The Key to Blogging Efficiently

Writing new and educational content on a routine and regular basis can be challenging, especially coming up with ideas and then getting those ideas down and published as quickly as possible.  If your blogging efforts take more than 30 minutes, that’s too long.

Writing quickly and efficiently doesn’t mean compromising the quality of your output though.  We still expect high quality and valuable information.  So here are 5 ideas to help you through that process so you can get your blog working for you:

 1. Keep a list of ideas.  Whether you store this like a tickler file, an electronic file on Evernote, or a something more complex, the concept is to simply have a list of ideas that you can go to get content out there.  Inspiration comes at any time, so it’s important to be able to capture the thought so you have it ready when it’s time to write.

2. Lists make excellent content.  The best content is brief and concise.  If you can provide a list of tips, to do’s or not to do’s in a numbered or bulleted format, you’ve made that content easier to read (or skim) so we can get the ideas fast and easy.  Lists also mean you don’t have to spend time on transitional language from one point to the next.

3. Keep it short.  I recommend something less than 500 words typically.  We have short attention spans and if it looks like it might take a few minutes to read, we often think we’ll come back to it when we have more time.  Make every word count.

4. Edit before you begin.  This really means keeping yourself on topic.   With many topics, we can often cover from soup to nuts, but that’s not the point of a blog post.  Remove any supporting ideas that don’t fit directly with the topic at hand.  You can always use that supporting documentation for other blog posts as well as longer articles or white papers that you might publish.

5. Never save a good idea.  I’ve had many people tell me they’ve got some great blogging content, but they want to save it for later when they don’t have any ideas.  You don’t want o save time later, you want to save time now.  And the faster you get better content on your web site, the better of you will be in the long run.

Blogging is like everything else – the more you write, the better you get.  If you have other favorite blog writing tips, go ahead and share them here.

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To increase traffic to your web site, blogging the key

Every week, small business owners tell me they don’t think their online presence is working for them. So the first step here is to look at the level of traffic that’s actually stopping by your web site. There are a few key indicators to look at and see if it’s improving over time. Check out this post so you know where to start and what to look for.

The only way to know for sure is to monitor your stats over time. But it’s important to also know that if nothing ever changes on your web site, there’s really no reason for anyone to return. While that sounds kind of harsh, it’s the truth. The best way to add fresh content to your web site is to add a blog.

Blog is actually a contraction of words web and log and a really simple definition is that it’s just regular entries of commentary. In order for people to want to read what you have to share, you want to make sure you’re providing useful and valuable information and if you can make it entertaining, even better.

Web sites that have a blog get 55% more traffic than sites that don’t have a blog. Adding regular content to your web site by blogging also ensures that your site gets indexed regularly by the search engines. If nothing on your site ever changes, the search engines also feel there’s no reason to return and re-index.

Seriously, if your goal is to increase traffic to your web site, blogging on a consistent and regular basis is really the key. Providing interesting and valuable content to your audience will encourage people to come back, to start talking about you, and to tell others about you.

Blogging alone will help to drive more traffic to your web site, but if you’re going to invest the time to blog and create content, then I’d like you to think about some other activities you can do to amplify the messages that you’re putting out there. Stay tuned for some thoughts on that next week.

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I always say that the best way for a business owner to build trust is to make your prospects and customers better consumers in your industry. And that’s why creating and delivering and sharing educational content is important.

We’ve been talking about the value of content for some time now. Writing and delivering content helps you become more credible and recognized as an expert in your industry, it helps drive traffic to your web site because its inherently key word rich, and it helps build trust because you’re willing to provide some valuable information with no obligation. But the question that gets asked then is “how much of your knowledge should you give away for free?”

"How much of your knowledge, should you give away for free?”

For those of you that make your living essentially selling knowledge, you might be a little resistant to sharing all of your information for free. There’s no question this is an often debated topic and much has been written and argued in support of both camps.

Adrienne Graham writes on this topic and her argument is that it costs money to develop that knowledge and maintain it with education, networking, and skills mastery. And while I do agree with this point, I think that perhaps Graham takes a very adamant position that, had I taken, I wouldn’t have created the valuable strategic partners that I have today—the partners that have helped create some success for me.

Michael Stelzner, founder of SocialMediaExaminer, also discusses this notion in his latest book, “Launch”—a book in which he shares an amazing amount of information on how to create exceptional content to grow your business beyond the competition. Stelzner suggests that one way to manage this is to provide useful but incomplete information if you’re concerned about giving too much away. He also offers that if you do reveal it all in your content, it still won’t come close to what you as a provider bring to the table. Even though you may have told them how to do it all, no one can do it the way you do, so the results will be difficult to duplicate anyway.

I’m in Stelzner’s camp. Like I said, I do agree that it takes time, money and effort to maintain that knowledge to continue to be an expert in your field, but there are a number of models out there that have proven that you can share it all, and still create a decent business. From my perspective, if I don’t expose that knowledge and those ideas for prospective clients and strategic partners, and I keep it ‘light’, I think they’ll begin to question if I really know anything at all.

What do you think?

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