Category Archives: Blog Publishing

Your content strategy requires a blogging schedule

Do you have a blogging calendar or a blogging schedule?

You cannot have a content strategy without publishing a blog. Of course, you can publish content on social media platforms, but if you want your website to remain the focus of the buzz that is created around your content, instead of generating content on third party websites, your time and money are better spent publishing content on your own blog.

Recently I published a blog post Why do most blogs fail and what you can do to avoid that?

One of the reasons why most blogs fail is that the blog publishers don’t have a schedule. They don’t have a calendar.

Why do you need a blogging schedule or a blogging calendar?

To give you a direction and also to help you prepare and write quality blog posts.

Without a blogging schedule you are last. Think of a blog like any other enterprise. To run your business or to run your office, you need a schedule. There is a time for all the employees to come to office. You know that by Wednesday you need to submit a report to the higher-ups. You know that your computers need to be upgraded by the 15^th of the next month.

When you have a calendar, you plan accordingly.

The same goes for your blog. If you don’t have a schedule, if you don’t have a publishing calendar, things go haywire.

A publishing calendar also helps your content writer. He or she can prepare content writing or blog writing according to the priority of your topics. By checking your calendar, you can immediately know that certain blog posts have been published or not.

A content calendar also gives you consistency. Every blog post has a unique purpose to solve. You want to target certain customers with certain blog posts. At the same time, you don’t just want to focus on a single niche.

There are some customers who need to be convinced. There are some customers who need to be educated. There are some customers who need to be informed.

You need different blog posts for these purposes. In your calendar you can assign days that on Mondays, your blog posts will cater to a certain audience, then on Wednesdays, they will target another set of audience, and so on.

The benefits of creating a blogging schedule or a blogging calendar

You can assign different topics to different days of the week.
You can collate all the related information at a single place such as the title, the target audience, the KPIs, the keywords, the images to be used and the people responsible for successful publication.
You can track the topics that have already been published to prevent duplication.
You can track the performance of individual topics in terms of engagement, KPIs and search engine traffic.

How can you prepare a blogging schedule or a blogging calendar?

Creating a blogging schedule or a blogging calendar can be easy or complex depending on what all you want to include in the schedule.

I use Google Calendar. Since I don’t run a multi-author blog, my schedule is quite simple. Sometimes I don’t even schedule – I simply publish whatever comes to my mind.

I use a combination of Google Calendar and Todoist. In the calendar I make entries such as the topic and some research links that I may have come across. This entry automatically appears in my Todoist schedule.

Some blog posts are short, and some blog posts are quite long. Shorter blog post can be completed in an hour and longer ones can take a couple of days. Hence, I schedule drafting and publishing over the stretch of two days, if need be.

I don’t want to mislead you or anything. I don’t have a complex blogging schedule or calendar for myself because, as mentioned above, I go with the flow simply because I write my blog posts by myself. Sometimes I suddenly pick up my phone, write a short blog post on it, and publish it from the phone itself.

But if you’re managing multiple content writers and you are an organization with an elaborate content marketing strategy, then you cannot hope to succeed without having a documented blogging schedule.

Why do most blogs fail and what can you do to avoid that?

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Why do most blogs fail?

This ReadWrite blog post discusses some factors that cause most of the blogs to fail. These factors include

Lack of goals.
Lack of focus.
Unoriginal ideas.
Poor research.
Poor writing.
Irregular updates.
Difficult to discover the blog.
Lack of growth.

Let’s quickly go through these points.

Lack of goals for the blog

What do you want to achieve through your blog? What KPIs have you defined?

By “lack of goals” we don’t mean not knowing what you want to do. If you want to publish a blog to raise ad revenue, then of course you know what you want to achieve.

Similarly, if you want to improve your search engine rankings, even then you know what you want to achieve and what is your goal.

But knowing these alone doesn’t help you much. These are simply outcomes. Higher ad revenue is a byproduct. Higher search engine rankings are a byproduct. What do you actually envisage for your blog?

For example, I want my Credible Content Blog to become one of the known blogs on content writing and copywriting. That is my goal.

I also want to fill my blog with lots of quality content so that other bloggers and publishers have a reason to link to it.

Similarly, what are your blogging goals? Do you want to raise awareness about your technological field? Do you want to establish your authority? Do you want to be recognized as an expert in your field?

