Tag Archives: Blog Publishing

Why is it difficult to publish a blog regularly?

Why is it difficult to write a blog post regularly

You want to, you need to, publish a blog regularly for multiple reasons.

When you publish a blog regularly, you regularly engage your visitors. You improve your search engine rankings. You get to demonstrate and share your knowledge. Your readers have a reason to come back to your website repeatedly. You have fresh content to share on social media websites and other platforms.

Most of the clients who approach me to write for them regular blog posts are looking to increase their organic traffic. This is the best form of traffic. Once your blog post begins to appear in search results, you don’t pay for every click. It is high quality traffic. It is free after you have recovered the cost of publishing the blog post.

How often should you publish a blog post?

Depends on what you’re trying to achieve. Websites like Hubspot recommend that businesses that publish 2-3 blog posts every week get 13X more traffic than businesses that publish 1-2 blog posts every 15 days. Ideally, you should aim for at least one or two blog posts every week. Again, it depends on what results you seek.

Let’s say you want to improve your search engine rankings in the coming two months. Then, I would recommend you publish a decently long blog post – 1000-1500 words – every day.

I have personally experienced good success by publishing even 400-500 words every day for a couple of months. Rankings improved. Targeted traffic improved. New content got crawled faster.

Why do businesses find it difficult to publish blog posts regularly?

Many reasons. You run out of ideas and topics. You feel demotivated by the lack of success that is hard to come due to competition and millions of web pages and blog posts being added to search engines and social media platforms every day. Writing every day can be a Herculean undertaking.

Some of the biggest challenges faced by individuals and businesses wanting to publish blog posts every day include

Lack of interesting topics.
Not knowing where to start and where to end.
Not enough time due to the core professional obligations (you may be a lawyer, a designer, a programmer or an architect and writing is not your main occupation).
Not having a content calendar or a clearly-defined plan.
Inability to come up with original content.
A sense of boredom – initially you may be full of excitement but as blogging becomes a usual business chore, it tends to become a boring activity.
Not knowing what to prioritize – writing what you love or writing what your core audience finds useful.
Not getting enough traffic – organic traffic doesn’t come in a few days. It may take a couple of months before the traffic begins to trickle.
Finding the perfect niche – if you don’t know your niche you are simply beating around the bush and wasting your time and precious resources, and this further leads to inertia.
The absence of the writer’s discipline – writing is a discipline and only professional writers seem to have it.
Not working with a professional writer – since writing is better done by a professional writer it is better to assign the task of writing a regular blog post to a professional blog writer.

How to make it easier and more profitable to publish a blog regularly?

You have two choices: become a prolific writer yourself or assign the task to someone who himself or herself is a prolific writer, preferably, a professional writer or content writer.

Why is it so?

A professional content writer is a dedicated writer who is everyday writing blog posts for different businesses. For a professional content writer or blog writer, writing is not a chore, it is a professional undertaking, it is a livelihood. Hence, the interest that a professional content writer shows in your blog writing, it may be difficult for you to show.

For your blog to be successful it needs to be relevant, regular and effective. Day after day it must deliver value. Your visitors must have a strong reason to come back to your website and check out your blog.

If your blog is not delivering value, it will fail to draw targeted traffic.

The problem with organic search engine rankings is that everything is interconnected. It is like an old motorbike – you need to keep kicking until the engine cranks up and your bike starts.

Somehow you need to make people come to your blog and enable them to stay there. If you don’t have quality content, people won’t stay and Google has a way of finding that out.

Here is an example:

You find one of my links on Google and come to my website. You don’t stay even for a few seconds. You go back to Google and start checking out other links. What does it tell Google?

It tells the Google algorithm that you didn’t find useful information on my website and consequently, the current rankings that the link enjoys should be degraded for the keyword that you used.

On the other hand, if you stay on my website for 3-4 minutes and you read a major portion of my web page or blog post, it tells Google that my link contains useful information and as a result, my rankings for that keyword for that link further improve.

