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Blog success has got a lot to do with persistence

Blogging — whether business or personal — is an ongoing activity. It’s not like you publish 20-40 blog posts and there you go, you have got a successful blog for yourself. No, it doesn’t work this way. The nature of blogging is such that it goes on and on.

I have noticed that many clients put an upper limit to the number of blog posts they need due to financial or other (mainly financial) reasons. Although they may slightly end up improving their search engine rankings due to the way blog titles are formulated, it is a very restrictive approach and to be frank they are wasting money in two ways:

They are losing money on those 20-40 blog posts because on their own they cannot do much for the clients

They are losing money by not continuing because persistent blogging is one of the strongest promotional tools they could have had for their business.

Do I tell this to my clients? Depends upon how receptive they are to my suggestion. They normally feel — it is but natural — that I am seeking a long-lasting business opportunity for myself. Of course, if they continue publishing content on their blogs (provided by me) I continue to get paid and for them it is an ongoing expense. But they fail to understand that they are incurring a far greater expense in order to avoid a smaller but significant expense. They missed the opportunity they could have had by persistent blogging.

But why do you need to publish content on your blog on an ongoing basis? Because this is the nature of blogging. You continuously publish content so that the search engines always have something new to crawl and index from your website. With every single new post you are improving your search engine rankings whether you can directly see that or not.

With new content you also give your visitors a reason to come to your website/blog repeatedly. It is repeat visiting that eventually gets you business.

Ongoing content publishing also helps you maintain the buzz around your brand/business over social media and networking websites. You routinely have something new to post there and your friends and followers can see that you proactively communicate through your website and share lots of information with your visitors.

There is another thing that should prompt you to publish content on your blog regularly and that is your competitors are doing it. Managing an online business is no longer about having a website and 5-10 customary webpages. You always need to be proactive and aggressive in your approach simply because there are so many people trying to grab business and they are constantly coming up with new things in order to beat you. The strongest weapon in their arsenal is of course content marketing. Targeted content gives an immense boost to search engine rankings for relevant keywords and longtail expressions. They are constantly feeding the search engines and the social media and networking websites with high quality and compelling content. In other words they are promoting themselves aggressively.

There was a time when some businesses had telephones and some didn’t. It was the same with fax machines and the same with websites: some had them and some didn’t. than people realized not having a website was a big drawback. the same phenomena is taking place when it comes to publishing content on blogs. There are many who understand that it is an ongoing exercise and then there are those who consider blog posts as normal webpages. blogging, once started is just like another recurring expense, and those who understand this have a great advantage over those who don’t.

But what if you don’t have a budget that can support ongoing blogging? Well, when I say that you have to publish content persistently it doesn’t mean you have to publish blog posts daily. Even 2 blog posts per week can fetch you great benefits. Of course daily blogging has its own advantages but if right now you cannot afford it you can go on publishing on your blog by scheduling 2 blog posts or even 1 block post per week. It’s just that the search engines and your visitors/followers/friends must always have something new to view and promote about your business — directly or indirectly.

Why your business needs a blog

Why does you business need a blog? If you think this question has already been put forth thousands of times, you’ll notice social media experts like Chris Brogan are still raising it. It means how important it is, and it also means there are still some people who wonder whether they need a business blog or not.

As Chris has rightly stated, not every business needs a blog, but if a business has a blog, that business has an edge over other business. Blogging is a great communication tool, especially if you have built up an audience for it. And if you are a big company, even the press knows about your blog.

When you have a business blog you don’t need to depend on media and other PR agencies to reach out to your core market. Of course it’s easier said than done. It takes effort to build an audience. If you simply keep on publishing formal press releases full of corporate jargons people are not going to throng to your blog. You need to publish content that really makes an impact. People should find it useful.

That’s a reason why many businesses shy away from starting a business blog. They know it’s a long-term commitment and a blog that is not well-managed can sully the image of the company.

Nonetheless, a business blog can be a great asset.

Focused content writing actually means SEO

What exactly does SEO (search engine optimization) mean? It means generating and organizing your online content in such a manner that search engines can appropriately rank it for the related keywords and key phrases. If you are writing a page on providing content writing services or blog writing services then the search engines should be able to rank that page higher on the SERPs (search engine result pages).

Of course your source code must be free of unnecessary clutter and you must have the right information in your meta tags, but the real SEO juice comes from your content — what you are writing to describe your message. It’s important to know what keywords and expressions must be used and avoided; you don’t want to rank higher for all the wrong keywords (there is no harm in it but that traffic gives you a false sense satisfaction and that might be bad for your marketing efforts).

So decide on the topic, make a list of the words you must use to describe that topic and then start writing. Talk about the subject and try to focus on it — the search engines prefer focused, targeted content. Just be careful not to overdo it. There is a very thin line between keyword stuffing and optimized content.

How to get new blogging ideas regularly

Publishing a regular blog is a great way of attracting new visitors to your website, from search engines, other blogs, online forums and social networking websites. But it’s not easy to get new blogging ideas on an ongoing basis. I’ve personally observed that when I ask my clients to send me blog post titles they run out of them after 20-25 blog posts. On the other hand if I find the topics the projects sustain for long durations. For instance there are around 3 blogs that allow me to send my own blog topics (plus content) and I’ve been supplying blogs to them for more than 2 years now.

Considering the overwhelming benefits of publishing a blog, how do you make sure that you always have something to post. Here’s a blog post that discusses 13 ideas to inspire your blog content. Briefly, they are:

  • Using Google alerts
  • Going through blog directories for ideas
  • Subscribing (email updates and RSS feeds) to blogs of your interest
  • Linking to blog posts from other blogs (like this one)
  • Conduct polls (relevant to your blog topic) and discuss the results
  • Write about interesting things in your own life (don’t over-do this, of course)
  • Find interesting topics/debates and share them with your readers
  • Create blog posts out of the sub-topics of other blog posts
  • Ask your community for fresh ideas using your comment section and Twitter and FaceBook accounts
  • Invite other bloggers to write guest blog posts for your blog
  • Scan for ideas in newspapers, magazines, online forums and other websites
  • Write lists…this is a fad on the Internet, like, top 10 free content management systems, for instance
  • Get ideas from the classical literature.

You can read about these topics in detail on the link mentioned above.

The importance and benefit of guest blog posting

Some bloggers have been able to generate massive amounts of traffic by regularly writing guest blog posts for other blogs. Have no idea what’s guest blog posting? It means writing blog posts for other blog publishers rather than for your own blog. It doesn’t mean you stop posting on your blog and just write for other blogs (it’s another matter if you get paid for this). A good mix can be, if you write 5 blog posts every week and you cannot simply squeeze in more time, you can use to blog posts as guest posts and remaining three for your own.

Besides creating diversity, as mentioned by Chris in this guest blog post, guest blogging also gets you high-quality in-coming links. More people begin to know you because your profile routinely appears at various places. Once people know you and recognize you and value your writing they also start promoting your links on various social networking websites like FaceBook and Twitter: it becomes sort of a cascading effect.

Another benefit of guest posting is that people start showing interest in guest posting for your own blog. This way you can devote more time on promotion.