I’m going to let you in on a little secret about success, you don’t have to be the best, you just need to be better than most. Now here is the best part, most people don’t even try! This is particularly true in business blogging. According to blogging.org, 40% of businesses do not even have a blog, of those that do 65% of them have not updated their blog in over a year! This means that if you updated your blog once every other month you would be in the top 35% of business blogs. That’s terribly easy!
Before you get too excited about barely blogging and claiming to be one of the best it’s important to remember these stats are based on all industries. Your particular industry may be a little more web savvy with internet marketing. Create a list of your competitors and then analyze their web presence. This is who you will be comparing yourself against when we say you don’t have to be the best, you just need to be better than most (of your competitors).
You may be asking yourself why a business should be blogging in the first place? If you are, check out this post: What Does Blogging Do For Me? Part 2 – Small Business
Since we know it doesn’t take much to out perform most business blogs let’s outline a simple plan:
Generate 24 Blog Titles
This sounds daunting but really it’s quite simple. Check out these helpful methods for generating blog post titles:
3 Ways To Come Up With Blog Post Title Ideas
Using Mind Maps To Generate Blog Post Topics
Or simplify the process even more and use our Blog Title Generator App!
Setup Google Authorship
Google Authorship will help set your blog apart in Google search results. You only have to set it up once and then you are good to go. Here’s how:
How To Add Google Authorship To Your Site
Schedule Time To Write
You can do this any way that works best for you. You can schedule large blocks of time or 15 minutes every day. With 24 blog titles you will be publishing 2 posts a month. You’re encouraged to do more but this will be your required minimum. I would prefer to knock out 2 posts in one day and be done for the rest of the month. Whatever you do, make time to write.
Content Calendar For Blogging Success
Search Engine Optimize Your Posts
Once your post has been written take a minute and optimize your post for search engines. This will have a tremendous impact on your search engine rankings when compared to another blog that completely ignores SEO. This will also help you get the most bang for your buck considering you are only posting twice per month.
Tips For Making Your Blog Post SEO Friendly
6 Free Tools For Doing Keyword Research
Schedule Post Dates in WordPress
If you chose to write your posts before you plan on publishing them schedule the time and date for your post to be published. Most content management systems (like WordPress) will have some method of scheduling the publish date, this will allow you to set it and forget it.
Share Posts on Social Media Sites & Schedule with Hootsuite
Sharing your posts on your social media accounts will help build traffic. If you use a tool like Hootsuite you can schedule your social media posts.
If you’re following along here this means you can take care of writing, publishing and sharing all at once. If it takes you 2 hours to create and schedule each blog post you are only looking at a total of 48 hours for the WHOLE YEAR! An entire years worth of content that will make your business blog better than most in only 48 hours.
Note:
If you are going to blog using the minimum plan, be sure to focus on quality content. If you are only going to post 2 posts a month make sure they are in depth and of high value. Quality content is also far more likely to be shared. For more on writing long-term quality content, check out:
