The Link Between Publishing Frequency and the Success of Your Blog

According to Dan’s analysis, blogs with a post frequency of less than 1 post per day had less than 50,000 visitors per month and fewer than 150,000 links (don’t choke on that or start feeling too inferior, we are talking about the most popular blogs!) whereas those with a post frequency greater than once per day tended to have visitor numbers closer to 100,000 and over 250,000 links.

Before you race off to crank out a pile of extra blog posts for the week in the hope of seeing website traffic and back links skyrocket, there’s much more to it than the quantity of posts. Clearly many of the blogs analysed are well established and have built up a good volume of content and a loyal following over a period of time. There’s also some evidence that frequent posting can turn subscribers away. 

Darren Rowse of Problogger did a bit of a survey back in 2007 to look at the reasons people unsubscribed from blogs. The number one reason was “too many posts.”  That was closely followed by the number two reason – “infrequent posting.”  So what’s the answer?

One would have to suspect that it comes down to the quality of the posts. Posting to your blog two or three times a day isn’t going to help if the posts you create aren’t useful for visitors or subscribers. If you have sufficient time to create only one really useful post a week, then you’re likely to be better off sticking to that frequency rather than adding five posts that offer your readers little or no information of interest. It almost goes without saying that to keep your content useful for your readers you need to define your target audience and write accordingly.

Of course, if you can turn up your blog writing productivity without losing the quality, then Dan Zarrella’s analysis suggests it’s time to get busy writing more blog content! If you’re time poor you could increase your post frequency by arranging some high quality guest blog posts and/or by paying a writing service to prepare additional blog content for you.

My Blog Guest is an online community of guest blog writers and site owners who are looking for guest bloggers. The benefits for site owners who make use of guest writers include: 

• Free content: you can obtain quality articles for free and post them on your site. In exchange, you must credit the blog writer and offer a link from the post to the blog writer’s site.
• More visitors: you already know that relevant content can result in relevant visitors, and that more content tends to result in more visitors, but there’s more! Guest blog writers often place links from their sites to samples of their work. Some are happy to do a little social media linking to showcase their work, which can mean more visitors for you.
• More links: blog writers linking to their work on your site and announcing it on social media platforms equals more links to your website and you know that’s good!
• Less work: if you find a guest blog writer with expertise or a particular interest in what you do or sell there’s every chance they’ll write a fabulous guest post you’ll be proud to have on your blog. Even if you like to write your own blog posts, having a guest blog writer on standby can be a relief when you are simply too busy to write.

Wondering why guest bloggers don’t work for blog writing services? No doubt some of them do, but many are busy establishing themselves as quality blog writers by building up a list of published articles that give them credibility. Many blog writing services pay writers a very low rate which means that writers can sometimes be better off establishing their own clientele in niche topic areas. Writing guest posts is a great way of advertising their work and it can lead to paid work. If they’re successful, they’ll eventually earn more per post than they could earn working for a blog writing service.

3 Ways to Make the Most of Guest Blog Writers

How you use guest blog writers will depend on the amount of content you need and your attitude towards linking out and crediting someone else for posts on your site. 

• If you’re a small niche business and prefer to write most of your own content, an occasional high quality guest post won’t hurt and it will give you a break!
• If your site is extensive and you order volumes of content from a blog writing service, regular guest posts from a variety of guest blog writers can help reduce your content costs or simply give you additional content for your site.
• If you can’t afford to pay a blog writing service for content and aren’t great at writing your own, guest blog writers can help you build quality site content for free.  

If you’d like to find guest blog writers for your site, make your way to the My Blog Guest website, sign up and put the word out! It’s absolutely free.

A guest blog post is one that has been supplied to a website owner to post on their website, usually in exchange for a link to the post writer’s website. Naturally, website owners that seek out or accept guest posts want the articles to strongly relate to the subject matter of their website. Why do they do it? It’s free content, and if they can get someone else to write an article for their website, it’s one less they have to write themselves! Instead of (or as well as) paying article writers to prepare content, some sites use guest bloggers as a way of getting some excellent content for free.

