The Busy Business Owner’s Guide to Blogging and Leads Online
It’s the place you share your most valuable information, attracting the people who are googling the questions you’re answering, building relationships with your online audience and converting visitors to leads. Even your emails link back to your blog in order to continue driving traffic to your website.
So blogging is important, but how do you manage to blog consistently when it’s so time consuming? If you’ve tried blogging, you know just how much time and energy it takes to plan out a strategy, decide which posts will be geared toward which part of your audience, gather your information, write the thing, have it edited, etc. How did a mere 500 words become so demanding?
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Practical Logistics
The more frequently you publish, the less time you have to write. So start with a manageable publication schedule like one post per month. This gives you to opportunity to remain consistent, which is vital to you relationship with your audience online, while building up a backlog of blogs. This backlog is incredibly helpful because there will be days when you just can’t seem to write anything you like.
With a backlog, you don’t have to stress because taking more time isn’t going to impact the consistency of your posting. For example, if you have two months’ worth of content ready to go, you can take an extra couple of days to write the next blog post and all will be well. As time goes by, build up your frequency and continue to pile up content for your backlog.
Less Isn’t Always More
There’s a lot of advice for how to blog more in less time, which is music to the ears of any business owner pressed for time. But remember that the purpose of your blog isn’t just to throw out a new blog on a regular basis. Your purpose is to help your ideal customers.
In doing so, you build a relationship with your online leads over time that proves you’re the expert they’re going to want to buy from when the time comes. You don’t produce quality content by hurrying through it. The world doesn't need more lists of the top four rules for social media or three great leadership tips you can implement today. These are the headlines that garner the most clicks, and there's nothing wrong with organizing your content in an easy-to-digest format like a list. Just don’t sacrifice quality for quantity.
Instead of spewing out as many words as possible in less time, figure out how you, as a thought leader in your space, can deliver greater value than your competition. Then figure out how to present that value in the most digestible way possible. Most blog posts average 500-800 words, but there’s no rule about length. Your audience is unique and you need to serve them. So take the space you need, be it long or short.
Let the piece dictate how many words it should be. Write as clearly and concisely as possible in order to get your point across. One sign of an amateur writer is that they take seven words to say what could be said in four.
The Discipline of Writing
So how does a busy business owner take the extra time to write quality content? Discipline. This is going to look different for different people. Some writers work best by writing at the same time, for the same amount of time, every single day. Others start at the same time and end whenever they’ve written a certain number of words. These are good systems but, honestly, they don’t work for me.
I fare better if I’m open to ideas when they strike. When an idea comes to mind, I make time to write as soon as possible. I'd rather rearrange my day or take time that evening to write down something I'm excited about than let it wait. I get ten times as much done if I'm excited about an idea and it's fresh in my mind.
The point is, find what works for you and do it. Do it consistently. Get someone to hold you accountable if it will help. And keep thinking of all those online leads you can reach.
This post originally appeared on Inkliss.com
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