These attributes for a successful blog can be delivered by a professional content writer or a professional blog writer. A professional content writer delivers

High quality blog posts regularly.
Quality research.
Engaging writing.
Publishing of your blog posts as per your calendar.
Targeted topics.
Search engine optimized content.

5 Tips for Writing Engaging Blog Posts

Leave a reply

5 Tips for Writing Engaging Blog Posts.

Writing an engaging blog post isn’t very easy.

Online readers have really short attention spans. Grabbing their attention, and holding on to it throughout the post is very difficult.

In this post, we are going to be looking at 5 tips that you can keep in mind when writing a blog post to make sure that it is interesting and engaging.

5 Tips for Writing Engaging Blog Posts

1. Do Proper Research

You can’t attract readers if you don’t know what you are talking about.

Take an example.

If someone was to say:

“The world probably has a lot of countries. There may be more than 180 but I’m not sure.”

It would sound horrible. No one would trust it. No one would rely on it and no one would quote it.

On the other hand, if someone was to say:

“The world has 197 countries. From these, 193 are members of the UN.”

It would sound way better. Even if it’s not true, it sounds like it because it’s said with determination and confidence.

And if you want to sound confident and determined, you have to have a proper command on the subject matter. You need to be so learned in your topic that you should be able to state facts and figures related to it without any hesitation.

When you want to write on something, take some time out beforehand and dedicate a session solely to research. Look at reliable articles, research papers and books on your topic.

Always remember to mention statistics and figures, and to link them back to their original source.

2. Focus on Making the Beginning Engaging

In writing, the old adage ‘First impression is the last impression’ holds a very accurate application.

If you manage to create an engaging and interesting introduction, you will be able to hook your readers and get them to read till the end of the post.

This will mean that if you’ve placed any links or sponsored elements in your blog, they will be more likely to appear in front of your readers.

Similarly, you will also increase the chances of your readers to click on any internal links that you may have left in between your content.

Here are some points that you can keep in mind to come up with an engaging introduction:

Discuss the main concept or topic of your content
Don’t dillydally. Get to the point without putting in a lot of fluff
Start with a relatable question
Keep it short and sweet

3. Break Your Content Down in Headings and Sub-Headings

By breaking your content down in headings and sub-headings, you will be able to make it easier to navigate and skip through.

If there is a reader who wants to just read a particular part of your post and not the whole of it, they can easily skip to their desired part and then leave. But, if you don’t add headings and sub-headings, your reader will get annoyed scanning through the content.

Other than that, headings and sub-headings can make your content appear less like a wall of text. And here is something you should know about walls of text.

If someone has written some highly interesting and information content, but without dividing and splitting it properly, it will appear boring to the readers.

But on the other hand, if the content itself is not very informative, but it is properly split up in headings, sub-headings, sections and bullet points, it will look interesting to the readers.

4. Make Sure Your Content is Unique

Plagiarized and copied content is, to be a little dramatic, the bane of reader-engagement. This problem can occur with writers who just take all their information from a single popular source on the internet without diversifying their research.

Plagiarized content, especially if it is taken from a popular source, can stick out to the readers, and it can easily be spotted.

However, there can be a lot of writers who don’t intentionally copy stuff from other sources. But even these types of writers can have trouble with plagiarism by committing it accidentally.

To make sure that there is no plagiarism, of any kind whatsoever, in your content, you should use a plagiarism checker.

Plagiarism checkers usually work by scanning the given text against online sources to see if there are any matches between them. This can help you easily see if there is any accidental duplication in your content from other sources on the internet.

5. Add Visuals and Graphics

There are few things that make written content more engaging than some visuals and graphics.

The logic behind adding visuals and graphics is the same as we discussed in the heading dealing with headings and sub-headings: they stop your content from looking like a giant wall of text.

But, here’s the thing.

