This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
How can you handle blog questions without feeling overwhelmed? Welcome to Side Hustle School, Chris Guillebeau, your host here. In this episode, we're gonna help a health blogger handle an influx of reader questions without feeling overwhelmed. And this could actually apply to social media as well. If you have a TikTok account or an Instagram account that is kind of blowing up and you're getting lots of comments, that's good.
That's great, you want engagement. And you also want to stay engaged with your audience. You don't want the comments to be only one way. You also want to choose your time wisely. You don't want to get in a situation where you're constantly having to interrupt what you're doing to respond to a comment.
It's really good to batch your tasks wherever possible. So let's talk about how to do that. This question comes from a nurse in Toronto who's been sharing health tips on her blog and has seen a lot of engagement recently, which as I said, it's great, but she's also feeling the strain of trying to respond to everyone. So a couple ideas for her that I think might be helpful for somebody else as well. How do you handle blog questions or just reader questions, social media questions, whatever they are, without feeling overwhelmed.
Detailed version of the question and my answer coming right up. [Music]
Hi, this is Emma. I'm a nurse from Toronto and I recently started a blog about health tips. It's going well and I'm getting a lot of reader engagement, but that means I get frequent reader questions in the comments. Well, I'd like to respond to them.
They're time-consuming to answer. How do I handle this without coming off as unresponsive or overwhelmed? I want to maintain my relationship with readers, but this feels daunting. [Music]
Well, first of all, engaged readers are a sign that you are doing something right. A lot of people have the struggle of trying to get engagement at all and they post questions, you know, how's your day going?
Share three tips about your opinion of this episode or this article or whatever, and nobody responds. So it's a good place, right? A good place to be and a good problem to have. But of course, balancing engagement with your time is also important. So a couple of things you can do.
Number one, create a system for managing questions. You might want to consolidate common questions and answer them in a blog post. You might want to use some kind of auto-response feature in your blog's comment section or email, perhaps to let readers know that their questions have been received. You know, you could say like, when you'll address them, you could say, I'll be covering common topics in upcoming blog posts. So that means, you know, you're gonna get your question answered, but it might not be right away.
It also doesn't imply a specific commitment to responding to every single comment, which leads to my second strategy to prioritize and set boundaries. As I said, it is good to respond to comments, but you can't always do it. And especially if your business grows and you're in different places and, you know, lots of things are happening, you know, you want to be as responsive as possible, but it's not going to always be possible to respond to everyone. So just choose, you know, what is important to me. Maybe set a specific time each week to address reader comments and questions.
And that way, as I mentioned, you'll avoid feeling like you have to respond immediately. It just kind of gives you like that dedicated space to it. You can also just set a boundary and say, like, I love hearing from my readers, but I'm not able to respond to everything. You know, I want to focus on writing new articles or making new videos, whatever it is. And another thing that's really great, maybe I should have even said this first, is to encourage community involvement, like build a community where readers can interact and support each other.
You might want to start a Facebook group or a Discord server where readers can discuss and help answer each other's questions and then highlight and engage with your most active readers. I've seen some really successful people do this over time. So sometimes that works better than others. It does depend on the industry. I realize with health, you want to be careful about just making it a free-for-all.
But hopefully somewhere in this mix of strategies, we can help Emma feel less overwhelmed and just get back to focusing on making this content that people are obviously engaging with. And that's good, as I said. Emma, wishing you the best. Listeners, wishing you well as well. If you have a question, sidehustleschool.com.
Lots of resources there. And of course, we'll continue to feature listener questions, comments, contributions throughout the year, along with updates from other listeners as they launch and grow their projects. Thanks so much for being out there. You're amazing. My name's Chris Guillebeau.
This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
- From the Onward Project.
