Many business owners, marketing directors, CEOs, etc. are dismayed when they find out they need to do regular blog writing. Before they hire us, many of our clients have had a blog for a while but they only blog a couple of times a month, maybe less. When we tell them they’ll have MUCH better search results if they blog a couple times a week, or more, they often say, “I don’t have time to blog, I’m running a business.”
It’s true, blog writing takes time, particularly when you’re working on “finding your voice.” You’ll forget to blog, throw today’s scheduled blog post over for something you’d rather do, put it off until next week, or make any number of excuses not to blog today. One of the great advantages of blogging regularly and frequently is that writing becomes so much easier. When it’s a habit, it’s just a matter of course to write 400 to 600 words.
But what happens when you’ve been blogging regularly and then all of a sudden you don’t? The blogosphere doesn’t care how good your reason is for not blogging, it just wants to see fresh content. It doesn’t matter if you’re in the hospital in a coma; if they don’t get valuable content from you, they’ll go somewhere else for it.
Here’s what happened to us:
We’ve been blog writing regularly for nearly 2 years. Our goal is to blog 5 times a week. Frankly, most weeks we don’t quite hit our goal, but we come pretty darn close most of the time.
However, this last April, we went for almost 2 weeks without a single blog post. No big deal, just jump back on the bandwagon and pick up where you left off, right? Well, not exactly. Yes, we did start blogging again the next week and we’ve blogged at least 3 times a week ever since. But something happened to our numbers.
We had been running almost 400 visitors a week from organic search from the beginning of the year to mid-April. Since then we’ve averaged less than 250 visitors a week from organic search – that’s less than 60% of our former traffic. And it has continued for 15 weeks. That’s 2,250 total lost visitors. (Note: at the same time, Google’s search algorithm changed, which also could have contributed to less visits. But that’s a story for another day…)
There are times when we simply don’t have the time or the will to be blogging so regularly. It’s easy for us to say, “Don’t stop, no matter what!” but the truth is, that won’t keep us going when the going gets tough.
Useful Blogging Hacks
So here’s a little tip for the times when we’re tired, overworked, or otherwise occupied: Find a great news article or blog article in your industry and reblog it. Write a short introductory paragraph, citing the main points of the article and where it came from, and then paste a section or the whole thing in there. Just make sure you link to the original article and include a nice, relevant call-to-action at the bottom.
Another hack is to take an excerpt from an ebook or whitepaper you have. Usually the first or second page is best because it introduces the content and what the person can get from it, without giving away too much. Again, make sure to write an introduction that includes the title of the offer.
This isn’t recommended for many articles in a row, or to do on a regular basis, but finding hacks like this can help you continuously pump out new content even when you’re uninspired or busy. So what are you waiting for? Get writing!
