There is nothing worse than setting up a blog and then forgetting about it – like someone said in a Twitter post, “a blog with no new content is like a cheese sandwich”. Although this made me smile, he is right. An inactive blog is the same as a brochure website, looking pretty but with no search engine optimisation activity it is worth nothing.
The answer? Get off your backsides and start contributing.
How? There is lots of material all around you. Look at your old articles, e-newsletter material, past emails answering questions from your clients, stuff you may have read from other blog posts or whatever that you would like to put your own slant on it, articles from business magazines, overhead conversations at networking events, general gossip: this forum is full of it!
How often? Regularity is better than frequency. Michael Martine of Remarkablogger stated in a recent post that he now blogs less than before, but his posts have a much higher value in their content so his SEO impact is higher, as well as the quality of comemnts. See what he says in one of my posts: http://www.designyourmarketing.co.uk/2009/07/blogging-less-can-be-effective-too/
What should you say? The aim is to provide value for your readers, give them something to think about, provide solutions to their problems, pose a question to encourage comments: comments are treated as new material too, so getting lots of these is also good for SEO.
Create an editorial diary so you can draft a number of posts in advance and come back to them later to spruce them up for posting. If you’re really clever, or if your original post is too long, split up a subject into many installments: this will keep the audience’s interest going, and incorporating cliff-hangers will encourage them to look out for the next post. It also will make it all the easier for you if you know what you are going to write next.
Don’t make your posts too long. People don’t have time to read huge articles on blogs, keep it down to five paragraphs, or more if they are short ones. Short, snappy and sweet is my motto. It makes it quicker to write them too.
If you get an idea, write it down in a notebook, or if you’re online, create a quick draft and go back to it later. Once you’re creative juices are following, why waste them?
Constant contributions are more important than making your blog look wonderful, stuffed full of imagery and widgets, but with no content. Get writing – the more your readers, and therefore potential clients, get to know about you, the more likely you are to do business with them.
Oh, and another thing, try and put a purpose into your posts. Blogging aimlessly about everything and anything is also a waste: there must always be an ultimate aim in whatever you do.
My purpose for this post? To raise awareness of who I am, you’ll follow the link to the post above, and you’ll realise that I want to help women to blog successfully to further their businesses by visiting my blogging pages.
Blogging less can be effective too
Friday, July 3rd, 2009I would like to reprint a portion of a post How to get more time to blog by Michael Martine of Remarkablogger, Blog Consultant and Blog Coach. I hope he doesn’t mind, but it raised some points that I wanted to share with you and hope you would find interesting.
Blog Less
Despite the fact that nearly every blog-advice blogger on the planet says you should blog every day, quality is much more important than quantity when it comes to blogging (most people aren’t successful, so why is doing everything they do a good idea? Hmm?). I’ve seen this first hand for myself, ever since I dropped down from seven posts a week to 5, and now I’m down to a whopping single post per week. Did I kill my business? No! In fact, my subscriber count and my income are up, up, up! (Some of you are aware of FeedBurner recently adding FriendFeed subscribers in with feed counts, which raised everyone’s feed subscriber counts overnight — I’m talking about an increase I saw before FeedBurner made this change.)
It’s true that in some ways, posting every day or even more than once a day can grow your blog’s audience. Certainly it will help with blog SEO, but maybe not as much as you might think. In my own example, I’m writing bigger, meatier blog posts that are absolutely my best writing. The result is that each post gets more trackbacks and more traffic. The more backlinks a webpage gets, the more authority it has in Google’s eyes, which is ultimately better for SEO.
Having more posts indexed by Google but getting fewer trackbacks or less influence & reach is not an even trade. Quality is better than quantity. If you make people happy, you’ll also make Google happy. And if you make Google happy, Google will make you happy when you see your PageRank numbers and search engine rankings.
Blogging less leaves me more time to do important stuff like spend time with my granddaughter and really be there for her in her life as she grows up (I just got her her first kite, and now we’re waiting for a day with some breeze in it — I can’t wait!). Blogging less also allows me to make more money, because I have more time to create and promote information products or maintain my network.
You just don’t need to blog everyday (but you do need to be consistent). What you need is to blog about stuff your audience can’t live without. You need to blog about stuff they want to spread to their friends and link to in their own blogs and on social media.
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