Tag 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.

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.

11 essential ingredients for creating great blog posts

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The objective of every blog post that you write and publish should be to get maximum exposure from your targeted audience, and not just exposure, but also sharing love. Maximum number of people should share your blog post link using their social networking and social media profiles.

There are some key performance indicators (KPI’s) that help you decide whether a blog post that you have published is successful or not. It’s not necessary that you fret over every blog post because there are some blog posts that you publish simply for the heck of the pleasure that you derive out of the process and the sort of interaction you have with your visitors, but if you’re publishing a business blog, then it’s very important that you know exactly what you’re doing on your blog and how you define success. A blog post would be successful if

It creates enough buzz to attract new customers and clients to your website
It makes more people click ads if that’s how you make money off your blog
More people subscribe to your newsletter if that was the intention
It helps you get more search engine traffic for your targeted keywords
It increases your longtail keyword traffic
It gets greater attention on social media and social networking resulting in the outcomes mentioned above

There are some fundamental ingredients that you can use in order to make your blog post successful. 11 such essential ingredients are published in this Copyblogger blog post in the form of an infographic, but below is the bulleted compilation of these ingredients:

Create a killer headline that draws people from search engines and other websites to your website. Your headline should present to your audience the central message of your blog post in a most compelling and attractive manner.
Make a great opening. Your headline should be followed by an impressive opening that prompts people to read further. Otherwise all the advantage gained by the headline will be lost.
Use persuasive words. Such words not just give an adrenaline rush they also instil a sense of purpose in the process of writing as well as reading.
Be authentic. It will help you stand out.
Take every sentence seriously. Write good sentences.
Use bullet points to highlight main points of your blog post.
Divide your blog post under various subheadings giving a clear idea of what awaits.
Use the art of storytelling to keep your readers hooked.
Don’t reveal all your cards at the same time. Withhold your information and keep revealing small bits every couple of paragraphs.
Use attractive images to give more meaning to your blog posts.
Make a convincing conclusion so that people are not left clueless.

Why it makes sense to publish your own blog even in the times of social networking

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Recently, as you may all know by now, Google decided to shut down its RSS feeds management service Google Reader. For more information you can read Want to save as many RSS subscribers as possible? Before that it also closed down Google Wave which was a rage when it was launched (I remember people were running over each other in order to get an invite). And not just Google, you can find many instances where services closed down because either they didn’t have a revenue model or the couldn’t figure out how to make money out of them.

There are many who claim that since the arrival of social networking and various social media channels blogging is becoming obsolete. Though it is true that fewer and fewer people are blogging, now that they can broadcast their thoughts using Twitter and Facebook, blogging is far from becoming obsolete. But then this post is not about whether blogging is dying or not, it is about why you shouldn’t put all your marketing eggs in the basket of third-party websites and channels.

If you seriously produce content for these services you run the risk of losing all of it, or having to move it to another service in case the present service closes down. Yes, it can also happen with Facebook and Twitter although there is less chance because these services have matured enough and evolved into full-fledged businesses just like Google.com (not one of its services, but the main company).

There has been this trend among many people to write intensive articles and opinion posts and then publish them on services like Google Plus, Tumblr, Quora and other such places. There is nothing wrong in participating in conversations and discussions and writing detailed pieces for that, but if you are putting your entire articles and blog posts on these websites, you are benefiting them more than yourself.

Benefits of publishing content on your own blog

Your blog is a platform. Just imagine, if all the effort you have been making producing content for other websites had been made for your own blog you would have had a vibrant platform by now from where you could have not only spread your ideas extremely fast but could have also promoted your business in front of a loyal audience. Content, especially unique, well-written content, is an invaluable asset and it doesn’t make sense to build this asset on another platform.

Targeted content also improves your search engine rankings organically. It makes your website immune to the various algorithmic updates Google keeps on rolling out one after another, decimating business after business. Valuable content on your own blog encourages other people to link directly to your blog or website rather than to your Facebook or Google Plus posts.

Unlike on Google Plus and Facebook, content on your blog has a longer shelf life. Timelines on social networking websites move extremely fast and no matter how valuable information you have shared, if your target audience at that time is not online and on one of these social networking websites, they will miss your message.

The message on your blog on the other hand is always there. You can share the link again and again from your social networking profiles. It appears in your RSS feeds. You can share it with your e-mail subscribers. It is always there.

Do you think it is easier to share content on social networking websites rather than on your own blog? Not at all. Even a very simple blogging tool these days comes with highly evolved publishing features. Aside from text, you can easily post audio and video clips, create image slides and embed all sorts of stuff.

It’s also a misconception that a blog post needs to be more than 400 words. Well, ideally it does you good to have longer blog posts, even if you can manage just 100 words, something is better than nothing. Besides, you can always come back and add more thoughts later on.