Balancing Family and My Blogs

Ever since my fifth child was born back in 2010, it has been a struggle to find time for my blogs and my family. I’ve wrote about this several times right here on the Talbert Zoo. I wrote about how blogging has changed, I sorted my time and priorities, and as a mother of five kids, four with special needs and a husband who works 80+ hours a week, I have had my share of stress, stress and more stress.

I’ve been doing this blogging thing for nearly 8 years already. Wow, it’s really been that long? You’d think I would have it all figured out by now. But, my page views and revenue for my main blog has gone down considerably. I am not making nearly as much money with it as I did just a few years ago. I used to pay myself every Friday and it was great! Now I am lucky if I get paid once a month.

I come up with these brilliant ideas, but have difficulty finding the time to execute them. If I don’t have time, then I think about hiring somebody to do it for me, but I don’t have the money to pay that person. So, there goes that.

Then last fall I decided I needed to write a book. Remember that idea? If I write a book and self publish it on Amazon, then I can finally make a decent second income to support my family. That was my idea for my new project.

For the first few months everything was going great. I went to the library every Saturday to work on my book. There I had zero distractions and all the resources I needed. I was able to go to the library 3-4 times a month from October until mid December. Then Christmas arrived so I took a break. I went a couple of times in January, a couple of times in February and once in March. I haven’t been back to work on my book since. And that time in March, I didn’t work on my book, I had to write a very important article on The Healthy Moms Magazine that required a lot of research for a hot button issue. You can read my lengthy article HERE.

I think I have about 35% of my book typed out. But I need to finish it, hire someone to edit it and format it for Kindle and then publish it. At the rate I am going I may not ever finish my book. I need a new strategy in order to make a decent income again.

Recently, I read a book about SEO in 2015. The guy that wrote it is an expert on the topic and has helped several companies reach number one in Google for their keywords. He’s brilliant and I trust what he wrote. I learned so much from reading this book and know that in order for me to get my page views back I must execute as much of his tips as possible.

But how in the heck am I going to do this? I could stop sleeping, but then I won’t be living what I preach. Adults should get at least 7-8 hours of sleep a night. I remember years ago when I was sleep deprived and looking for answers, I do not want to go back to that again!

I can easily work 10 hours a day on just that one website (Healthy Moms Magazine), but how am I going to come up with 10 hours when I have a family to take care of and a home to keep up as well? I know that successful small business owners work 12-16 hour days and I wish I could do that! But, then I would need a nanny for my kids, and I don’t have the money for that right now.

I’m tired. I’m frustrated. There is so many things I want to do but I can’t. I want to start a new link building strategy and write more articles for other websites and blogs. I want to finish my book and get it published. I want to feature more bloggers on the Healthy Moms Magazine so I can build good quality links that will produce traffic as well as help with SEO. I want to spend more time on social media so I can increase my followers. I want to e mail bloggers to invite them to join Healthy Moms Social, so I can watch it grow and thrive. I want to visit 20-50 blogs every single day and leave meaningful comments. I want to organise my blog calendar so my posts are planned ahead of time. I want to contact potential advertisers so I can make more money with sponsored content. But how am I going to find the time for all of that?