Category Archives: Blog Publishing

Is most blogging waste of time?

At least the title of this article seems to say so. Actually you can say the same with content marketing: is content marketing waste of time?

Okay, I’m going into a loop – is most driving waste of time? Is most reading waste of time? Is most physical work waste of time? Is most studying waste of time?

I personally believe that an activity is rarely a waste of time. The thing that decides whether it’s a waste of time or not is the end result that you achieve. Whether a particular business promotion activity (for that matter, even an enterprise) bears results or not depends on its implementation, execution and targeting. The same is the case with blogging, whether you indulge in personal blogging or business blogging.

There are many businesses that are doing great with the help of their blog. Most of my business comes due to blogging. Yes, it is time consuming and I would rather have an activity that gets me targeted traffic without having to blog every day, but for now, blogging gets the business. The more I blog, the more business I get, the less I blog, the less business I get.

I have observed that with more blogging I get more targeted traffic. It’s not that my clients give me more business because they can see me blogging everyday. It’s because my visibility increases and more people come to know of my services whether my search engine rankings are improving, new blog posts and webpages are continuously being added to the search engine index or more people are having more content from me to share on social media and social networking websites. Whatever is the case, ultimately, I experience an improvement when a blog more. So at a personal level I can never say that blogging is waste of time.

In a blog post titled Why every business should blog Neil Patel shares the following statistics regarding business blogging:

61% of consumers have made a purchase based on a blog post that they read.
60% of consumers feel positive about a company after reading its blog.
70% consumers learn about a company through its blog vs ads.

According to an infographic shared on the same page, websites that blog have 97% more inbound links. Websites that regularly blog have 434% more indexed pages compared to websites that don’t.

Is blogging good for your business? It depends on your targeting, your intention, and your seriousness. Please don’t think that I’m trying to preach, but most business blogging ventures fail because people are not persistent. The problem is not with blogging, the problem is with commitment. Business blogging requires serious commitment, whether it comes directly from you (you writing the blog regularly) or it comes from someone you have hired. Persistence is the key.

Why quality content writing matters and how to maintain quality

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Importance of quality content for your business blog

Do you think quality content writing matters? As a business vying to promote yourself through the power of content marketing, how seriously do you take the quality of content that you publish on your blog or website?

As a professional content writer I am routinely approached by clients looking for highly cheap content. This is also because they think that if they suddenly publish lots of content covering every possible keyword their search engine rankings will improve, but at the same time, they either don’t have the needed budget or they don’t have the inclination to spend enough money on getting the content written (because they aren’t sure whether it is going to work or not). Since they don’t want to spend much money on the content (due to whatever reason) they are often fine with publishing inferior-quality content, thinking that once people are drawn to their website, somehow they will end up doing business with them (the same sort of people are fine with spamming people with emails). Unfortunately (unfortunately for them, fortunately for people who take content writing seriously and would like to maintain a reasonable level of quality) this rarely works and even if lots of people end up on their websites, very few actually do business with them.

Regular interactions on social media and social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube may give you an impression that people aren’t much worked up about what sort of grammar you use while expressing yourself. In fact, people who care about grammar in casual conversations are often termed as “Grammar Nazis”. Then why does quality content writing matter especially when it comes to promoting your business and generating leads and sales?

In the business world, quality means seriousness. If you are putting effort in producing quality content writing, it shows that you are serious about your business, and you also respect your customers and clients. If you don’t respect them, you don’t care about the sort of language they are exposed to. If you are not serious about getting business from them, you’re not going to spend much effort and money on getting quality content for your website and blog. You are fine with publishing mediocre content because you anyway have no confidence in your business. This is the message that you send when you neglect quality content writing.

So it has got nothing to do with how well you can write and what an impression you can make on your customers and clients. It is about conveying a message that you take your business very seriously, you take your customers and clients very seriously, and this is why, whatever it is they come across on your website, it is of high quality. When you respect your website visitors (or email recipients) it means you respect your own business and when you respect your own business, you take utmost care that whatever is present on your website is of good quality.

How to maintain the quality of content writing on your blog, website and emails

You can take care of the following in case you want to publish quality content:

Hire a professional content writer if you are not comfortable with the language you need to write in.
Avoid excessive use of jargon.
Always keep the central purpose of your writing in your mind if you are writing yourself and instruct your content writer to do the same in case he or she is writing content for you.
Although you don’t need to be a “grammar Nazi” be mindful of your grammar and don’t commit mistakes that reek of carelessness and ill-education.
Try to write in the language of the persona you are targeting.
Do proper research when writing.
Use a conversational style.
Continuously solve problems of your prospective and current customers and clients when writing content for your website or blog.
Use proper formatting such as headlines and bulleted points to organise main points of your content to make browsing and scanning easier for your readers.
Use interlinking (hyper linking to other important pages and blog posts on your website) to avoid content duplication if you need to explain a single point from within multiple pages and blog posts.
Try to deal with just one topic on one web page or blog post.
Use smaller paragraphs whenever possible and express just one idea.
Use images that help your readers understand your content better.
Thoroughly proof read before publishing.

