Marketing Monday: Making Blogging Easier (Author Sites, Part Six)

So you made it through last week’s post To Blog or Not to Blog and ended up on the positive side of the equation. But you may still be a little nervous about the prospect of cranking out several unique blog posts a week… for the rest of your career.

I probably just lost half of my readers who went back to rethink the “not to blog” part of the equation. But it doesn’t have to be painful. Here are a few ideas to help you manage the process.

1. Find your optimal number of blogging days. In general, that’s considered three days a week. (Check out this post from Michael Hyatt.) For you, it may be more or less. It’s better to do high quality posts a couple of days a week than to just throw out quick blog posts that won’t encourage engagement to make a five-day-a-week schedule.

2. Get help. Most of us know dozens of writers in various stages of publication. Ask for guest blogs. Offer to interview them and promote their upcoming releases. You get content for your site, they get extra exposure for their book. Win-win!

3. Choose topics/columns. Rather than relying on the whims of your imagination, choose a different theme for each blogging day of the week and stick with it. You’ll be able to build a readership more quickly, and it will allow you to test what topics resonate most with your reader. Don’t be afraid to switch things up.

4. Batch your blog posts. I find it difficult to keep up with blog posts when I write them one at a time, just in time to post the next day. I now attempt to write a week or two worth of posts on a single day each week, then set them up to post automatically. Experiment with what works best for you. Perhaps you’d rather write a month’s worth of Monday posts in one day.  Or maybe it works better to write the following week’s posts the Friday before. Once you get your rhythm and get ahead of the game, the regular schedule of posting doesn’t feel quite so overwhelming.

5. Curate content. You don’t always have to create an idea from scratch. Pull a particularly relevant post from your blog reader, and reblog it with your thoughts: do you agree or disagree? Many of the most successful blogs send readers elsewhere, knowing they’ll come back to find content hand-selected.

Now it’s your turn. Do you already blog? What tips have you learned for making blogging easier?

Tags: blogging, content curation, marketing

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