Time saving blogging tasks you can do from your smartphone

The beauty of blogging is not just the flexibility of working around the hours you choose, but also the way you work. It doesn’t need to require you to be plugged into your computer all day.

I have made a list of time-saving blogging tasks you can do from your smartphone to complete more than half of your daily blog work. These work perfectly whether you are using an Android or an iOS. I have also listed a few essential apps that you can download to be updated with your daily traffic and stats.

Getting started is the hardest part, and I have an awesome way to get set up for free with expert guidance in 10 minutes! 

This way it does feel complicated especially if its the technical aspect that’s holding you back!

Now let’s start!

• Choose stock photos– I choose most of my stock images from Free sites like Pixabay and Unsplash. I just scroll through the images I like and save the links to the notepad on my phone. When I’m done with a list of links, I send it to my email and download it to Canva for editing. I find I spend a lot of time choosing photos to go with my brand and the personality of my blog. This is a huge time saver for me. Making the perfect pin image is key for people to click through to your site. So make sure to spend enough time choosing the right photos and creating pinnable images

• Take photos using phone and edit– With my food blog, I used my Samsung smartphone to take most of my food photos and Picmonkey. Picmonkey is amazing in creating Pinterest images for my posts. I hear Snapseed is a good app for editing photos. I personally haven’t used it myself but is worth trying out. Make you are taking your photos in natural light avoiding the flash. Canva is free to use and works well to edit photos, but Picmonkey offers a wider range of photo editing which includes creating transparent backgrounds and creating professional logos.

• Write down posts in notepad– I brainstorm ideas and write them down on my phone’s notepad. This is really handy as I can write down keywords I would like to use in my post. Sometimes ideas might just hit you at the wrong place and at the wrong time when you cant reach for your computer to put it down. It’s handy to use your phone in these situations.

• Promote on social media– Best use of a smartphone is for social media promotion. Two sites I fully concentrate on promoting my blog is Facebook and Pinterest. Its hard to handle all the social media sites when you start, and I find these two bring me the most amount of traffic and sales. I pin manually most of the time and I find it worth doing it on the phone. I remember to pin 4 sessions a day so I’ve spread out my pinning schedule. I pin a total of 30-40 pins a day. It’s mostly 50/50. So half of the pins are from my own blog posts and the other half are from others pins.

• Respond to emails– I allocate a few minutes every day to respond to emails. With emails, I usually do it on my computer, but if I don’t get “computer time” I do it on my phone.

• Reply to comments – Whether it is comments left on your blog or comments you like to leave on someone else’s blog you can do this easily on your phone. Replying to comments is really important. I initially wasn’t keeping up with responding back. But I think it’s nice to show your readers some appreciation for stopping by. It also shows them the level of commitment you have to your blog and its readers.

• Pin manually – It’s always straight to manual pinning with the phone for me! And what better way to pin manually than with Carly’s strategies! This blogger manually pinned her way to over 200,000 pageviews. I have read her book and her strategies helped me gain over 130k views on Pinterest in my 2nd month on my food blog, and this did lead to a few affiliate sales. ( Apologies for the blurry image below :)) Here’s my one-week statistics that show a jump in views from 40k to 130k in 7 days! She shows you what you might be doing wrong with Pinterest and re-do mistakes. She is an amazing person too!

• Read/learn from an ebook or a course– Before I started to blog I was absorbing all the information I could from blog posts, ebooks and courses. Most of them were the free options. I did my research well before I invested in any course or ebook. There are so many out there and in all honesty, they are really hard to narrow it down to “one resource” that answered all my questions. The two best investments I made so far are how to start a blog as a beginner course for total newbies, and this fully-loaded Pinterest ebook (I seriously mean loaded, and not just about getting a business account and rich pins!) that has made me finally work out how Pinterest generates all that income and traffic bloggers talk about. It made me over $300 in affiliate income with my 3-month-old blog! (a post in the making :)). I still use my smartphone to keep referencing these ebooks!
• Research from the internet – Learn and research articles on the internet to be well prepared when writing your blog posts and to link back, to validate your work.

• Apply to affiliates– If I want to find an affiliate program to join that suits what I blog about. I just do a google search ( my niche + affiliate program ) and see the results that pop up. Read through their guidelines and see if the product is of true benefit to your readers. If it is an ebook or e-course, you can request an affiliate copy to learn about the product (if you haven’t personally used the product). And if you like some of them, why wait? Apply straightaway.

• Email a pitch for guest posting – Want to guest post on another blog to bring in some traffic to your site? You can use your phone to read blog posts on their blog to get a feel of what interests their audience. You can even send them an email with your pitch so they can decide if your article will be a good fit for their blog.

• Follow others on social media relevant to your niche – Always follow people relevant to your niche, they will most likely follow you back, as you share the same interests and it also decreases your unfollow rate. Whether Pinterest or Facebook, I search niche related topics and follow people that participate. As a beginner blogger Facebook groups are great to join as it helps increase your social media numbers (it does take time to build your following as a new blogger). This particularly good when you want to work with brands.

• Download apps– Here are a few time-saving apps that I have downloaded and kept handy on my phone to check the statistics and be updated with traffic and income to my blog- Google Analytics, Adsense, WordPress, Dropbox, Google drive, Snapseed and, all your social media apps.

Do you know of any other blog task you can do from your smartphone? I would love to hear your ideas in the comments below!