5 ways to generate more business with guest blogging

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Guest blogging is a great way to generate fresh traffic to your blog and website, provided you make the right moves and you have crossed a certain threshold level. I repeatedly talk about this “certain threshold level” because unless you have crossed it, nobody is going to bother with approaching you for guest blogging opportunities.

Guest blogging has two sides:

You offering guest blogs to other high traffic-blogs
People offering to write for your blog to get exposure for their own website or blog

As rightly mentioned in this Copyblogger blog post on the power of guest blogging and how it frees you from the clutches of search engines like Google, guest blogging can be a double-edged sword. To understand this, you first need to understand

Why do people guest blog and invite guest bloggers?

Why do you want to guest blog on other blogs and why do people want to guest blog on your blog? You can achieve the following by guest blogging:

Get more direct traffic by publishing your blog post on another, high-traffic blog and getting your byline included.
Expose your ideas to a different, wider audience.
As a person or as a brand become known to more people.
Get fresh content for your own blog by letting others write for it.
Get yourself some respite by not having to continuously write yourself and instead, allowing others to generate quality content for your blog.
Increase search engine rankings.

Unfortunately, it is the last, 6th reason for which people mostly guest blog and this is how you can become a victim of spamming if you are not careful about for whom you write and from whom you accept content. If you can take care of both these aspects guest blogging is one of the greatest ways of getting access to a wider audience as well as continuously getting new content for your own blog.

How do you generate more business with guest blogging?

Yes, ultimately you want to generate more business. How does guest blogging contribute? Here is how…

You get exposure: If yours is a relatively new business or if you are looking for a bigger audience you can either wait for your search engine rankings to improve and your social media and social networking audience to increase or you can guest blog for more famous blogs. A good thing about guest blogging is, provided you use the right sort of blogs, you can gain massive amount of traffic in no time. How does this help you grow your business? When you are guest blogging you are mostly targeting highly focused, niche blogs, read and viewed by people who are already interested in what you have to offer. Suppose you are in the business of producing biodegradable building materials. Which blogs would you choose? Maybe architecture? Alternative lifestyle? Green living? Regular visitors to these blogs will be more eager to check out your website and become your customers.
You expand your influence as an expert:
Suppose you make a living off advising people how to do a particular thing. For that you need to establish yourself as an expert. You want to be known as an expert in your field. More and more people should know about your expertise so that when they need the expertise that you can provide, they remember that you can provide it. The more you are known as an expert, the better are your prospects.
You get more targeted traffic to your website:
Generating more business from your website and blog is all about getting targeted traffic. Most of the websites face this problem that although they get lots of traffic, they are not attracting the sort of traffic that turns into business. When you are guest blogging you carefully choose the blogs. As I have mentioned in the first bullet, if you are producing biodegradable building materials you will naturally be guest blogging for blogs that attract an audience interested in nature-friendly architecture, green living and pursuing alternative lifestyles. This will send your way lots of targeted traffic and this in turn will improve your conversion rate and hence, generate more business for you.
You get quality content for your own blog: Just as you are providing quality content to other blogs as guest blogger, when you invite other guest bloggers to write for your blog, you are engaging more and more people to generate content for you. As a small business it might be difficult to produce lots of quality content on an ongoing basis over a sustained period of time. But once your blog has crossed a certain threshold level of popularity and traffic, greater number of people will be interested in writing for you. Just imagine, a single person writing one blog post every day and a slew of writers writing multiple blog posts every day. Wouldn’t that be marvellous for your content quantity and quality? The more content you have, the more content is indexed by the search engines, the more content of yours is exposed on social networking websites and the more targeted traffic you have to your blog and website, getting more business to you.
You strike up new business partnerships: It is not just about traffic and exposure when you use guest blogging to generate more business. You can strike up direct business partnerships with people who get involved with you and with people you get involved with. Many of the guest bloggers may turn out to be your customers and clients later on. Similarly you may end up doing business with people you are right now writing for.

Guest blogging is a great networking opportunity because when someone allows you to write blog posts for his or her blog he or she is allowing you to enter his or her space. This is a great opportunity for you to get close to that person in terms of establishing a mutually beneficial business relationship. The same is applied to people who want to guest blog for you.