Guest blogging can help you build back links to your website, network with like minded website owners and bring more of the right visitors to your website. Write enough good quality and relevant guest blog posts and it can boost your presence on the Internet and give you added credibility, on top of those added site visitors.

Now if you want to get out and about guest blogging but you don’t have the time to write, or your writing skills are a bit ordinary, our article writers can write guest posts for you and because we’re ghost writers, you get the credit for the articles we write.

Are you ready to guest blog? Just let us know which site you’ll be submitting your article to and what you’d like the article to be about and our article writers will do the rest!

• Green living and environmental
• Motherhood and parenting
• Fashion, clothing, accessories, costumes
• Healthy living
• Small business
• Pets
• Film and literature
• Travel
• Philosophy & parapsychology

Most of our article writers hold university degrees, have a good deal of work and life experience and have developed a range of particular interests along the way.

Many of our article writers have young children, so parenting and motherhood topics are topics they’ve not only researched but lived through! One writer has a long held and active interest in conservation and the environment, while several have more than a passing interest in the subject.  Another has a health science degree and a particular interest in healthy living.

Several of our article writers have an interest in film and literature and between them they have quite a list of short stories, feature articles and even short films to their names.

As you can imagine, in a group of such well credentialed article writers, many have read widely on philosophy and parapsychology and love nothing more than to put pen to paper on those subjects! Most article writers are women, so give them an article writing task on fashion, food, lifestyle, budgeting, household finances or relationships and they have no shortage of ideas and information at their disposal!

Another of our article writers travels extensively and has naturally developed experience in travel writing over the years. Others have been involved in small business. Being writers, many have worked in public relations related areas or written professionally for some time.

Our article writers might be vastly different individuals but they all have one thing in common – they’ve all reached a stage in life where they want to enjoy life more and earn a living doing something they are passionate about: writing! If you’d like one of our fabulous article writers writing your articles, why not find out if we have a writer who loves working on your topics?

Writing services are springing up everywhere. There are article and blog writing services, tender writing services, letter and report writing and resume services. The demand for good freelance writers has never been higher and it’s likely to intensify in the coming years.

Why has there been such a turnaround? Several factors have brought about this delightful situation for freelance writers.

The Internet

With the arrival of the Internet came the company website and the need for content. Of course, not understanding the need for SEO many businesses initially wrote their own content (and many still attempt it) but it wasn’t long before specialist website content writers and content writing services began to emerge.

Then the ‘blog’ was born. Initially a format for personal online journals, blogging was quickly taken up by smart business owners as a means of adding content to their website and marketing their business. Article directories began to appear and became a marketing and SEO tool. Soon enough, there was paid work for article and blog writers as many business website owners weren’t able to write the content they needed. Article and blog writing services quickly emerged.

In order to get content the content they needed some article sites began offering a revenue share arrangement to contributing writers while others offered freelance writers a new avenue through which they could sell their articles.

As the Internet became a more competitive environment it became harder for businesses to get noticed. To compete, you had to have content and the more you had the better. The only problem was that by that stage of the game, there was no longer a plentiful supply of people who could write well.

The Decline of Writing Skills

Whether you blame it on a lax education system, the emergence of computer games, email, the Internet, text messaging or all of those things combined, there’s little doubt that the average person’s writing skills aren’t what they used to be.

The once popular pastime of reading began to lose ground to television decades ago but with advances in technology, it lost even more to computer games and the Internet. Reading tends to inspire writing, so it’s only logical that with less people interested in reading, fewer people would be inspired to write.

Written communication took a big hit with emails quickly replacing personal letters and even many business communications. Text messaging arrived on the scene and in no time at all people became used to writing short, sharp communications often containing abbreviations as they sent emails, posted comments on blogs and forums, and hammered out quick text messages.

It’s possibly no great surprise that writing skills have declined so much and so quickly. Nobody is getting much practice! And if recent reports of students outsourcing essays and assignments to India are true (and with so many essay writing services around, we have to assume they are) things aren’t going to improve any time soon.

