Nothing Special, Just a Current State of Events and Progress Report.
Latest Update
Hello everyone,
This week's post is just going to be a general update as to what I've been doing and what's in store.
Efficiency
Writing
As some of you probably know, I've been working on the Super Affiliate Challenge (SAC) and getting some great tips on efficiency, etc. I'm now able to write a lot more content in much less time, allowing me to get more done. I was even able to write and schedule posts for when I was away camping last week.
The exciting part wasn't that I could schedule the post, it was that I could write 4 of them ahead of time to be scheduled! That's a huge savings for me. I used to write a post a day and it would take me half a day, at best, to do just one. Now I can write 3 to 4 per day if I dedicate the entire day to it. I still work full-time so I can't do that on a regular basis but I am working toward that goal.
Social Sharing
I've also been testing and working with automatic social media posting solutions so that, when my posts are published, my social media shares happen too. Again, saving me time that I can use for other things.
So far I'm liking Nelio Content the best as it publishes as soon as my post is published. Second up is Blog2Social but it doesn't auto-post and requires manual interaction to actually publish to my social media feeds. The up-side to it is that I can have different images and messages for each social network where Nelio Content only allows one for all of them. These limitations for both solutions go away if you upgrade to the pay-for options but I'm trying to keep things frugal for now.
Research
The SAC has been a great help in speeding up my research tasks as well. I used to be the guy that would work on a post from start to finish. That meant research the keyword, come up with the title and framework, write the content, publish it, share it on my social media feeds, etc.
Now, I do these things more in bulk. Take the research portion for example. Instead of researching the one term and then moving onto the next step, I research the 5 per site per week that I want, for a total of 10 each week (as I have 2 sites), but all at once. Now, instead of having 1 keyword after spending about 20 minutes to research it, I have the 5 I need for the week for my one site and it only took about 30 to 35 minutes to come up with them. So, for both sites, I might have an hour or so invested and have 10 keywords total!
Just that little change, going from a single search to researching multiple keywords in a single sitting, has saved me so much time, it's mind-boggling.
How Did I Spend That Saved Time?
Writing
First and foremost I spent it writing my weekly content. I now try to get two posts minimum done per day at the beginning of the week so the rest of my week is free for whatever else I'd like to do. I choose to write them at the beginning of the week so I have the time to address any hangups or issues that might pop up. I then just schedule them to post on the dates I want them to show up on my sites.
I write a total of 2 posts per week per website so that's 4 posts. At my goal of 2 per day, that means I'm done Tuesday and have Wednesday on for whatever I desire. Now, I also try to write 1 post here each week too (like this one), so really that's 5 posts per week. In reality, I'm usually done by mid-day Wednesday, if I stick to my schedule. Still that gives me 2 1/2 weekdays and the weekends for whatever.
Experimenting
If you read any of my other postings here, you know I've been testing plugins and themes lately. The focus has been on site speed, as my mobile speed is terrible and Google favors sites that load faster. To that end, I had setup multiple test sites and installed various themes and plugins to come up with the best combination for my needs.
I've settled on two themes and one site builder plugin:
GeneratePress
Now this theme is actually quite amazing. By itself it's pretty robust but, if you upgrade to the Premium version, which is really just a plugin to enhance its abilities, you get so much more. Add to that, that it's very lightweight and fast and you have a real winner here. This also happens to be the one that Jay (magistudios) recommends too.
Hello
This theme requires a page builder. It's really just a blank canvas and needs the page builder to paint on it. I chose this one because the page builder of choice for me (which I'll talk about next) is made by the same company and it was designed to work flawlessly with it.
Elementor
This is one of the best page builders out there. What's even better is that you can get quite a bit of its functionality for free. After playing around with it for a while, I chose to buy the Pro upgrade and I don't regret it.
I was able to reproduce the functionality and layout of a theme I purchased and even had the added benefit of that recreated theme being much faster than the one I bought. If that wasn't enough, by recreating the theme in Elementor I was able to fix the menu issue that plagued the theme I bought where I couldn't use WA's Extreme Site Speed setting because my menu wouldn't show up for Chrome users and I had to fall back to the Accelerated setting in order for it to work. There's even 3rd party extensions you can buy for it, giving you that many more elements to play with.
Now, Elementor works with GeneratePress too so you can mix and match either of these themes with Elementor and create some amazing sites.
In the end, I had Site Support copy my content from my production site to my test site and I started testing the various themes, both for design options and speed. I actually came out with two factors to consider when it came to my site speed; home page speed and post speed.
I noticed that GeneratePress Premium with Elementor Pro was faster loading my main home page than Hello with Elementor Pro was. On the flip-side, Hello and Elementor Pro were faster than GeneratePress Premium and Elementor Pro when it came to individual page/post loading times. That said, neither was significantly faster than the other, just marginally. In the end, I figured, because my bread and butter is my actual content, I'd opt for Hello and Elementor Pro, for the faster page/post load times.
I'm now in the process of installing the Hello Theme and Elementor Pro plugin on my primary sites and slowly converting my layouts to them. What's nice is that I can install Elementor Pro and design the pages without having to switch to using them right away. I just create new pages, mark them as noindex and nofollow and work away until the're as I want them. Once I'm ready, I'll change my theme, update my static home and post pages to use the newly designed ones and start using them.
Camping
Yes, that's right. I went camping last week. Remember how I told you that I'm usually done by mid-Wednesday? I took off that afternoon and spent the rest of the week, through Sunday, camping with friends and family.
It's so nice to be able to do that and not worry. My posts published as scheduled and my social sharing happened without me needing to do it manually.
This is my end-goal. Having my business work for me, whether I'm there or not. It's nice to see that it's possible and that I'm finding my way to that ultimate goal.
OK, enough time, chatting here. I need to get this week's posts and research done.
Have a great week everyone!
Recent Comments
3
That’s a nice detailed post. I am also using Elementor Pro along with the Elementor “Hello” theme. I agree that it’s one of the best page builder out there too.
I've been having a great time messing around with it.