day in the life of a blogger

A Day in The Life of a Blogger: The Exact Things I Work on Daily in My Blogging Business

day in the life of a blogger

Want to know what a day in the life of a blogger looks like? This post will give you my version of it. I wrote this 4 years ago, but it’s still relevant so I wanted to share it with you. This is behind the scenes content and for all those wondering what bloggers actually do and who want specific examples of blogging tasks and activities, this should help. Enjoy!

I’m writing this from a cafe in Amsterdam, the Netherlands (where I live). I’ve been trying out different co-working spaces and cafes (this city is a heaven for people working online, really!) as I want more discipline.

Sure, it’s nice to have the chance to do it from home. But nothing beats having a slow morning, getting ready, not even opening email or doing anything blog-related before noon, and then leaving the house at noon with your laptop in your bag, going to a co-work cafe, ordering a latte and getting to work.

So that’s how I’ve been spending some of my days during the week lately and I want to continue doing it. In fact, I’ve even thinking of joining a real co-working space and paying a monthly fee to have access to their locations in the city, free drinks and a desk, and the chance to be around inspiring and productive people in an environment created for people like me.

So, here’s exactly how my day in the life of a blogger looks like, and what I worked on once I entered the cafe:

A Day in The Life of a Blogger

The Preparation Phase

Email

I always start by checking email. To this day, it’s my most important communication channel and most things related to blog income and relationships are happening there too.

It’s also the perfect way to get into work mode. 

I don’t answer all emails right away but with a quick look I can see what’s important and what I want to respond to now.

That’s usually emails from sponsors or people reaching out and offering a collaboration. I reject plenty, but still, I take a moment to consider each offer.

I also get emails from subscribers or course students. My audience is at the heart of my business and so dear to me, so of course I handle that first.

These emails are really helpful to me too as I can see what people reading my content are struggling with or what questions students of my programs have. That means many other people have them too and it’s something I should answer on my sales page or in my blog posts at some point. So I take notes once I respond to emails like that.

After this, I leave email and come back to it whenever I feel like. It’s sort of my break in-between other tasks. More like a mental break, not so much a break from work or the laptop, but it really helps me.

Checking stats

The second thing I do after getting to work each day is super fun – checking stats.

If you’re just starting out, you won’t see much and it might be discouraging. So instead of checking stats, you should simply be focusing on content creation, learning all you can about blogging, and optimizing your content and site.

After some time, the traffic, income and engagement will start coming your way and you too will enjoy checking your stats every few hours of every day in the life of a blogger.

The things I track are:

  • Blog traffic – I do this directly from WordPress, and only visit Google Analytics for all the juicy details 2-4 times a month. I also see where that traffic came from. That means I know which articles performed best, how many visitors I got from Pinterest, etc. From there, I also see the referring domains so I can see which Pins performed best. That’s good to know;
  • Ad revenue – I go to my Mediavine dashboard and see the report from yesterday;
  • Pinterest – I go to Pinterest to see how many page views I have and how the engagement is;
  • ConvertKit – I log into ConvertKit (my email marketing tool) to see how many new subscribers I got yesterday (and whether someone unsubscribed), what opt-in forms they subscribed through and how the engagement for the last newsletter is going.

That’s pretty much it. Everything else doesn’t require constant monitoring. Obviously, if you focus on different channels, then you will check these sites/dashboards too. 

I log into Teachable and certain affiliate programs too, but it’s not something that needs to be done daily.

As you can see, I don’t check anything that’s not important to my blogging business. In the first years though I spent way too much time checking and worrying about metrics that didn’t really matter.

Payments

The next task of my day in the life of a blogger is to see what new payments arrived.

For each, I note that the client has paid and create an invoice for my business records (which is sent to my accountant at the end of the month). I also write down this as daily income so it can be calculated at the end of my month and added to my income report.

Sponsored Content

If there’s a sponsored post, I publish it now. I also negotiate with new potential sponsors via email or generate ideas for them on how we can work together.

If I do publish a new post, I also add internal and external links, images and a Pinterest graphic, insert an opt-in form, make it easy to read, optimize it for a keyword (most of the time, but not always). 

I then go back to 2-3 old relevant posts and link to it from there, share it on social media, and maybe feature it on the homepage.