Of course, existing freelance writers are ‘LOL’ at this point and they’ll soon be laughing even louder.

Why Writers Are Laughing

While a general decline in writing skills is really no laughing matter, skilled writers will have trouble not laughing in a society where demand for and value of their skills are rapidly increasing.

More and more individuals are setting up online businesses, taking up the opportunities the Internet offers to work from home running e-stores, Adsense websites, and other businesses that generate semi-passive income. Even businesses that are predominantly land based usually find it necessary to have a ‘web presence’ so they too require web content, along with a variety of other written material which is becoming ever more difficult to produce in-house. Site and business owners capable of writing themselves are often too busy to do it and need to hire freelance writers or outsource to writing services. More content, article and blog writing services are likely to emerge as a result.

It seem highly likely that the demand for writers will continue to rise while writing skills continue to decline – and that’s a promising equation for freelance writers and writing services!

How People Find Blog Content

Search engines are always ‘crawling’ the web in search of fresh content. When they find it they determine what it is about then index it under related search terms (also called keywords). That activity gives search engines the ability to present you with a list of pages on the topic you’re looking for when you search the web. The suggested pages are ones that, after the spider’s analysis of the words on the page, appear to relate to the topic of your interest.

Let’s say you’re searching for ‘blog writer’ or ‘business blog’. Pages that have been indexed under those terms because they appear to strongly relate to those topics will appear first in the search results that are displayed for you. The more relevant the search engines believe a page is, the higher up in the results it will be displayed.

How to Unleash the Power of Your Business Blog

If you had the assistance of a search engine optimization expert and a content writer when you created your main website pages, your pages probably include highly relevant keywords that help to make your website visible to searchers. But there are many more keywords and phrases that your target market might enter into the search box and you can’t cover them all on your static pages. You can on you blog. Think of every blog post as a new webpage attached to your site.

Every post can bring visitors who are interested in the topic of the post – so it stands to reason that your posts should be written specifically to be of interest or benefit to the group of people most likely to need your products or services. They may not need them right away – for example, you might be reading this post because you want to learn how to make the most of your business blog. You may never have considered hiring a writing service but if you own a business website and you’re thinking about content, then you’re a potential client. That gives me the flexibility to write on a range of topics that business website owners might be interested in. The chances are that if you consider your target market carefully, there’ll be a good variety of topics you can include on your business blog that will be of interest to your potential clients.  

How to Make the Most of Your Business Blog

Search engines love sites that regularly have fresh content but uploading posts that contain no useful information for your readers will only serve to ensure that they don’t stay for long after arriving on your website. On the other hand, having a lot of informative and helpful posts will not only make the search engines happy, it will keep your site visitors reading, and perhaps even get them thinking about what you have to offer.

Uploading a couple of quality posts to your business blog every week can make a difference quite quickly. These days, many businesses rely quite heavily on customers finding them on the Internet and of course, for Internet based businesses, being found online is vital to their survival.

A good business blog is a powerful tool that can substantially improve your online presence – if only you can get into the habit of using it!

A blog writer who neglects their own blog is a bit like the painter who never seems to find the time to paint his own place, and our blog has been somewhat neglected during a very busy few months. Last week I found the time to be my own blog writer again and the fruits of my labour began to pour forth almost immediately. To remind myself how good blogs are for websites, and to give you an example, I’m going to share the result with you.

For the past several days I’ve added about two blog posts a day, and the difference in our website visitor statistics is already quite remarkable. Almost all the posts were quickly indexed under relevant keywords and began to appear on pages one, two and three of the organic search results so they immediately began bringing visitors to the website.

Not surprisingly, the number of enquiries about our services also increased. Of course, the result suggests that we’ll soon be very busy again – but this time around, I’m not going to let it distract me from the fact that I am the blog writer for our website…although come to think of it, with so many great blog writers at hand I’d certainly have no trouble outsourcing it!