These are more definitive goals.

Lack of blogging focus

Every blog succeeds on its niche value.

People want to recognize your blog with a topic or with a field. For example, my Credible Content Blog is known for quality blog posts on content writing and copywriting.

I could have easily gotten mixed up and turned it into a digital marketing blog by publishing posts on search engine marketing, search engine optimization, email marketing, landing page optimization, PPC optimization, Mobile app marketing, and such. After all, I do need lots of topic ideas to update my blog regularly.

But I don’t. I stick to content writing and copywriting, and at the most, content marketing.

Even when I talk about something like email marketing and SEO, it is vis-à-vis content writing.

Unoriginal blogging ideas

If you’re writing about something that everybody is writing about, you don’t offer something original. There is nothing to draw people to your blog. You need to stand out. You need to offer something that is not being offered by other bloggers. Something valuable, yet unique.

Poor research

It is important to do good research if you want to establish yourself as an authority blogger. People respect facts and figures that are verifiable and credible. If you are simply interested in throwing around numbers without verifying them and without linking to original, reputed sources, you lose credibility and people stop visiting your blog.

Poor blog writing

Writing is the backbone of your blog.

Unless you publish a visual blog (that has just images and videos), writing doesn’t matter, but if your blog contains lots of writing then make sure that either you are a great, expressive writer or the content writer that you hire is a proficient writer.

If the sentences are muddled, if the paragraphs are disorderly and if the writer doesn’t take much care about the sort of language he or she uses, visitors begin to get put off and then eventually, they stop visiting your blog.

Disinterest begets disinterest. Apathy attracts apathy.

Irregular updates or intermittent blogging

To publish a successful blog, you need to be regular. There needs to be a pattern. You must have a calendar. If you publish a blog with prolonged intervals, people are either going to lose interest or forget about your blog.

You may like to read: Are you blogging regularly? Here is why you should.

If you don’t publish regularly, it means you are not much interested in your blog. Therefore, if you’re not interested, why should anybody else be?

Difficult to discover your blog

Even if you are publishing great content, even if you are publishing content regularly, if people cannot find your blog, all your effort is going waste.

Simply publishing your blog regularly doesn’t prevent your blog from failing. You need to take measures to bring people to your blog.

Pay close attention to your SEO efforts. Establish a presence on social networking websites where you can share your content. Publish a newsletter to broadcast the latest content that you are publishing. Encourage people to link to your blog.

Blog marketing is an integral part of blog publishing.

Repetitiousness

This means publishing the same old stuff repeatedly. Many bloggers do that to improve their search engine rankings. If they think that they publish the same content with little variations, they will cover more keywords.

Your human visitors can obviously make that out because they are smart, but these days, even search engine algorithms can make out that you’re basically publishing the same stuff over and again. Bake fail.

Lack of growth

Growing your blog is a serious business. Take active interest in it. Observe the metrics. Get your blog hooked onto Google Search Console and Google Analytics. Observe the sort of traffic you are attracting and take note of anomalies.

If you think that your blog isn’t getting enough traffic, get to the drawing board again. What are you doing wrong? What sort of content are your publishing and what sort of content you should be publishing? This is an ongoing exercise.

How do you define success and failure of your blog?

I will give you my own example.

My Credible Content Blog doesn’t attract mega-traffic. If I started publishing advertisements, I would hardly make 1-2 dollars every month.

Still, I have been publishing my blog for many years now. Sometimes I go on a hiatus, but as soon as I observe that my traffic is going down, I increase the publishing frequency.

I’m not interested in advertising revenue. Yes, I want to improve my search engine rankings and whenever I increase my publishing frequency, I succeed in that.

My blog brings me visibility. Of late it has also been attracting lots of backlinks, which has improved my search engine rankings further. I don’t actively monitor my backlinks, but I can make out by the number of pings I’m getting in my dashboard.

So, in the conventional sense, my blog is not enough successful, and many may even term it as a failure.

But for me it is a successful blog. It helps me maintain my search engine rankings. It attracts paying clients. It generates work for me.

Define what makes your blog successful or a failure. You might be surprised.

Can there be too much content publishing?

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Recently I unfollowed some content publishers who were (of course they were not aware of my annoyance) crowding my timeline and preventing me from seeing updates from other content publishers.

