When you said; “it will always be harder to prioritize time allocation without on overall plan or strategy. ” – I wanted to say that even without an ‘overall plan or strategy’ you can instantly improve your results by simply blogging a little more.

That was all.

I completely agree with your comments (actually I’m not sure where we differ??) i.e. make your blog the key focus and prioritize your time around that (that’s what I was getting at by having a planned approach i.e. plan to make your blog a priority,have goals and allocate/schedule the time etc).

For me, these other services are only relevant to the extent that they support/build your blog.

Any time I use Twitter, Linked-in etc I ask myself, ‘how does spending time doing this help build my blog?’

The point about Chris Brogan was really to highlight the fact about making your blog your top priority, with other services like Twitter as supports for the blog.

Sure, nothing new and I wasn’t meaning to imply that Chris ‘invented’ this idea. I just liked the term ‘outposts’ as a pun on remote posting around a central blog.

Thanks for the FriendFeed link and information. I will approach with caution.

Best, Robin

I see entrepreneurs and the owners of small businesses, spending 2/3 hours (often more) a day on Facebook or Twitter and doing nothing with their blogs. Splitting that time up more effectively requires nothing more than a shift in priorities – so their blogs get some more of that time.

I had an email after publishing this post, from a lady who spent between 2 and 3 hours a day, 6 days a week for over 18-months on Twitter ‘building her reputation.’ She became the victim of intimidation from a small group of people and was forced to delete her account.

She’s lost everything, because she didn’t use Twitter, to help her build a community on her blog, which as she put it, died of neglect while she ‘played’ with Twitter.

She went on to say that Twitter were either unable or uninterested in stopping the ‘hate tweets’ as she called them. Net result, she thinks she’s wasted about 1,400 hours of her time, effort and energy.

Regarding Friendfeed, there are already a lot of ‘how to’ guides and videos – here’s a link to some great tips:
http://friendfeed.com/scobleizer/1e1a5ec7/to-new-friendfeeders-there-are-thousands-due

However, since Facebook bought the company, many established friendfeed users no longer use the platform; because of fears over what Facebook plan to do with their data. Ironically, this has ALSO resulted in a number of people paying the price for having all their eggs in one social media basket – which they do not control.

Chris Brogan’s post about hubs and spokes is actually telling us nothing new – it’s a 35 year old old business model, developed by Fred Smith, the founder of the FedEx courier company. I love Chris’ work, but I don’t think he would mind me pointing that out.

Thanks for a thought-inspiring comment Rob.

Thanks for this post. Without wanting to sound too “big company”, it will always be harder to prioritize time allocation without on overall plan or strategy.

I have been reading Chris Brogan’s blog recently and he makes it very clear how to use blogs and social media in a planned way.

For example, he writes how your blog is the central hub and services like Twitter and Linked-in are ‘outposts’ that support the blog, but don’t become an end to themselves.

Jim, you mentioned Friendfeed. I would love to read a ‘Dummies Guide’ for getting the most out of FF (i.e. as an outpost to a primary blog). Maybe a potential post for you?

Best, Robin

It’s easy to put off writing a post because there are so many pulls on our time. I also think that blog authors often worry too much about each post being a stand-alone masterpiece. My posts are always written with the intention of giving the reader value, but some are always going to be better or more popular than others and none will be perfect. I think it may have been Hemingway, who said that to avoid writers block, we should write for the paper bin.

Thanks for stopping by the blog.