10 Tactics to Increase Blog Post Frequency Painlessly
Blogging consistently on a regular schedule is one of the biggest problems that derail both newbie and experienced bloggers.
It’s easy to blog regularly when your blog is new and you’re full of zeal, but once you need to spend your time on more income generation related activities, your blog may experience periods of neglect when you don’t post for days or weeks (or okay admit it months). You get the picture.
The reality is that posting at least two to three times per week yields most of the effectiveness of blogging every day, based on research by Dan Zarrella of Hubspot. Further, at least fifty posts are needed before the impact of search kicks in. (Here’s the complete analysis of this blog research with the related charts.)
For many bloggers (as well as other content creators and writers) churning out blog posts regularly may seem like a daunting task. Producing high quality content that an audience consistently seeks out or puts in their reading folder to consume when they have time takes practice. You can’t just sit down at your desk or device and hope to turn out eloquent prose consistently without doing very much.
That said, you can facilitate content creation by reducing the effort and time you spend developing each blog post. Here are ten tactics to help you blog more often without working harder.
- Remove roadblocks to blogging. This encompasses real and emotional barriers that are holding you back from blogging. Take some time and figure out what’s preventing you from blogging regularly. Seriously consider whether you really want to blog and achieve specific goals as a result.
- Schedule time to blog. If blogging isn’t part of someone’s job or regular routine, it won’t get done. Therefore, determine how long it takes you to write an average blog post and add a cushion of time. For example if it takes you an hour to write a post, then add twenty minutes. Then block out this amount of time on a consistent basis. If you can’t find this much time then consider where you can make trade-offs such as giving up an hour of television, using your lunch hour, or getting up an hour early.
- Brainstorm regular, recurring topics. Plan three to five major columns or themes around which you’ll post content on a regular basis for a two-week period so that it’s manageable. This is detailed in “The Cliff Notes Approach to an Editorial Calendar”. (Mack Collier refers to this as “Topic Buckets.”) This focuses you on the type of articles you’ll write. BTW—Here’s how to blog when your heart isn’t in it and you don’t know what to write.
- Collect blog post ideas. Never sit down at a blank screen without an idea about what to write. It’s a surefire way to waste time. You’ll wind up jumping from topic to topic without making any progress. To prevent this, collect post ideas when you have them. You can’t leave this to chance hoping you’ll remember what you were thinking. Further, you need a process to capture ideas for future use. Use a piece of paper or a word document titled blog post ideas. Alternatively use software like Evernote or a nice moleskin notebook. Don’t waste time deciding how to capture the ideas, just do it.
- Outline blog posts before you sit down to write. Until I started blogging regularly, I never outlined my writing. But the need to produce consistent quality content taught me the benefits of outlining. Don’t feel constrained to outline the way Miss Casey taught you in seventh grade. Instead make it work for your purposes. For example, I put together a working title, an introduction and the main points before I start to blog.
- Batch post writing when possible. Some prominent bloggers can dash off a week’s worth of posts in a morning spent at a local coffee shop. They find it’s easier to focus on writing for a single, long period of time. I’m not one of them. Try this approach and use it if it works for you.
- Chop blog posts in half. This is the two-blog-posts-are-better-than-one option. Once you start blogging or outlining a post and realize you’ve got more information than can comfortably fit in one post, turn it into another related post. Use the second post a week or two later to offer readers a mix of content topics. In my experience, multiple individual posts on the same topic do better than a series.
- Get help creating blog content. Understand that you don’t need to create all of your blog content alone. You can get support, even if you’re a solopreneur or individual blogger. Think in terms of crowdsourcing content, doing interviews, and accepting guest blog posts. (BTW—we don’t accept guest posts.)
- Recycle content you’ve created for other digital venues. When you’re developing other forms of content, consider how you can use it as the basis for a special blog post. You can imbed videos or powerpoint presentations into your blog. Alternatively, you can leverage your other content work on your blog. Just remember that you must go beyond pushing your own content. (Here’s 56 ways to reuse content.)
- Think content snacking applied to content creation. While content snacking tends to refer to consumption of completed content, it can pertain to content creation. This is where you use small bits of time to outline posts, create by writing small segments of posts, or to edit your posts. I find that I can edit posts on public transportation or between appointments.
You can increase your blog post frequency by following these tactics and building the habit of collecting post ideas and shaping posts before you start to put words on paper. The idea is to let your subconscious help you by thinking through your approach before you start.
What other recommendations can you add to increase blog posting?
Happy Marketing,
Heidi Cohen
Please join me — I’ll be speaking about blogging at:
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