Normally when I tweet something or write an update for LinkedIn, I am either linking to my latest blog post or video, or I have something to share with my followers.

I thought those content publishers are publishing lots of content and hence, they are constantly tweeting about it. That was not the case. Some of the links that they posted were published back in 2016-17.

This is a good practice, in fact. I have nothing against that. I was just wondering that they were publishing lots of content.

This made me wonder further: as a service provider, how much content is too much content for your blog?

Recent studies have shown that on an average a business must publish around 16 blog posts. This Hubspot recommendation says that you should publish 3-4 new blog posts every week. This comes out to be one blog post every alternative day.

But, what about if someone publishes 3-4 blog posts every day?

Some people do it to improve their search engine rankings.

Is it a good thing to do?

I’m neither against it nor for it.

I mean, if I’m constantly publishing content, when do I get time to work on client assignments?

Of course, if I am a multi-employee business and if I have dedicated writers to keep on writing blog posts for my blog, I have no problem with that.

As long as content is of good quality, your search engine rankings definitely improve.

When you publish content multiple times in a day, Google crawls your website/blog multiple times in a day, sometimes, every 10-15 minutes.

This is good. It means your latest content begins to appear in search results quickly.

Is too much content beneficial for your business? Only if you are a publishing platform.

For example, instead of providing content writing and copywriting services, if I am simply publishing educational content on content writing and copywriting, it makes sense to publish as much content as possible.

On the other hand, as a one-person business, publishing lots of content can be counterintuitive.

Maybe in the beginning it makes sense to publish multiple blog posts every day. But once your search engine rankings have improved, you should slow down.

One blog post every day is a perfect way of maintaining your blog, I think.

How to minimize the bounce rate on your blog

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In case you’re wondering what’s bounce rate, it is the percentage of people leaving your blog (or website) after checking just a single link, and that too, within a few seconds.

High bounce rate is bad, low bounce rate is good.

You need to come up with ways to minimize the bounce rate on your blog. A low bounce rate is good for your conversion and your search engine rankings. I will explain how and why.

Initially when I started writing this post, I had intended to simply publish a couple of paragraphs and then link to another blog post from another website that originally seeded the idea in my mind.

But on second glance, that particular blog post is not written to add to the topic and in fact, most of the topics are a regurgitation of unrelated topics. Such blog posts increase the bounce rate.

In fact, I just discovered that I have written this blog post on a similar topic: How to improve your bounce rate with quality content writing.

Why is a low bounce rate important for your blog’s SEO?

As you have read above (or in the blog post I have linked above) your bounce rate is the ratio between the total number of people coming to your blog and the number of people leaving your blog immediately after arriving at the link, without visiting other sections.

Think about it from Google’s perspective.

The search engine user comes across your link for a particular search query, clicks it and comes to your blog.

She feels that the information she is looking for is not present on this link. She so disappointed that she doesn’t even try to check out the other sections of your blog.

She immediately comes back to Google and carries on with the search.

Google doesn’t solely want to depend on its search algorithms because its search engineers know that no matter how advanced the algorithms become, people who want to exploit the logic, sooner or later will.

But people’s response to your content cannot be cloned, and this is why, Google takes into account the response your content gets from its users.

When someone finds your link on Google and clicks it, Google tracks the behavior of the user. Currently your link has a particular ranking, let us say, it is on the fourth position of the second search result page, for a certain keyword or a search query.

The user comes back to Google within seconds and either tries out a different query or clicks other links.

This tells Google that the information she was looking for after using that particular keyword or search query, isn’t present on your link.

If multiple people do the same thing, Google concludes that your link doesn’t deserve its current rankings for that particular keyword or search term and consequently, lowers the rankings of that link.

It’s quite logical actually. If your link is not solving the problem for that particular search query, it doesn’t deserve to rank there.

Now, reverse the situation.

The search engine user uses a particular keyword or a search query and comes across your link on the second page at the fourth position.

She clicks the link and goes through the entire blog post. It takes at least a few minutes to read the blog post.

This tells Google that the content on that link is good enough to make her stay for some time.

She not just reads the content on the link, she also explores other links on your blog.

It tells Google that your blog contains useful information related to the search query used by her.

As a greater number of people show the same behavior, Google improves the rankings of that link for that particular keyword or search query.

