“Yikes!” “I don’t have enough time.” or “I don’t know what I will write about!” is what I often hear when people talk about trying to blog on a regular basis. There’s no question about it – blogging takes time. If you’re an entrepreneur or small business owner with a daily to-do list as long as your arm, you may feel like you don’t have the time to update your blog. However, it might be your day’s most important task, so don’t skip it. Here are some tips for taking the blogging weight off your shoulders and making blogging what it should be – fun, energizing, and creative.
Find Your Best Time to Write Your Blog Posts
Everybody has certain times of the day when they feel more inspired than others. For example, you might have your best ideas in the mornings just after you wake up. Set aside some time each day during these periods for working on blog posts. Make it part of your schedule and it will become a habitand ideas will flow and when they do, write away.
Your blog is often the first thing new readers, new prospects, and new clients see of you and your online business and first impressions count. That means you need a well-designed and layout blog, great content, and pictures that draw you in and enhance your content. In other words, yes, your posts need images.
It doesn’t stop there. You want to keep encouraging your readers to come back and read more of your posts. Before that can happen, you need to catch their attention and draw them back in. It takes a while to build a loyal following of readers who will devour anything you write. Images will help draw them in again and again. In other words, yes, your posts need images.
We live in a very social and internet based world. One way to broaden your reach and grow the traffic to your blog is social media. Guess what captures attention on sites like Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter. That’s right, it’s images. The images make people click through to read your blog post.
Getting Images
You have two options when it comes to getting images for your blog post. You can use your own pictures, or you can buy photos to use. Your best option for purchasing images is a stock photography site like Istockphoto.com, Depositphoto.com and Pixabay.com to name a few. You can find both free and paid stock photo sites. Get your images and move on to the next step.
Formatting Images
How you format and size your pictures will depend on a few different things. The first is where and how you are displaying them in your blog post. Next, keep the different social media sites where you’re active in mind. Different sites prefer or convert better with different images sizes. Do a little research and come up with an image for each of your most important social media sites.
Images and SEO
Last but not least, let’s not forget about SEO. The file name and the alt tag are both used to determine what the page (or post) the image is found on is about. Use this to your advantage by including your keywords.
There you have it. Start using images in your posts regularly. Play around with style and things like adding text and titles to your images until you find a winning combination for you, your blog, and your audience.
Once you build a bit of a following with your blog, you will start to get questions and comments via email from your readers. Or you may find yourself chatting with a friend or colleague about a topic, again via email. Take a look at your inbox and more importantly your sent folder right now. Chances are you’re doing a good bit of writing on a regular basis and much of it applies to your target audience.
Reach a larger audience
Isn’t it a shame that many of these emails only go out to one person? Which means only one person potentially reads them?
And what about the emails you send out to your list? Yes, they get seen by many more, but once you’ve sent them, they are gone and a few days later no one will look at them again.
There is an easy little content recycle strategy that will turn those emails into evergreen content for your blog. The basic idea is simple. Anytime you write an email, be it a reply to one person, or an email you send to your list, ask yourself, “Can this content be repurposed into a blog post?”
Recycling One-on-One Emails
An easy way to recycle one-on-one emails where appropriate is to introduce the topic, share the email conversation, followed by your comment where applicable.
For example, you may share how the conversation started or that you received a question from a reader in response to another post on your site. Then you would share the email they sent you (anonymously unless you’ve gotten permission to share their name) along with your reply.
From there you can elaborate a bit, or give more general advice if it was very specific. This is a quick and easy post since you did most of the writing when you replied to the email.
Recycling Email Messages and A/R Messages to Your List
Paste the entire email message into drafts and edit away. Maybe you can expand on an idea or tip, or maybe all you need to do is change a few words so it reads more like a blog post than an email. Use the formatting tips we talked about a few days ago (here is the blog on formatting tips) and you’re good to go.
Anytime you don’t feel like writing much, or don’t know what to blog about, dig through your emails. I’m sure you’ll find something you can use. I look forward to hearing from you.
Coming up with fresh content ideas for your blog isn’t always easy. Today I have a great new content tip for you and the best part is that some of your post is already written. It’s a bit like getting to skip ahead in line. Perfect for those busy days when your calendar is full but you want to get a blog post published.
Got Questions?
Keep an eye out for questions in comments. Save them, horde them, and when you need a quick post, take that question – copy and paste it into your blog and answer it. That was easy, wasn’t it?
Of course you want to answer your readers right away when you see the comment come up. Go ahead and do that. But keep a mental tab on this question and ask yourself this:
Will other people have the same question? (99% of the time the answer will be yes)
Is there more I can share on the topic?
If you answer yes to both questions (and most likely you will), then the commenter question qualifies for a follow up blog post. And that’s exactly what it is; a follow up to the original comment question and your answer.
Answer those questions
Start by introducing the topic or question. Share the question and then let your readers know that you wanted to give a more detailed answer, thus the new blog post. Share the answer you gave the reader in the original comment and elaborate as you see fit. That’s it. A quick and easy blog post and for a portion all you had to do was copy and paste.
