Time is the best way to separate the serious people from the non-serious people and not just in social media, in real life too. Just ask an Olympic athlete how many hours he had to train to get to the Olympics, what sacrifices he had to make. Well, not everybody is ready to make those sacrifices and invest the necessary time and that’s totally fine: if it was easy to get to the Olympic, it would be one hell of a boring event. The event is great because only the best athletes compete and if they are great, it’s not only because they are talented people: they didn’t fear to put time and efforts.

Social media is no different. Of course it’s important to have a good strategy to make the most out of your time, but it takes time. Gaming the system just won’t work…long term.

When you have 8 hours in front of you to do what you want, you have plenty of time. Or at least, you think you have. For a lot of people, and this includes me, it’s easy to spend an hour on twitter, an hour on skype, an hour on MSN and an hour on forums when you have a full day in front of you. It is not all wasted time, because during those four hours you might have built connections or your brand a bit more, but let’s admit it: you’re probably procrastinating.

On the opposite, when you come home after a day of work or school and that you know you’ll have to spend some time with the family and eventually will only have three hours to do what you want to do, things go much faster and there are good chances you’ll be a lot more productive.

In those three hours, you can achieve what a lot of people achieve in 8 hours simply because you focus on what you have to do and on what brings you real results.

Time is no excuse

I am writing this just because time is often an excuse for not getting things done. From personal experience, I achieve more when I’m full time that’s for sure, but I can’t say that I do a lot more. When I’m full time, you’ll see me on twitter, skype and on blogs a lot. It’s not wasted time but in the end twitter doesn’t pay the bills. So, when I’m “part time”, I’m less active in the community (which is the case right now…), but that’s because I focus a lot more on things that make the business go forward. Don’t take me wrong here, commenting on blogs and being active in the community is extremely important, but it depends on the kind of business you build.

In the end, time is good to have, but it’s not the solution to every problem.

The mad blogger

The mad blogger post 5-10 articles a day and while the website looks to be filled with content, that content is usually “filler posts” (Not so unique posts just to fill some space). Why is it bad to do that? Well, I’m not saying it’s totally bad because I guess it might work for some websites. Again, it’s a case of “it depends what your website is about”: if you have a news website, of course you should post 5,10,15 articles a day, it’s your job! But let’s say you own a ‘regular’ blog about a particular subject you have some good knowledge of and that your goal is to spread that knowledge and make some money while you’re doing it. If you write five articles a day about your subject, not only you will run out of ideas eventually, but you are not going to market any article. It’s good to spend 5 hours a day writing tons and tons of articles, but what’s the point if no one’s reading them? You have to spend some of that time marketing these articles. By publishing too much content and not having much traffic, you are killing your ideas.

What’s great about writing a blog is to know people read you and also comment on your blog because they like what you do. When you end up on a blog you don’t know, I’m sure you check the average number of comments on the blog just to estimate the website’s popularity. Popularity is extremely important to a lot of users, they like to be part of something, a community. Posting 5 to 10 articles per day on a website not getting a huge amount of traffic will split your comments into these 5-10 posts, making maybe 10 articles with one comment on each. While you have some readers commenting, it’s not that impressive for a new user.

The lazy blogger

The lazy blogger is the complete opposite. I won’t go into details as I’m sure you get the idea. The main thing to understand is that being lazy and not updating the content is not a better idea. While you may end up with a lot more comments on each of your posts, new users will see you don’t update your website too often and this is usually a turn off. We like fresh content don’t we?

The balance is hard to get

I try to stay on a one post a day routine to keep fresh content coming in but also to maximize the number of comments I get per article. I know sometimes it tends toward a 1 post every two days routine, but that’s simply because I don’t want to write crap: if I don’t have time or ideas to write, I simply don’t write and so far it’s never been a major problem in my blogging experience. I try to write quality, not quantity and I’ve talked about it in a previous post: Don’t write just to write something. I also try to let people know about my new blog posts and I give my them the time to live. This way, the articles get some exposure, you haven’t spent your precious time writing for nothing and you maximize your comments possibility.

I guess the way to go is to write the amount you are able to write every day without feeling like you don’t know what to write about. You also have to keep some time to market your new articles, otherwise you are writing for nothing! If you are filled with ideas and could write 20 articles, spare some ideas and you get yourself almost a month worth of ideas on a one post a day routine.

Bottom line is that the balance is extremely hard to get. The best way is to go with what feels natural for you.