>> If you want to know all there is about making money from sponsored posts on your blog, check out my course The Blog Sponsorship Boss.

Course Tasks

I usually have something to do related to my courses. It might be adding something new. Right now I have printables ready to be added. That means I’ll also update the sales page, mention them in the sections related to what they contain, and tell my audience about them.

Research/Inspiration

It might come as a surprise to some, but one of the most valuable ways to spend my time while working is to read about/study/contact other bloggers.

So, right now, I had a few tabs open in my browser (well, I always do) and they are related to a topic I was researching (on blogging).

One site made a really good impression on me so I read more about the blogger. She is actually really successful, has another blog, earns 6 figures, shares income reports, does great on Pinterest, and sells courses too.

There was a lot to go through and it’s super fun to explore the blog and other channels as well as read the About page and latest income report.

Right away I knew she was ideal for being featured on my blog so I emailed her for a possible collaboration (in the form of an interview). Soon, she responded with ‘Yes’ and I could send her my questions.

From what I saw on her media kit and read from her about sponsorships, I got inspired to update my page for sponsors.

Just the day before, I had re-defined my packages and what I offer to brands. So now I created the new visuals using Canva and added them to the page. 

This was also the first time I asked for a fixed price of $1,200. And that’s closely related to having discussed a similar rate with a brand the day before. Sometimes just mentioning a bigger number allows you to dream bigger and actually make it your fixed rate and start charging that!

Category Pages

A series of updates I’ve been making to the site lately is connected to changing my category pages and turning them into silo pages. They contain important information about the topic and links to other relevant articles, are optimized well and designed for ease of use.

That takes a lot of time but is worth it as these will be placed in the Menu and the actual category pages for each will be redirected to the new page.

These can be considered the cornerstone content for each category and will help Google know what my site is about.

So that usually takes me an hour or two a day lately. It’s fun and related to my overall SEO strategy.

Here are some of those silo pages. I update them often:

SEO

Next in my day in the life of a blogger is SEO. I check for broken links and go to each article to fix them. That’s easy with the Broken Link Checker plugin. 

From then on, I get into ‘updating old content’ mode and go from one article to another, fixing links and maybe even deleting it or adding it to another page and redirecting the old one to it. I just don’t want thin/low-quality content on the blog, so such updates need to be made constantly.

It’s a lot of work so no need to spend a whole day doing it. Just in small steps every other day.

Publishing New Content

Another blogging activity is publishing something new. That might be a blogger interview I have scheduled or a blog post. It could also be an article of mine, an income report or else.

I might also have just updated an old piece so much that it can be republished. So then I’d promote it like a new article and feature it on the homepage.

Email Marketing

Every few days, I focus on email marketing. That might mean: 

  • Preparing my weekly newsletter and sending it out to subscribers;
  • Learning new things about email marketing and how to best serve my audience;
  • Updating email series;
  • Updating opt-ins;
  • Creating a new opt-in.

Courses

I also take courses. Right now, I’m completing the last modules of Stupid Simple SEO.

Thanks to what I learned in it (and what I was inspired to test and work on), I deleted a ton of old articles and updated the rest of the content. I focused again on increasing my domain authority and am now going to do link building and blogger outreach.

I also started using Ahrefs, outlined my competitors, checked their top performing pages and the keywords they rank for

In addition, I defined my top pages and keywords and based on the data extracted from Ahrefs, I could go to these articles that were already ranking for keywords but not on the first page of Google, and optimize them further and make them better so I could improve their rankings.

When I’m not taking a new course, I’m going through notes from a previous one. After competing Pinterest Traffic Avalanche and Six Figure Course Creator, for example, I had a ton of notes. It’s easy to forget things so I go through them every now and then and think of new ideas on how to improve my content strategy, increase income, use Pinterest smarter, or else.

So these are the main tasks related to my blogging business and which are part of my day in the life of a blogger.

After 4-6 hours of work doing the things outlined above, I’d go home, make a meal, then go to gym or do something else. The late afternoon and evening are mine. 

What do you think? How does a day in the life of a blogger look like for you?

Want to know what a day in the life of a blogger looks like? Here's my version of it and how I run my blogging business:

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