Teaching & Blogging

As many of you already know my full-time profession is that of a high school English teacher. And I believe I’ve mentioned it on here before, but if I haven’t I’m sure you could guess that if I could make blogging my full-time career I would in a heartbeat. Seriously. I’m incredibly grateful for the strides I’ve made in this blogging profession thus far, but I’m nowhere near being able to quit my day job and pursue this full-time. I might never get to that point, but one can dream right?

In the meantime, I work full time and blog on the side. I may not be making a salary through blogging (yet), but it’s pretty much liking having a second full time job. Anyone who also blogs or is close with a blogger knows how much work goes in to this! From brainstorming post ideas, planning posts, writing posts, shooting photos, interacting with others on social media, keeping up with business emails about inquiries and collaborations, and the list goes on. And if you’ve been a long time follower of mine on here you know that I post every day. Yes, every day. Why? Because I love it so much that despite the seemingly endless amount of work that comes along with blogging it never seems like “work” to me. I genuinely enjoy doing it and it’s something I hope will never change.

For anyone who is not a blogger it may come as a surprise that this much thought and work goes in to everything we do. I plan out posts or at least post ideas far in advance, I get a family member or friend to take my photos or I put my camera on a tripod and snap away. I have the good fortune of being friends with a professional photographer who I’ve done a photoshoot with just last month and have plans to shoot with again this fall. All of these things take careful thought, budgeting of money and time, preparation. It’s hard work!

It is a lot to keep on top of. I try to stay as organized as possible with all my blog business. I have a draft email filled with post ideas and notes to myself as well as a physical planner where I always have the next 1-2 weeks planned out. The amount of arrows (to rearrange posts) and x’d out things in my planner is a bit crazy but it works! But things don’t always go according to plan and I’m just one person. While it is mainly me that handles all things blog related I do rely on some other people and networks to assist me. This is where being a full time teacher has been both good and bad for my blogging.

How is it good? Well, in general my schedule as a teacher is conducive to blogging but only if you’re thinking calendar wise as in a year, not daily. As a teacher I get most holidays off and a summer break. This is great for blogging because it gives me more time to get things done, write some posts ahead of time, get more time to travel etc. How is it bad? While my work schedule for the year is pretty good, my day is pretty much set in stone and it’s a rigid stone. I’m a teacher so there is little to no down time during the day as I’m either teaching (obviously), prepping, grading, or in meetings. It’s not that I try to blog from work, but part of blogging is maintaining an active social media. It’s easy enough to post and interact with people on Instagram, for example, during any of my breaks during the day but sometimes I’m approached about doing something and it has a very specific post time and I just can’t do it. As a way to build my audience and gain followers, I have been taking part in loop giveaways for a long time. One time, I had signed up to be part of a giveaway when some of the participants and the host started a conversation about changing the post time to the middle of the day. Easy enough for all the people who work from home or have jobs where they can openly use their phone during the day. Not so easy for me! I can’t exactly stop my lesson on Macbeth while I post my giveaway image can I? I kindly explained to the group that I wouldn’t be able to do the giveaway at the newly proposed time because I wouldn’t be able to take my phone out and spend 5-15 minutes making sure we were looped while in the middle of class. For some reason, there were people who didn’t understand that and were asking if I could just go to the bathroom for a few minutes. Um, not exactly since it’s illegal for me to just leave my students unattended! So sometimes I miss out on things. Like events on weekdays during the day because I can’t take off from work. Who plans events for the middle of a weekday?!

But I digress. The point is sometimes being a teacher is a great career to have to be able to blog and sometimes it’s not. And the days when it’s not, I’m especially thankful for all the tools at my fingertips to be able to successfully keep my blog going and social media presence alive. There are so many different things we can do these days to help our blog business. I use WordPress for my blog and I always schedule my posts ahead of time. I’m at work by 7:30 every morning so it’s helpful for me to be able to write my posts ahead of time and schedule them to go up. Another helpful tool is scheduling tweets. It’s easy to forget that people who may like our blogs may live on the other side of the world! So I might be posting things online that they may never see or it may get buried in their feeds by the time they wake up. Another thing I try to do is post on Instagram during my high traffic times. Once I switched over to a business profile on Instagram I was able to see what times of the day my followers are most active on any given day and if I’m able to I’ll try to post during those times for better engagement. But it’s not an exact science and we’re all just trying our best. Keeping my audience engaged with giveaways and collaborations with other bloggers and companies is essential as well to help get our names out there as well as build great relationships! I am truly thankful for all the other bloggers I’ve gotten to know over the past few years as we’re all in this together! All of these things are helpful to me and I know for many others they turn to SEO services as well.

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