easier to do this myself.

When you do perform a task like this yourself, you should always assume that you’ll later be able to outsource it.

As a result, I end up screen recording a lot of my processes and narrating out-loud my thought process.

These recording will serve as SOPs for my team or other bloggers, if/when I decide to outsource this task to them.

3 PM: Late Lunch / Check News / Listen to Podcast

After a solid block of heavy re-writing, I am usually a bit tired, so I take this chance to have a late lunch, check the news, and listen to a podcast or two.

Sometimes the podcasts relate to blogging, but mostly this time is meant to help me unwind a bit, by getting me to think about something else.

And although I rely on social media marketing for many of my sites/projects, I spend very little time on these platforms myself. They can become a major time suck and the boundary between work and fun becomes blurry when your job involves digital marketing.

4PM: Website Redesign

As I mentioned earlier, I recently acquired a new website that is monetized through Raptive.

Whenever I acquire any asset that costs at least 5 figures, it worth having a plan in place before purchasing the asset and establishing a new one once you actually have possession of the property.

In the case of this site, there were many obvious synergies. For example, by having a Raptive site (in good standing), I can now onboard additional sites at 30,000 pageviews vs. the typical traffic requirement of 100,000 pageviews. This alone justified a large amount of the purchase price.

The other nice thing was this website was already monetized and generating daily cash flow.

Prior to this, I built all my sites by myself, so I am used to waiting as long as 18 months to see my first dollar on a site!

Since this site is monetized and has recently strong domain authority, it should rank for topical content relatively easily.

But before I begin adding new content, I’m going to go through and make some small adjustments to the website’s theme, article structure, image settings, and other factors that will improve the site speed.

Doing all this only takes a little over an hour, but just by removing the bloated plugins from WordPress and optimizing a few of the key theme settings, I’ve improved the ability of the site to rank for all existing articles and future articles.

5:30 PM: Explore New AI Tools

I try to spend an hour or two per day experimenting with various blogging tools.

I find that when I just explore, even without a clear goal in mind, I can usually figure out some critical use for most blogging tools.

While I may not have an immediate application for every tool or solution, in the long run, as I dive deeper and deeper into blogging, there is a good chance that I will.

So sometimes I’ll purchase lifetime deals on new software prodcuts.

Lifetime deals are one of my favorite opportunities.

Basically, in order to fund their early startup, many software developers will release an early version of their software, for a fixed lifetime price (you only pay once).

Ultimately, few of these products will grow into massive successes. But for the few that do, having lifetime access to a product that your competitors will otherwise have to pay a hefty monthly subscription fee for, is a major advnatage!

Today I’m experimenting with an AI image generation tool. While it is a long way from being ready to replace my own graphic designers, the beta version looks pretty good, and the Lifetime Discount is a one time payment of $199 (vs. the $30-$60 monthly fee that the company will charge users in a few months).

So I am definitely adding this tool to my shortlist of products to consider buying this month before the sale ends.

7 PM: Keyword Research

The core of most successful blogging comes down to good keyword research.

You can be the best writer in the world, but if you don’t know how to analyze SERPs, and assess the odds of ranking for specific keyword phrases, you will almost certainly fail as a blogger.

This whole process used to be much more labor intensive, but luckily there are now a number of (expensive) tools such as Ahrefs that will simplify this process for you.

Still, Ahrefs is a tool, meaning it is only useful if you know how to utilize it properly.

So I spend the next few hours researching some topics for a new potential blog that I’m thinking of building from scratch. Given that this blog will take hundreds if not thousands of hours to earn money, doing this type of due diligence up front is a small price to pay.

8 PM: Dinner, TV or Movie

Like with lunch,l I try to take my mind of blogging for dinner. This may mean I go out with friends or family for dinner. Tonight I’m eating in so I watch an episode of one of my favorite shows in the background.

9 PM: High Impact Writing (Newsletter, Fun Posts, Personalized Content)

Around 9pm, I start on a block of time that I refer to as high impact or personalized writing. By this, I mean writing that I produce completely for scratch, for my readers. This could be content for Blogging Guide (the site you are reading right now), my subscription newsletter, or another personal project.

Tonight, I decide to write the rough draft of an email newsletter that I plan to send out the following week.

10 PM: Check Blogging Related News, Forums, Communities, and Groups

While I do avoid social media for personal use as much as possible, I do like to chat with other bloggers and content creators. I am a part of several blogging mastermind groups as well as a number of less formal blogging communities and forums.

Tonight I spend some time reading and chatting with others on two of the private forums that I frequent.

11 PM: Batch Image Creation / AI Article Generation

As it gets closer to the end of the day, I try to queue up any work that will require heavy amounts of computer processing.

This typically means setting up the prompts for my AI writing software and starting file uploads or conversions of bulk sets of images.

While these tasks do not require 8 hours to process, I generally try to run them while I am sleeping so that I do not have to spend any time waiting for something to upload or process during the day.

1 AM: Late Night Walk

Around 1am I go for my late night walk. This is my second time for exercise during the day. Unlike the morning period, I love going for an evening walk, and I often have some of my best creative ideas while doing this.

2 AM: Relax, Pause Tasks, Go to Sleep

Although I can definitely stay up later, I try to go to bed by 2am. Sometimes if I’m in the middle of a huge project I’ll work much later, but fortunately tonight, I’m feeling content with the work I completd for the day.

And ultimately, sleep is critical for any activity that requires creative thinking (blogging included). So I’ve made a real effort this year to avoid pulling all nighters, and making a point of turning off all screens by 2am.