How do I find time for blogging?

It's worth the effort

With regular blog posts, you are continually adding search engine friendly content to your website while showing your clients that you are passionate and your business is thriving and alive. How often have you seen a website with an old blog and wondered if the business still cares about what it does or in fact still operating?

Here are some helpful tips to simplify the planning of your blog:

• Ensure that the person who writes your blog articles has decent spelling and grammar. A simple writing style using plain English is fine, you don't need to be a journalist, your articles must be easy to read. Let your personality show through if you have a particular writing style.
• You don't have to be a "blogger", just write about what you know, be the expert. Keep the subject matter relevant to your website or business, don't try and be too broad. They key is to keep it niche.
• Short articles are best (although some SEO experts may disagree). Keeping them short is better than nothing and will enable you to maintain your blog whereas if you are aiming for long, detailed articles, then it's overwhelming and will probably not happen at all!
• Use paragraphs, headings and bullets to break up the information into manageable chunks of reading. Keep an article to ONE subject each time, this way you will be able to create more short articles rather than agonise over the perfect long article. A few high quality paragraphs definitely justify a blog post, keep it simple.
• Plan your blog posts in advance when you think of them, jot down your ideas somewhere before you forget. Blog subjects might include tips, ideas, experiences, case histories or instructions. I write my articles in advance when I feel inspired and save them as a draft directly in my website editor and then I can simply edit and fine tune the post when I'm ready to launch.
• Write about what customers ask you (eg a FAQ item) and then refer them to your blog link to save you time explaining over and over. This also ensures you are writing about things of interest.
• Don't make your articles too sales orientated, it's OK to mention that you can assist with a product or service perhaps at the end of your article, but don't make it the focus of your blog article. People want free advice !
• Use good quality images to supplement your blog posts if you can, this will make it attention getting, professional and more interesting.
• Encourage people to visit your blog by cross posting them to social media or emails to your customer mailing list (if you use either of these).
• Choose your post frequency and try and stick to it. This may be once a week or once a month,  whatever you can manage. We all get busy and I've been guilty of letting my own blog lay idle at times. Since carrying out the tips above, I have found it do-able to keep my blog reasonably up to date.

It's also OK take the pressure off !

• If you have accepted that your articles will be too sporadic, ask your web designer to remove the date from the articles. This takes the pressure off and gives you the freedom to let your blog lay idle from time to time. Bear in mind this won't look good for newsworthy articles in which the content itself will give away their age.
• Have no time or desire to write? Consider engaging a copywriter to do it for you (we can help you with that!), they can research your given subject choices, ask you some focussed questions and do most of the legwork for you.
• If you have no intention of keeping an updated blog, it is truly best sometimes to remove it altogether and use social media for regular news snippets. Although regular fresh content is important for a website, I believe a blog is not for every business and I will quite often suggest (to the relief of the business owner) that a blog is not the best choice for them.

If you do some form of regular blogging and have a little time to persevere, you could possibly be seen as an expert in your field and the 'go to' resource for all things that you specialise in which can keep your visitors engaged and coming back to your website boosting your Google ranking and ultimately becoming a paid customer.