While it is commendable and good for your content’s engagement to have images in it, some writers can go a little over-board. They can either start adding images at every other point in the blog post, which can make it impossible to peruse.

Or they can start adding images that have nothing to do with the content at hand.

This sort of excess or irrelevancy in the added visuals can, far from making the content engaging, take away whatever little engagement it may have previously had.

Conclusion

If you are writing for an online audience, you should understand well that your readers will not bother entertaining a dull and boring blog post.

In this post, we looked at some tips and steps that you can follow to make your content look interesting and gripping to your readers.

To sum it up, you should take care to do proper research before sitting down to write your blog post. Having thorough command and knowledge over your subject can make you sound authoritative.

Then, you should work on creating the beginning of the post interesting in order to hook the attention of your readers. You should also break your content up in headings and sub-headings so that it is easier for users to navigate through it.

Uniqueness is also necessary for making your content engaging, so you should be sure to check your final draft for duplication using a plagiarism checker.

And last but not least, you should take care to add visuals and graphics in your content.

What are the 3 main benefits of business blogging?

Leave a reply

3 benefits of business blogging

Blogging has matured. It no longer remains a “trend”. If you visit a serious business website, there is a 90% chance that in the main navigation you will also have a link to their business blog. Most of the serious businesses understand the benefits of business blogging.

Since blogging is no longer a new trend, many people discount business blogging as a marketing tool whose time is over. Nobody wants to read blogs, people say. Everybody is on Instagram.

Is it true that business blogging is no longer useful? The problem is not with blogging; the problem is the lens through which these people view business blogging.

There are some blogs that are extremely popular. Most of the niches have been covered it often seems. Whenever someone thinks of starting a blog, the task seems overwhelming, especially when you don’t want to just publish a blog, but also get decent traffic.

Whereas it may be true for non-business blogs (blogs that are published merely to generate advertising and affiliate revenue), when you regularly publish a blog for your business, it never fails to deliver. This is, provided, you publish regularly, and you choose your topics after due consideration.

If you are having doubts about publishing a business blog, here are the 3 benefits your blog is always going to deliver:

Your business blog improves your SEO

One of the biggest requirements of better search engine rankings is having lots of content under your domain.

The main website can have only a limited number of web pages. In the top navigation, once you have covered everything you want to talk about your business, publishing extra pages will be distracting for your visitors.

This problem is solved by your business blog. There is no end to how much you can publish.

If they have the budget, I always recommend to my clients to publish at least three blog posts every week. There is a reason.

You want Google to quickly crawl your website and index the new content that you have published. Although you can submit your link to Google Search Console for relatively faster crawling and indexing, ultimately it depends on Google with what frequency its crawler crawls your website.

The frequency is decided by the frequency with which you publish new content on your website. If you publish content with greater frequency, Google crawls your website with greater frequency. I have experienced this firsthand.

Once I was publishing a blog four times a day. My new blog posts would get indexed within seconds. Normally, if you don’t publish frequently, it may take anywhere between one week to one month for your content to start appearing, if at all, in the search results.

So, this is one benefit of publishing your business blog – you can increase the frequency of publishing without creating a ridiculously long lineup of web pages. You provide Google with fresh content with greater frequency.

Also, you need to cover all your possible keywords. You cannot cover all your keywords using your main website pages. But this can be achieved with your blog posts.

Here I am assuming that when you decide the topics of your blogs you take your keywords into consideration. You can use both your primary and secondary keywords. You can also use your longtail keywords.

You also give an opportunity to other website and blog publishers to link to your website.

Backlinks, as you must know, are very important for improving your search engine rankings. Backlinks must be voluntary. People should link to your blog or website because of the value your content provides, and not just as a link-exchange exercise.

No matter how informative your main website pages are, people will be reluctant to link to them because after all, they are business pages. In some manner they will be promoting your products and services if they link to your business pages, something people rarely want to do.

