A Blog About Blogging

Whether your blog is an added extra on your site or the very foundation of your business, it’s a great tool for driving more traffic, showing off your expertise, and injecting a bit more personality into your site.

Here’s a list of five ways you can blog better (because we all love lists!).

Be consistent

In other words, start as you mean to go on. If you start blogging once a week, your readers will come to expect to read your blog once a week. If they don’t get an insight into your mind along with their morning coffee every Friday, there will be uproar. Or in more realistic terms, the less often you post a blog, the less often people will come looking for it until they eventually get out of the habit and stop dropping by completely.

The solution? Scheduling.

When you get in the mood, write, write, and write some more. Then use your blog’s CMS to schedule your posts over the coming days or weeks. That way, you can write four posts on Monday and have enough material to cover you until Friday, when you can write a few more. When scheduling, you should think about events that will be happening on the days your blogs will be posted (such as public holidays), and write material accordingly.

Be you

Even if a topic has been done to death, you can still put your own spin on it to make some unique content, which both search engines and readers will love. I wonder how many hundreds of times someone has posted a blog about how to blog well? Offer opinions, add images, and show your personality.

Be accessible

And by accessible, I mean easy to read. Be succinct and lay out your content in a way that’s easy to follow. Use bullet points so people can skim, or write lists, like “5 ways you can blog better”. (Told you everybody loves lists.)

Create and curate

Creating new content takes time, not to mention brain power. Though unique content is highly valuable and shows off your talent and expertise, you can throw a bit of content curation into the mix. Put together content from several other sources to make one interesting post, and there you have your new content. It’s kind of like taking a regular cookie recipe and adding some lemon zest to it for a whole new flavour.

The key is to strike a good balance between creating new content and curating existing content. Check YouTube, social media, and other people’s blogs for rich and relevant content. This can also potentially bring you more traffic – a win-win!

Promote, promote, promote

It would be a shame for you to go through all the trouble of writing blog posts daily or weekly with nobody reading them. So take to your favourite social networking sites and tell everyone what you’ve been writing about. Some blogging systems allow you to link your blog to Facebook or Twitter so that any blog post you add is automatically linked to your business’s page.

Another way to promote your blog is to comment on other people’s blogs about similar topics and get involved in the blogging community. You could also put a link to your blog in your email signature, and as with all content, keep search engines and your target audience in mind.