Hence, the lower is the bounce rate for that link for the related keyword, the higher go its rankings.

A lower bounce rate is also important for your conversion.

The longer she stays on your blog, the greater is the chance that she may subscribe to your newsletter or check of the commercial section of your website or blog.

How to minimize your blog’s bounce rate?

Very simple. Deliver what you promise.

As explained above, why do people leave your blog immediately?

Because they were misled into visiting your blog.

They saw your title and clicked the link but when they came to your blog post, they realized that it’s not what they were looking for.

If this is not a one-off incident and there are multiple people who think that they have been misled (whether you are doing this intentionally or unintentionally), Google takes it as a high bounce rate and concludes that your link doesn’t deserve its current ranking for the related keyword or search query, and downgrades it.

Here are some steps you can take to minimize your blog’s bounce rate:

Provide specific answers to specific questions

In their pursuit to write long form content I have observed that many blog publishers try to cram as much information as possible in a single blog post.

In such cases, even when you have covered the topic mentioned in the title, it gets buried under extra details. Your readers are unable to find the exact piece of information they are looking for.

Google has tried to solve this problem at its own end: you must have observed that sometimes when you click a link, you are directly taken to the portion that gives you the answer for your query, and this portion is highlighted by a yellow marker.

But even for that to happen, you need to make sure that the answer exists in your blog post in such a manner that Google can locate it.

Long blog posts of 2000-4000 words have their importance, but you don’t always have to write them.

Sometimes you can write shorter blog posts that I trust to a particular question.

This will give you more satisfied visitors.

Write and publish blog posts catering to search intent

Since I have published multiple blog posts explaining search intent, for example, you can visit this blog post for a longer explanation – What is search intent and how knowing it improves your SEO – I won’t explain it again, but knowing the searcher intent of your visitors and then writing content accordingly, can bring down your bounce rate drastically.

In brief, search intent is the intention with which a search engine user uses a query.

She doesn’t always want to purchase from you. Sometimes she is looking for information.

When she finds out that instead of informing her, you are trying to sell something to her, she leaves immediately.

It can also be the opposite.

She wants to purchase something, but you go on and on educating her. She gets confused and leaves immediately.

Therefore, it is vital that you write and publish keeping search intent in mind.

Link to other blog posts from your existing blog post

Linking to other blog posts from your blog also saves you from creating duplicate content.

For example, in the above point, instead of explaining again what is search intent, I have simply hyperlinked to another blog post and if you want to know more about search intent, you can just go to that link.

This way, even if you’re unable to find what you’re looking for in the present blog post, maybe you will find the right information in the hyperlink.

Shorter paragraphs, smaller sentences, and headings

Simply put, make it easier to read your blog post. When people notice long strings of text going on and on, they feel intimidated and leave immediately.

Write in a conversational style. Write shorter sentences. Even if you want to express something complex, leave it for later.

Draw the reader in. Ask the right questions. Drop the right hints. Tantalize. Invoke interest.

If you can write three sentences out of a single, long sentence, do that.

Don’t have more than two sentences in a paragraph.

Organize different subtopics under different headings so that the reader can skim if she wants instead of reading everything, and still make sense of what you are saying.

In conclusion, minimizing your bounce rate or reducing it is crucial for not just improving your search engine rankings but also for improving your conversion rate.

It is not even difficult. Be truthful. Have a conversation with your reader. Sound enthusiastic. Provide short answers for short questions.

You don’t always need to show how much you know.

Sometimes, knowing enough to provide the right answer suffices.

Are you blogging regularly? Here is why you should

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Benefits of regular blogging.

In the beginning blogging started as a hobby movement. Publishing was being democratized on the Internet and many tools came to exist that would allow people to publish their thoughts and opinions without expensive software.

From Blogger.com to Movabletype to Tumblr, and everything in between, I have used practically every blogging platform, before finally settling with WordPress.

My website and my blog these days are powered by WordPress. Anyway, this is a side issue.

Once thousands of people started publishing their blogs regularly, they discovered that Google preferred blog posts over regular company web pages.

It wasn’t surprising. People shared more information through blog posts than through company web pages. The blogging content was more search engine friendly, especially when you used software like WordPress.

