blogging
Information, tips and guidelines for making your blog effective and worth reading
Even small business owners are allowed to take a holiday or some sick leave 🙂 Obviously that can leave a lot of tasks to be prepared for or done in your absence, but I’m just looking at your blog – what happens to your blog when you take some time off work?
Running a blog and developing a readership takes time and effort; ignoring your blog for a while can undo much of that effort. So how can you manage take away from your business without letting your blogging efforts weaken or even waste away?
The following list gives some suggestions – the best approach will depend on your blog of course, and on how long you are taking off, and the best approach may be quite different next time you take a break.
Last week I asked what features do we expect to find in a blog, beside the actual content. So this week I will answer the question 🙂
I think there are many features but using them all creates a cluttered look that can overpower the content so it is worth deciding which features best suit your needs and your readers. However, here are some of the basic features that I think are important and pretty much form the base level of reader expectations:
While perhaps not a basic, some form of subscription notice is also a common and useful tool to offer on your blog – make it easier for people to keep up to date with your blog and you are likely to have more loyal readers. You have various options – a RSS feed, email notifications or a newlsetter susbcription are probably the most common and obvious.
Are any of these features you find more important when visiting a blog? Any that you have chosen not to use on your blog for some reason? Why?
On the assumption you want people to visit and read your blog, it is a good idea to get people to link to it.
Incoming links obviously lets more people see your blog exists and is also good for your SEO (search engine optimisation – in other words, getting search engines to list you high in their results).
I think the single step that is most effective in getting links is quality content – no one will link to your blog if you don’t provide useful or entertaining information. Regular additions to your blog will help bring people back, too, and repeat visitors are more likely to link to you.
Having said that, here are some more specific tips to increasing the number of links to your blog…
It is also important to make your blog and posts appealing so remember the usual things like paragraphs, good spelling and grammar, using pictures as appropriate or for interest, use white space and avoid clutter.
The last tip is to actually ask for other blogs to link to you – but managing that is probably worth a post on its own!
Running a blog to support your business in some way can be a good marketing move although it doesn’t suit every business or every business owner/manager.
Like everything else in business, just because running a blog is a good idea doesn’t mean it is easy to do or doesn’t have issues for the people behind the business.
So what are your biggest hurdles with running a business blog?
Starting a blog may have sounded like a great idea (and it often is!) but is maintaining it harder than you expected? What do you find particularly hard about it?
I think a key to having a useful business blog (personal blogs have different measures of success so it may be very different) is frequent posts. From personal experience, I know the number of people viewing my blog are higher when I post every few days than when I miss a week or so – even when the popular posts at any given time are not the most recent ones.
So here are a few tips from me on building a good business blog that people will keep reading:
If time is a big hurdle in your blog development, consider delegating some of the tasks so it builds momentum without relying on you as much.
If finding things to blog about is causing you worry, set aside an hour or so and brainstorm potential topics. That list can then be used any time you need inspiration.
If you have been blogging for a little while and are worrying about its popularity, think about these points:
Back to my original question though – what do you find hard about maintaining your blog? Let us know and you may just get some solutions to rocket your blog success!
Some time ago I wrote a post about building blogging skills based on a list by Chris Garrett (on a blog that is no longer live unfortunately).
One of his tips was to delegate, and this was picked up in the comments of that post so I thought I’d list some ways delegation can help your blogging:
While it isn’t something to delegate, I would also suggest keeping a notepad or computer document handy to note ideas at any time. Any time you think of something to blog about, write it down so you don’t have to spend time with bloggers block – and you don’t face the frustration of knowing you had the perfect idea yesterday…
How do you ensure you have enough time for blogging?
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