Still not blogging? Here are the 10 reasons you should

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“There are actually people who are not blogging for their business!” exclaimed one of my social media marketing clients recently who often outsources his content writing needs to me. Sometimes you get across the advice “blogging isn’t for everybody” and people end up interpreting it all wrong.

When someone tells you “blogging isn’t for everybody” it doesn’t mean your business doesn’t require blogging. What it means is, not everybody can handle the level of commitment required to run a successful business blog. Having said that, yes, there are many businesses that don’t require a blog and still experience lots of success but then there are many people who can spend 5 minutes underwater without running out of breath and drowning themselves – exceptions are always there and if you want to be an exception, well, it is your choice.

While you may have your own reasons not to have a business blog, here is a nice link that gives you 10 reasons why you should. Some of the reasons are…

Make money: In one of my recent LinkedIn blog posts I wrote there are different ways you can make money from your blog and you don’t always have to rely on third-party advertisement networks. So yes, if you want to make money, blogging is one of the best ways to do it, though it requires lots of hard work and commitment.
Become a better writer: A good thing about blogging is you don’t have to mind much about how you write. It doesn’t mean you run amok and use whatever sort of language you want to use, but you can relax and let your guards down. What am I saying? Instead of becoming a better writer, am I advising you to become a worse writer because nobody is judging your writing on your blog? No, what I’m saying is, on your blog you can write without fear so it can be a good writing practice. Business blog, on the other hand, needs to be professionally written but still, it can have your personal touch.
Build an audience and also your own broadcasting platform: Once you start publishing a blog regularly people will start coming to your blog regularly. This will help you build an audience and wherever there is an audience, there is a broadcasting platform. You can use this platform to build your brand and hence, your business.
Become an expert in your field: Provided you are serious about your business blog, you will be constantly sharing your expertise and in order to share your expertise, sometimes first you need to gain that expertise. Sometimes I learn new content writing and content marketing concepts while gathering material for my blog posts.
Get new customers and clients: People who regularly come to your blog trust you more compared to those who don’t. Many among your regular blog readers will gladly become your paying customers and clients provided you have something valuable to sell.
Improve your search engine rankings: Well, this point is not present in the link above, but this is one of the main reasons why most of my clients approach me to write content for their blogs – they want to improve their search engine rankings and yes, a business blog can definitely help you achieve that. This is because when you have a blog, you eventually end up creating lots of focused content and it is the focused content that enjoys higher search engine rankings.

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How to go from 0 to 100,000 monthly blog visitors in 1 year

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Every blogger’s dream is to get a ton of traffic as soon as possible, but the problem with blogging is, unless you have got lots of time and money at hand, it takes a prolonged effort to grow a decent flow of traffic. Most people abandon blogging because although they start with great ideas and lots of energy, gradually they start running out of ideas and the energy begins to ebb. If you go through the history of every successful blog there is one common trait you will easily find: persistence. I don’t know whether this is true or not, once I read somewhere that Seth Godin publishes a blog post everyday, without missing even a single day, even on Christmas Day. Many bloggers claim that the moment they decrease the number of blog posts they publish per week or per month, their traffic declines and so do their business queries.

How do you grow traffic to your blog? This Business 2 Community blog post explains how you can generate a monthly traffic of 100,000 visitors to your blog. Of course conditions apply. You need to stick to the following:

Write great headlines to increase traffic directly as well as from search engines. Remember that whenever people come across your link, it’s not the URL that they see, it’s the headline or the title that you have created. Search engines use your page title to display your listing as a hyperlink text. Even when people post your link on Facebook or Twitter, it’s your headline or title that is automatically extracted and displayed within the update preview. So spend ample amount of time coming up with a compelling, highly attractive headline or webpage titles.
Write lots of content on trending topics if possible. Well, this advise is not always applicable to your business, but it definitely helps if you write content on trending topics because people are already looking for such content. But do keep in mind that you need to give a unique twist to your blog posts because if it is a trending topic then you can safely assume that hundreds of thousands of people must be writing about it and there is going to be a tough competition on search engines as well as social networking websites. Create a unique title or topic and then write your blog post centered around the trending topic.
Always solve problems. Visitors will come to your blog in droves if you solve their problems through your blog posts.
Write in conversational tone. Remember that when you’re writing blog posts you are not trying to prove your literary credentials – you’re simply trying to hold conversations with your visitors. Write in a friendly manner. Write as if you’re talking to someone sitting in front of you.
Promote your blog posts. Simply writing blog posts all the time doesn’t help much, although sooner or later you will start getting search engine traffic. Start pitching your blog posts on various forums. Share your links on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other such platforms.