Category Archives: Blog Publishing

The benefits of updating your existing content

We are perpetually talking about adding new content to your website or blog but there is another way of having fresh content, as explained in this blog post titled 6 ways to give your old content new life. Personally for me it’s quite difficult to sift through my old posts and articles and update them. Although this does not increase the quantity of content, when you update your existing content, you keep it relevant, and you give the search engines a reason to re-crawl and re-index your older blog posts and articles.

This way you don’t have to create new content each time you want to drive traffic from social networking websites. Simply update your existing content and repost the links.

It also helps you refine your content. Frankly, we’re are constantly learning and evolving. I’m pretty sure I write better than what I used to write a year ago (although I feel my fiction writing has deteriorated considerably) and if you feel you could have done a better job with that post you wrote on providing better content writing and blogging services, you can try again and sound more convincing.

How to get new blogging ideas regularly

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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

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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.

Good content establishes your authority

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Why so much hype about publishing good content on your website or blog on a regular basis? On the basic level there are two reasons: search engines prefer websites and blogs that have fresh content, and social networking guys and girls always have something to promote or retweet. So your content constantly generates new traffic and keeps the buzz going.

On a more advanced level, people begin to respect you (not as an elder but as a person who knows things and shares them confidently), and when they respect you they don’t fear doing business with you. When you constantly publish content people can derive knowledge from, they begin to see you as an authority. Interestingly, I’ve observed this on the Internet and also in my day-to-day life, given a chance people like to listen to those with authority and they like to read what they’ve written. But does only publishing good content make you an authority?

Not necessarily. Good content must be followed by regularity and relationships. Occasional sparks don’t bind people to your ideas. They have a low attention span on the Internet because so much is happening here. Written a great blog post? Cool! How are you going to make people read it if you haven’t created an audience for yourself? An audience is often created a few persons at a time. You create valuable content on a regular basis, you start interacting on other blogs, online forums and social networking websites and people start visiting your website or blog. If they see something remarkable there, they make an effort to return and check out what new you have published. Even after 15 days if they don’t find new content they assume you publish occasionally, and soon they lose interest, and you start all over again, and the loop goes on and on.

On the other hand if you publish valuable content regularly, they become used to visiting your website; they may even subscribe to your RSS feeds or newsletter, and start following you on Twitter and Facebook to keep up with what you have to say. Sometimes they may also link to you from their websites and blog posts, or promote your links on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon etc. This creates a cascading effect. More and more people become aware of your thoughts and ideas and they want to interact with you. When they interact with you you get a platform to share more of your knowledge. This is how you establish your authority.

How to use your business blog content to promote your business

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The greatest benefit of your business blog is that it increases repeat traffic to your website — that’s why I advise my clients to host their business blogs under their main domain rather than using a separate, dedicated domain (even if the dedicated domain contains their keywords). If you regularly update your business blog with useful and relevant content you automatically cover the keywords you require to get targeted traffic from major search engines.

The key to turning your casual visitors into loyal customers and clients is, make them familiar with you, your product or service, and provide them all the information they require in order to want to do business with you, and you can easily achieve this through your blog. Although there is nothing particularly wrong or offensive if you occasionally publish your marketing or promotional messages on your blog (after all it’s a business blog), restrict them to one or two in a month. Don’t also make it highly personal unless people have become familiar with you and respect your knowledge and play close attention to your thoughts.

The basic purpose of your business blog content is to inform your visitors what you can do, convey to them how much you know about the product or service you are offering, and create a comfort level. Your business blog also creates opportunities for you on social media websites. If you want people from these websites (Twitter, FaceBook, Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit…) to visit your website on a regular basis, you can’t just go on posting the same old links again and again; your followers and friends will grow tired of them and start ignoring if in the interesting stuff you may post occasionally. Post something fresh on your blog regularly, and then promote those new links using social media and social networking websites.

Engaging business blog content also encourages conversation and herein lies the true power of your content. If people talk about what you publish on your blog and share your links with each other, your business blog has crossed a major milestone. After this you simply have to maintain the momentum and keep feeding them with new thoughts. That’s the human side.

On the search engine side, maintain a certain frequency so that the search engine crawlers know when your blog should be crawled and new content indexed. I’ve personally observed that your website or blog gets crawled and indexed depending upon your frequency. When I publish on a particular blog multiple times a day for a couple of weeks the blog posts begin to appear in search engine results within 40-50 minutes of posting.

Quality business blog content encourages other bloggers, social bookmarkers and online publishers to link to your blog if they find something worth linking to. This doesn’t happen the moment you start publishing your business blog; it takes time because you need a certain level of presence for topics concerning your field. People in the first place should know that they can find good, reliable content on your blog if they want to link to it. If they are looking on the search engines they should be able to find your relevant blog posts for the related search terms. If they are sifting through social media and networking websites then your links should be present under appropriate categories.

Maintaining a business blog and generating quality content for it on an ongoing basis of course takes up lots of time. But when you see the results, it’s worth the effort.