For the vast majority of people that get into a career through blogging, they will be thinking of heading down their own path and creating their own website about the things they like and care to talk about. However, the only problem with this is that setting up and running a website all by yourself can be quite a challenging task. Setting the website up is inherently going to always take time since there are many things that need to be done until the website is ‘ready’ for the online world. However, what many bloggers and website owners forget is that maintaining and running a website can be just as hard, if not harder, than starting up a website: if you approach the running and maintenance of the website wrong. For this reason, talking from experience, here are three tips you can use to reduce the load you have on running a website by yourself.

#1 Automate Social Media Platforms

When it comes to the publishing of articles onto your website, you will want to share these articles on social media platforms to increase the exposure that each of your articles get. The ‘old fashion’ way of doing this would be to manually tweet and share each article as you publish it. However, there are many plugins for WordPress and other automated platforms that will automatically tweet and share your articles the moment they are published, in a format and structure that you dictate, so that it reaches as many people as possible.

#2 Publish Comments ASAP

You might think this is a weird tip. However, I found that a large time I spent on blogging was contributing to answering comments for individual articles. As much as this is beneficial as comments do increase the SEO of articles, it was extremely time consuming. Therefore, I changed my tactics and simply publish every comment as it is posted (before hand, I would only publish comments that I would immediate respond to after publishing). From doing this, I found that other people actually answered other comments saving myself the time of doing it myself. With this, I dedicate about an hour every Sunday to answering any comments left unanswered, by is a significant reduction in time when compared to my previous method of comment answering.

#3 Automate Things That Can Be Automated

This is an expansion on the first point. In essence, the best way to reduce the amount of time to run and maintain a website is to automate as many processes that you would have to have done manually, so that more of your time can be concentrated on more important areas that can’t be automated, such as content writing, theme design and more.

With this, here are a list of the main things that can be automated for websites:

• As already mentioned, social media channels
• Filtering spam comments
• Advertising optimisation with programs such as Ezoic
• Email marketing
• Calculating/retrieving blog/website stats