Of course like any business owner, you want to know numbers: those few posts generated two job enquiries yesterday and four today.

I may have temporarily lost sight of the value of updating my own blog regularly, but after such a great reminder, I’ll be blogging at every opportunity from now on!

If you have any doubt about the capacity of your blog to bring potential customers to your website, I challenge you to turn yourself into a blog writer for the next two weeks, write one post every day and monitor the improvement. If around 10 posts can make a difference, imagine what 30 posts a month could do!

If you’re ready to turn blog writer for a week or two and see what happens, here are my personal tips for your posts:

• Make them anywhere from 200 to 500 words in length, longer if it’s necessary to cover the topic properly.
• Choose some keywords you don’t already target with your static pages, but don’t choose ones where the organic competition is so fierce that your post doesn’t stand a chance of getting a position.
• Include those keywords in the post title, and your opening sentence and wherever they fall naturally throughout the post (if they don’t appear anywhere naturally as you write, you might not be writing to topic).
• For a couple of the posts, don’t think about keywords at all – just write on a relevant topic on which you have something to say, or write a post about a great site or resource that members of your target audience would love to know about.
• Write blog posts that will help or give information to the group of people you most want to visit your site. The posts should be somehow relevant to your products or services but there’s no need to directly sell them.
• Pay attention to the Meta descriptions of the posts – remember, they are the pieces of information searchers read to decide whether to click on the link to your post, so make them good!
• Re-read, spell check and proofread your posts carefully before uploading.

What are you waiting for? Start blogging your way to a greater Internet presence – but don’t forget to bookmark our site so you can come back when you decide that you’d rather not be a blog writer!

Start an Ideas Book

Ideas come and go, even for seasoned writers. That’s why wherever there’s a writer, there’s usually a notebook (or several of them) filled with things they might like to write about in the future. The same strategy works very well for a blog writer, particularly those who need to create a lot of content. How often do you think of something you can blog about while you’re doing an unrelated activity? Of course, by the time you’re ready to blog, the idea has disappeared into the depths of your memory.

Buy two notebooks and keep one next to your computer and one in your handbag, briefcase or car, for when those brilliant post ideas just pop into your head. Don’t forget to keep a pen there too!

Understand the Different Types of Posts

 When it comes to deciding how to structure your posts, it really helps if you’re aware of the different ways it can be done. It can really open up your mind when it comes to generating content ideas. Here are some of the common posts types:

• Tips and Tricks – lists or handy hints to help readers.
• Informative – posts that provide information helpful to readers.
• How to – step by step instructions on how to do something.
• Reviews – product or site reviews.
• Humorous – seen something funny that relates to your industry?
• Statistics or Research – the latest statistics, trials, research or news.
• Opinion – sharing your view on topics related to your business.
• Pros and Cons or Debate – weigh up the arguments on relevant topics.
• Problem/Solution – providing solutions for relevant problems.
• List – useful lists that will be of interest to your target audience. 

 Use Mind Maps to Elaborate on Ideas

 Okay, so you’ve got a list of one line ideas and you’re ready to create content. Now you just have to expand some of those lines into a few hundred words! If you find writing difficult, it can help to approach the whole thing in a very structured way. To expand your idea you’ll need several points to talk about in your post. Start by drawing a little mind map on paper. Write your topic in a circle in the centre of the paper. Around it, add as many things as you can think of that you could discuss about that topic. When you’re done, select the ones you like most, decide on the order you’ll put them in and begin creating your post content.

Write Routinely

 Writing is a chore, whether you enjoy it or not. Even purely creative writers often try to maintain a regular writing routine because without one it’s too easy to put off the writing they want to get done – and that can result in projects that never get finished.

Set yourself a very reasonable goal. Depending on how much content you intend to create for your website, that goal might be to write one post for your blog every week, one a day, or three a day.

Decide on the best day and/or the best time of day for the writing task and set that time aside purely to create content for your blog. When the day and time arrives, go to it!