Format it, add a graphic and you’re ready to hit publish. Rinse and repeat with other questions as they pop up in your comments. Readers love these types of posts because they often had the exact same question, but they were too shy to ask.
Your Personal FAQ section
If you find yourself with quite a few questions, you may even want to make this a new featured category on your blog. It will quickly become a valuable resource to your readers. You can even answer them all at once (in different blog posts) and schedule them to be published on a certain day. If you are consistent with this, your readers will know look forward to reading the answers. You can also do this as a video if you would like just to give people a more personal connection to you as you are answering their questions.
It will save you time in the long run. By being thorough in your answer, it will not only apply to this exact question, but a multitude of related questions. When they pop up in comments, all you have to do is reply with a link to the post. You have created your own personal FAQ section for your blog.
Wasn’t that easy? So, do you have any questions for me today?
I have a quick tip for you today that will come in handy as you’re working on getting ahead on your blogging. It’s using the draft feature. Yes, it’s handy that WordPress and most other blogging platforms have a way to save your posts as drafts so you can continue to work on it over the course of a few days. It’s even better that they usually auto-save for you – at least it is in my case. But there’s another great way to use the draft feature.
You can use drafts to get ahead of the blogging game in several different ways. Let’s start with the most obvious one.
Use Drafts to Work on Your Next Blog Post (or Two)
The most obvious way to use drafts is of course to work on your current blog post until it is ready to publish. But don’t just stop there. If you know you have a busy day tomorrow or later on in the week, go ahead and give yourself a head start by creating a draft and working on it here and there as you can fit it in your busy day. You’ll be glad you did when it comes time to wrap up that particular post.
Use Drafts to Plan Out Your Week
You can also use drafts to plan out your blogging for the week. Let’s say you want to post 5 times per week. Come up with 5 topics and create a draft for each. Then start working on them, making sure you wrap up and publish at least one of the posts on each of your publishing days.
Not only will this keep you on track and show you at a glance what you’ll be blogging about this week, it also allows you to work on multiple posts throughout the week, giving you options when you get stuck on writing one post.
Use Drafts as A Way of Storing Blog Post Ideas
Let’s wrap this up with my favorite way to use the drafts feature. And that’s to use it as storage container for ideas for future blog posts. Here’s how to do it. When you get an idea for a blog post, go ahead and create a draft. Come up with a working title and make a quick note of what your blog post will be about. If you’re feeling ambitious, go ahead and write a quick outline for the post. Then save it as a draft.
Do this anytime you come up with an idea and save them for later. Then whenever you need something to blog about, browse through your drafts and pick one of these. The idea is there and you may even have done some of the writing already. These drafts make for fast blog posts and are just the thing when you’re suffering from writer’s block.
Writing an article without an outline is like cooking a pasta dinner without a recipe. Now you may have an end in mind for each; an amazing article that will gain you credibility and expert status and a mouth-watering pasta supper that will have your family raving about your cooking prowess for days to come.
Let’s cook some pasta
You have an idea of what you want to create; an amazing dinner that your family will thoroughly enjoy and give your flowing compliments. You think to yourself, “I know how to cook pasta, let’s just get started.” I don’t need to look at the recipe. You don’t take a look at the recipe or gather all the ingredients but instead just jump in to cooking the noodles.
The same thing applies when writing an article without an outline. You think you know the material very well and you just go for it and write. As you go through the writing process, however, you may forget an important element and take much longer than intended to get to the finished product.
The result is a bit bland and not very memorable
Your family is served a meal that they enjoy but it is a bit bland and nothing that will be memorable in the morning. This is what your reader may say about your article if you do not spend the time preparing all the ingredients and bringing all together in an outline. You may end up with an article that, like the pasta dinner, will serve a purpose of nourishing but it will not be remarkable to your intended audience.
You want your reader to enjoy and remember what you write
An article without the preparation of an outline may cause you to miss some key elements that may leave your reader feeling not quite satisfied. Without a clear picture of how all the elements go together, one area of your article may become overcooked while another is not fully simmered so that the full impact of your argument is not felt. Without all the pieces laid out, you may forget an example or a story that will enhance the flavor and thus the experience for your reader.
You can create a memorable experience
You start with an end in mind when you write also; usually to provide information that will make a change in your reader, either through increased knowledge or change in perspective. By taking the time (and it might just be 5 minutes, that is what it took for this article), you pull together your argument, your examples, your subtopics and then your conclusion.
You can order your ideas so that they flow best and then decide what objections your reader might have. You also can see the next step that will help your audience in their growth.
So you see article writing does not have to be hard. If you do your prep, it can actually be quite enjoyable. I invite you to try this today. Decide what you want to write about, create an outline and then write your article from your outline. You will be able to create a masterpiece that will have your audience begging for seconds. And perhaps you will have time to enjoy a glass of wine as well.