But blog posts are informative. They have useful information that can add value to people who link to your content. People readily share and link to blog posts, but they are hesitant when it comes to sharing and linking to your main website pages.

These three attributes are important for your SEO:

The frequency of content publishing (more regular, better for SEO).
The length and the breath of the keywords/topics that you cover.
The greater number of backlinks your useful blog posts generate.

Your business blog engages your visitors

Blog posts are always thought-provoking. They inform your visitors. They educate them. People find them useful. They force people to think. When they have to think a connection is established with you.

If you are reading this blog post and if you have read it so far, it means I have been able to engage you. The topic is of interest to you.

Although if you may have found this link on Google I have been able to push my SEO agenda further, the link is not just helping me improve my SEO, it is also providing you some useful information that you can use to derive benefits from your own business blog.

You may also think, since I know so much about business blogging and since I am able to communicate convincingly, in case you need a content writer for your business blog, why not hire me?

Even if you don’t hire me immediately, assuming I publish my blog regularly and you are able to find it with greater frequency, you will remember me whenever you need a professional content writer or blog writer.

Your business blog enables you to become an industry expert

In terms of becoming an industry expert, your business blog helps you in two ways:

To write high quality content on your blog, you learn and evolve more.
Your visitors began to look at you as an authority figure because you are constantly sharing useful information.

What about people who hire a content writer for publishing blog posts for their business blogs? Even if you are not writing blog posts yourself, working with a content writer is also a great learning experience.

When I am writing blog posts for my clients, I always encourage them to give me as much background information as possible. One, it saves them money, and two, it allows me to deliver exactly what they are looking for.

If I have to research everything, I charge for my time. Since a client already has an expertise, he or she is in a better position to quickly research and give me the needed information.

Additionally, a client never publishes a blog post without thoroughly going through it. This too is a learning experience.

Although I can go on and on with the benefits of business blogging, these are the 3 main benefits of publishing a business blog. The rest of the points that you may find on other blogs are simply the subpoints of these 3 main points.

How to write an email for a guest blogging proposal?

Leave a reply

How to write a guest blogging proposal email?

A typical guest blogging request email reads like this:

Hello and greetings!

I’m a great fan of your blog. Your posts are wonderful and highly useful. Do you accept guest blog posts? Then I would like to contribute. Here are some suggested topics:

At the first glance, there seems to be nothing wrong with this message. That is, if you get such messages once or twice a month and you are eagerly looking for people to write guest blog posts.

But, if you get such requests regularly, it often becomes difficult to reply to messages that have not been specifically written for you. I will explain what happens.

On and average I receive 3-4 messages offering to write guest blog posts for my blog that is, I won’t say very popular, nonetheless, decently popular.

A majority of the messages are not personal. I can immediately make out that they have sent out a mass email without even going through my blog. I normally don’t reply to such messages unless there is a compelling reason.

On the other hand, there are certain messages that are quite direct and targeted. Take for example a message like this:

Hello Amrit

While doing research for a blog that I’m working on I came across your link {the link is mentioned} and I was thinking of writing something that can add value to your blog. If you’re open to the idea, I can send you some topics.

Here are some links to give you an idea of how I write:

{links are mentioned}

Best,

Such a message shows that the person has actually gone through my blog, and even if not the blog, then at least the link he or she is talking about. He or she has got a basic idea of what sort of content I publish.;;;

Obviously, I reply to such messages.

How to write an email when you’re offering to write a guest blog post?

Make it personal. Begin with the name, something like “Hello Amrit”.

Quickly go through a few blog posts on the blog to get an idea of what type of content is published on the blog and how you can add value with your guest blog post.

Then mention it in the email that you have gone through a few blog posts and you have gotten the hang of what sort of content is accepted and published. Accordingly, make some suggestions.

Keep your email conversational. Don’t try to impress because a successful blog publisher receives anywhere between 10-20 (even more) guest blogging proposals. There may be plenty of people trying to impress. Just be original. Just be yourself.