Most of the blog posts that you publish using WordPress are search engine optimized. These posts have SEO-friendly URLs. They have titles with the main keywords. People use headings and subheadings to create different sections. Many posts are interconnected through hyperlinks. Through the “Recent Posts” section, almost every post become scrollable.

Search engines like Google found blogs ideal for higher search engine rankings.

Soon the SEO community discovered blogs and started using blog posts to improve search engine rankings and to generate more traffic.

It worked wonders for many businesses. I definitely benefited from blogging. I still do.

Just as it happens with every technology and every trend, once a few people begin to benefit from it, more people want to benefit from it.

When more people benefit from it, they want to find faster ways to benefit from it. They begin to find workarounds. They begin to “exploit” loopholes and capabilities.

The same happens with blogging. These days almost every business website has a blog. Every entrepreneur knows that blogging is an essential part of search engine optimization. You have SEO plug-ins that tell you how to write (I recently uninstalled such plug-ins) to improve your search engine rankings. They tell you how many images are good and how many images are bad or whether you are repeating the keywords enough number of times or not.

Despite the fact that the search engine crawlers these days can crawl and index millions of pieces of content per second, the audience is still limited.

When you search for something, Google tells you that these many links have been found.

Content writing services – number of Google results.

Google is just trying to make you feel good that it has so much information for your queries. Of course, you’re not going to go through all these millions of links. At the most you’re going to check out the first and the second pages of search results.

Google may be crawling and indexing millions of links every day, the way people use this information hasn’t changed much. Most of the people still don’t go beyond the third page.

So, almost everyone is scrambling for the limited space.

This is where people begin to get disenchanted, and they lose confidence in the effectiveness of blogging. Not every blog post can appear on the first page. And that too, when you are competing with millions of blog posts for the same keyword or key phrase.

This is where they commit a mistake.

Don’t publish blog posts just to improve your search engine rankings

If you think that your blog exists only to improve your search engine rankings, you’re going to be in for disappointment.

The search engine benefits of blogging begin to show after some time. And that too if you blog regularly – 3-4 times every week.

Blogging definitely has SEO benefits and if you publish regularly, these benefits begin to manifest in a couple of months (provided you are publishing every day or every alternative day), but don’t just focus on improving your SEO.

The problem with just focusing on SEO is that then it becomes your primary concern. You want every post to rank well and for that, you take “measures” such as using keywords these many times, using the keywords in the title, and so on.

Yes, these things are important, and I strongly advise that you should use keywords in the title and in the copy even when you are not worrying much about your search engine rankings, but then there comes a time when instead of sharing your knowledge, you are constantly trying to improve your search engine rankings.

This becomes self-defeating. The more you try, the more you fail.

Is blogging no longer beneficial?

Blogging is still one of the best ways of improving your search engine rankings, engaging your audience and sharing your knowledge and experience.

Then why do so many people say that blogging is no longer beneficial?

They jumped on the blogging bandwagon just because they thought that blogging would improve their search engine rankings.

They had no intention of actually publishing engaging content to educate and inform and to add value. Their sole purpose was to exploit the platform to fill their websites and blogs with target keywords and key phrases.

The problem with this approach was, there were hundreds of thousands of people publishing blogs with the same attitude and the same approach.

How people search on Google and other search engines never changed. How many pages people were ready to check for the search results before giving up, never changed. The space was as limited as it was before.

The only thing that changed was, Google had more pages to crawl and index. The competition increased. The competitiveness of the keywords increased – it was harder to rank for the same keywords.

The more they tried to trick, the more “workarounds” they found, the smarter the Google ranking algorithm became at weeding out low-quality content.

Since these people mostly run behind razzmatazz, they began to find social media more attractive. They lost interest in blogging because well, running a successful blog is hard work. Rewarding, yet, hard work.

First they declared that email marketing is dead because they spammed the crap out of it – email marketing is still thriving and in fact, is more effective than it was 20 years ago.

Then they declare that blogging is no longer effective.

Blogging is still very much effective for those people who understand what blogs are for.

You need to understand that higher search engine rankings are a byproduct

Your higher search engine rankings are like money. How do you earn money?

Assuming you are not a swindler, or a robber, or a criminal in general (who work for the sole purpose of getting hold of money), you need to earn the money you have.

