Ok, you know you are supposed to blog. The marketing experts agree that blogging consistently is a sure-fire way to get your site well indexed by the search engines and get those oh-so-important backlinks for your site. But let’s face the reality. Coming up with fresh interesting blog content 365 days a year is darn difficult. You know it’s important but getting started is so hard. You understand you need the value that blogging provides from search engines gobbling up your content. But how? ! How do you come up with fresh blog content and find the time. Here’s some ideas to make your life easier but also to get better results for your efforts.
1. Blog about what you know or are passion about so the words stream from your keyboard rather then having to struggle to spit out the words and put sentences together. It’s always easier to talk about something you know or care about or that is controversial then technical or dry topics.
2. You don’t have to be an expert (unless you really are an expert and offering expert content on a specific topic). Write about specifics if you can, generalities if you have to, but write about something!
3. You don’t have to be a blogger who writes with grammatical perfection. Your English teacher is not reading your blog. Stop thinking that the world is going to judge you critically if you misspell a word or don’t know all the rules of grammar. Of course you want your blog to be as good as it can be, but don’t let the quest for perfection make a 20 minute blog post take you hours to complete. (If you find a typo in this post, I don’t want to hear about it).
4. Ideally, to get the most benefit from search engines indexing your blog, you want to blog about topics related to your products, service or business. But that can be really tough to write about just one subject every day. Try spacing out your blogs so that some are on topic for your purpose, while others are off topic, or about current events. Add in your Resource Box at the end of every post (see point 7 below).
5. Keep your blog posts short. Keep your blog to the point, itemize, organize, number points if you have to. Do what you have to do make it easy and quick for you to write and easy and quick for your readers to digest. Sometimes less is more.
6. Let the world around you be your inspiration for blogs topics. This can include songs, newspaper headlines, nature, current events, other bloggers, daily happenings in the course of your life, things your kids say or do. Get the idea. There are NO limits.
7. Always, conclude your post with a Resource Box or Author info section with every blog. Why? So that your contact info and identifying information is tagged with EVERY blog post and not tucked away on an About page. Ensure that your Resource Box includes your name, contact details, areas of expertise, and link to your site or landing page. It is also a good idea to weave your optimal key words into your Resource Box. This way the key words you want people to find you with are associated with your blog, your name, and your company. This proves beneficial if you write about something not directly related to your business, products or services, you still get the benefit of the key word content about yourself, and a backlink to your site, or landing page.
8. Sometimes it helps to start with a really catchy Blog title. Take a lesson from the newspapers. They construct clever eye-grabbing attention getting headlines to draw you in. Start with a really bold, in your face, descriptive or reaction provoking headline to get immediate attention. The let your content come forth from the headline.
9. Set a goal to blog on a regular basis. If you can’t blog every day, then do it every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Set exact dates and times that work for you. If you don’t you will always find some other distraction to convince yourself is more important. Set a goal, stick to it, do it!
10. Make the most of the time you have spent on your blog by then tweeting it, posting it to Linked In, adding to your Facebook profile and other social media sites. Maximize the power of the time you spent blogging by utilizing social media to spread the message to other sites. You can use automated tools to do this to save time. Include links to your social media sites on your blog itself for even more exposure.
About the Author:
** Sandi Hunter, is the Director of Website Development at Worldprofit Inc at http://www.worldprofit.com
Worldprofit provides hosting, design, training, traffic, support and specialized software for small and home based business owners.