Make sure the topic suggestions that you have made are in sync with the content being published on the blog.

For example, my blog is about content writing, copywriting and sometimes, content marketing & SEO. These are the topics I’m interested in. Not how to sell real estate in Tokyo.

Of course, if you can write on a topic like “How to promote your real estate business in Tokyo through strategic content writing”, this is quite acceptable.

In the case of my blog, one of the main topics (content writing, copywriting, content marketing, and SEO writing) must be there in your guest blog post idea.

Don’t blast off a template message to multiple blog publishers. It is immediately clear that you haven’t even visited the blog you are proposing to write a guest blog for.

How to start blogging right now

Leave a reply

You can start a blog right now.

Blogging has immense benefits. It can improve your search engine rankings. It can build you a platform that can get you customers and clients. It increases your visibility. It helps you establish yourself as an authority in your field.

But why do most of the people find it difficult to start a blog?

What I have found is, most of the people find blogging intimidating in terms of time and cost.

This is because they do not see their blog as a platform that they can use to communicate their thoughts and share their wisdom and knowledge. They see it as a tool that can help them improve their search engine rankings.

Since they are focused on improving their search engine rankings, they get bogged down when they observe other blogs.

Information can empower you, but it can also mentally stunt you.

Don’t try to do what other blogs are doing

Before starting a blog, they visit multiple blogs. They observe how individuals and businesses are publishing their blog. They see that the blogs that do well on search engines and social media are very long, very well written, and well structured.

“Will I be able to achieve such a standard?” they end up thinking.

I mean, before starting a blog on search engine optimization, do you really want to do what Search Engine Land is doing?

Before starting a general interest blog, do you really want to do what Buzzfeed is doing?

Before starting a blog on content marketing or copywriting, right now, in terms of manpower and budget, can you really do what blogs like Copyblogger and Content Marketing Institute are doing?

No.

This is how you can start your blog right now

Complete your WordPress setup (or get it completed by your web designer). Install a basic, functional theme, but from WordPress (because they are search-engine-optimized by default).

Then start publishing small blog posts. You can write just one paragraph? Then just write one paragraph.

A blog post is not a bullet or an arrow that cannot be recalled.

You can always update older blog posts. You can always add new content. You can always add new images and new links. You can add new data as you come by it.

Right now, the main stress should be the building blocks.

Here is what I would do:

Install the blog and do the basic setup including a clean theme.
Come up with a title that genuinely represents what you intend to publish on your blog post. Do not use a confusing title. Create a title in such a manner that it exactly represents what you intend to write, no matter how “average” it seems.
Write it. Publish it.
Submit it to Google Search Console.
Do not worry about how well it is going to do on Google. Not right now.

Do steps 2-5 everyday.

Don’t worry about the length of your blog post. Don’t worry about publishing 1000 words or 800 words or 400 words. Don’t worry about images.

Make sure you have good titles and topics to cover. Then, even if you can write 100 words or 200 words, write them, and publish them. Then make sure that you submit the newly generated link to Google Search Console.

I know. No matter how good your intentions are, ultimately, you want to start a blog because you want to generate organic search engine traffic for your business. There is nothing wrong in that.

But atrophying your effort or postponing the launch of your blog just because you want to cater to certain parameters does not exactly help your cause.

Shorter blog posts may not do well on search engines compared to highly popular blogs in your niche, but they don’t stop search engine crawlers from crawling and indexing your website, which is more important.

Why?

Unless you are publishing 3-4 blog posts every day, if your domain name is new and if Google hasn’t yet indexed it, it may take anywhere between two or three months for Google to even start crawling your content.

So why waste all that time? You may not get higher search engine rankings right now, but at least a pattern will be set.

By the time you are ready to publish bigger blog posts, the crawling and indexing process will start and your more comprehensive content will be found by Google much faster.