You are an engineer, and you are paid for your engineering skills. You are a web designer and you are paid for your web design skills. I am a writer, so, I’m paid for my content writing and copywriting skills. Famous performers become celebrities and they are paid for their ability to perform as well as for their celebrity status (which is, branding).

Hence, money doesn’t come to you for the heck of it. You do something else, and the money is a byproduct. Although, your ultimate goal is to earn as much money as possible, money can only come to you when you do something worth paying for. People, organizations, and businesses don’t just give you money because you exist. They give you money because you deliver something, or you satisfy some need.

The same happens with search engine rankings. Your rankings won’t improve because you desperately want to improve your rankings. Your rankings improve because you publish high quality content, content that people find useful. The more relevant your content is, the better search engine rankings you will enjoy. Hence, your search engine rankings are a currency.

This brings me back to the original question that I asked in the title of this blog post: Should you be blogging regularly?

This question was triggered by this Entrepreneur blog post that I came across yesterday: Why blogging should be on your weekly to-do list this year.

Blogging still delivers to those who understand the true essence of blogging – engaging audience by sharing valuable information.

The above Entrepreneur blog covers some important points about why you should be blogging regularly, but I will rewrite them here for my own audience.

Your blog gives reasons to people to visit your website multiple times

Familiarity builds trust. Whereas I definitely get new business queries from people who find my website on Google and have visited for the first time, people who actually end up becoming my clients (pay me for my services) have visited my blog or my website multiple times.

They have received my updates multiple times. They have read a few of my blog posts. They have come across my updates on LinkedIn.

Now, I’m not saying that I never get business from people who have just landed on my website – I definitely do – but most of my business comes from people who have visited my website multiple times.

This is true for almost every business. Nobody becomes your customer or client the first time he or she visits your website. People need some sort of familiarity. A blog that you regularly publish gives them a reason to access your content and consequently, become familiar to you, and then consequently, begin to trust you.

You get a chance to demonstrate your expertise through your blog

How do you convince people that you know your stuff? How do I convince people that I am a content writer who can provide engaging content to them and also help them improve their search engine rankings?

I regularly share my expertise on my blog. When people come to my blog, they know that I have covered practically every topic on content writing, content marketing and copywriting.

Hence, if you are looking for a content writer, do you feel confident working with a content writer about whom you don’t know much, or a content writer you are familiar with because he or she regularly shares his or her expertise through his or her blog?

Your blog gets you backlinks

As you regularly demonstrate your expertise in your field, people begin to respect you. They begin to look at you as an authority figure. After all, you need to have some knowledge to be able to write so much on your blog.

Also, very few people simply want to blow their own horn. They need validation.

Suppose I explain to you a particular method that can improve engagement on your website, I may also like to backup my claim by linking to another experienced content writer or digital marketing expert who says the same thing.

The more you blog, the more content you provide to other bloggers and publishers to link to. This improves your search engine rankings because backlinks are one of the most important requisites for higher search engine rankings. Especially the backlinks you earn through the strength of your content.

Regular blogging helps you build your mailing list

One of the biggest benefits of building a mailing list is that people trust you enough to share their email ID with you and give you access to their inboxes.

It shows they want to keep in touch. In case they are unable to visit your blog or website on their own, they don’t want to miss the great content that you are publishing. Subscribe to your mailing list only when you have something good to say regularly. They won’t be interested in you if you publish once or twice a month.

Regular blog publishing increases your search engine crawling rate

Google is constantly crawling the web to index new content and update existing content. But it needs to optimize its resources. If a website is updated once a month or once in two months, it’s no use sending out crawlers in its direction every day.

Hence, Google keeps track of websites that are published or updated frequently and then sets the crawl rate accordingly.

On one of my own blogs, I have observed that when I updated my blog multiple times in a day, my content was crawled and indexed within minutes. It was like, I published a blog post and then when I searched for it after a couple of minutes, it was there in the search results!

If you publish regularly then Google begins to crawl your website regularly. It means your content is crawled and indexed faster. Otherwise, it may take anywhere between one week or one month before your content begins to appear in search results.

In conclusion, blogging still holds the same benefits that it held a decade ago. It is still good for SEO. It is still good for engagement. It helps you promote yourself as an authority figure. It establishes you as an influencer. But only if you blog for the sake of blogging and not just for the sake of improving your rankings.