How much time does blogging really take?

Another year’s gone, and the time-sheets are processed. Hereby a few benchmarks for our blogs at Leonardo ENERGY.

The length of our posts varies between 100 and 500 words, and takes us between 0.5 and 6 hours, depending on the amount of fact checking needed (as well as insight checking) and how straightforward it is to structure the story. Taking a median of 2 hours per post and 2 weekly posts consumes half a day per week for content.

Added to this comes scouting for new stories. We monitor a number of RSS feeds through Google Reader. Clearing these takes about half an hour per day, but not all this time should be allocated to blogging. Keeping up to speed on your sector has value and you probably should do it, even when not blogging.

Count an hour per week for maintenance, i.e. editing your about pages, managing your tag cloud, installing plug-ins, editing the side bar, handling occasional server problems, etc

Joining the blogosphere means participating. It means commenting on other blogs in your sector, promoting your blog through forums, directories, social bookmarking etc. Another hour per week?

So overall, a content blog producing a couple of articles per week takes about 20% of a person-week, though it does not need to come from a single person. You can divide the roles of blogmaster (20%), editor (20%) and copywriter (60%). The role of copywriter can be easily outsourced.

Above applies to a single blog. Running multiple blogs rapidly produces scale economies. At least, you can share systems, intelligence and even content. In our experience, we spend about 60% of a person to run 7 blogs.

Not all blogs need to be in-depth content. For example, our photoblog takes about half an hour per week. As a side benefit, its indexed photostream is very popular with search engines, giving us the kind of advertising that money couldn’t buy.