The more often your write, the easier it’s likely to become. Another magical thing that happens once you’re into a good routine is that your mind gets into the habit of generating ideas and the entire task of creating content for your blog can become much easier and much faster. You might even begin to enjoy it – especially when your creative labours begin to bear fruit.

If you need to create content for your blog, make a plan, get a notebook and get stuck into it!

Of course, if you’d rather pay someone else to create content for you,  content writing services can help!

The Audience Your Web Copy Needs to Attract

If you’re running an online business you don’t want just any old visitors – you want potential customers. That means that the first thing you need to do is think about who those people are. Depending on your product or service, that group might be a large one defined simply by age and interests and not restricted by location; or it might be a relatively small group, for example, home owners in Sydney who might need landscaping services.

The web copy you write needs to ‘speak’ to that group, be relevant to them, and be related in some way to your product, service or area of expertise.

The Words in Your Copy

The words that appear to be most important in your web copy tell the search engines what your blog post is about, which in turn determines which words your post will be indexed under to help searchers find what they’re looking for. So how do the search engines decide which words are important? They ‘read’ your post and take particular notice of the words contained in your post title. The frequency of important words and related words throughout your post are also taken into account.

While it is certainly a good idea to choose useful keywords and include them in your post title and body, it doesn’t mean you should go overboard and include those keywords at every opportunity. Doing so is likely to ruin the readability of your post. It’s also referred to as ‘keyword stuffing’ and if Google suspects you’re doing it your post won’t be well positioned in results – which would defeat your purpose. Choose your keywords by all means and include them in the title and body of your post, but in a natural way.

The Importance of Meta Descriptions

Your Meta description is of great importance and you should take the time to compose it well. Why? Because when your page or post is indexed, the Meta description is the snippet of information that will be displayed in the organic search results – it’s what searchers read in order to decide if they want to visit your web page. The Meta description should be a little piece of compelling web copy that will encourage potential customers to click through to your page to find out more – for example, your description might tell them you have information they need or a solution they’ve been looking for.

What to Write About on Your Blog

When searchers decide to click through to your website, you want them to be glad they did, even if they don’t need your product or service right now. This is where writing your blog posts comes in and it’s an area where you have to think outside the square. While every one of your blog posts should be great web copy that will help bring visitors to your site, your every post does not have to sell your services, or appeal directly to people who are looking for that service right now.

If you approach it that way, the chances are you’ll very quickly run out of ideas for your posts and the usefulness of your blog will be limited. Remember, there are people out there who might need your services in the future, or who need them now but don’t know it yet! You can reach out to those people by adding items to your blog that give those people information they need, tips they may find useful, ‘how to’ instructions or even pointing them to related freebies and cheapies or other sites of interest.

Let’s take our landscaper for example. His potential clients include home owners who are into gardening or want to improve their outdoor areas; and people who are in the process of building a new home or adding an entertaining area. Those who want retaining walls, pergolas, new plants, trees, garden mulch or rocks might also need his services and home owners who are currently trying to complete their own improvements might give up and decide to call in a professional.

He’s one lucky website owner – he has a wealth of potential topics for his web copy from how to construct a rock retaining wall to which plants to include in a water wise garden. If visitors to his site find his blog good reading and filled with useful information, he might just end up with a subscriber following and a whole lot of potential customers hanging on his every word. He could also find that related sites begin to link to his site because his blog is just so useful.

Best of all, a percentage of his site visitors will be in need of his services when they find his site – and with such a fabulous information packed blog he’s clearly an absolute professional as well as a thoughtful, helpful and all round good bloke! Now, that could really make his phone ring.

Bringing it All Together

 As you can see, great web copy for a blog is much more than a nice piece of writing. Your copy must be indexed so it can be seen by a relevant audience. The displayed Meta description needs to be good enough to entice people to visit your website; and when they arrive, the web copy they find on your blog should make them happy to have discovered your website.

What if You Can’t Write Your Own Web Copy?

 As they say, where there’s a will there’s a way. If you envision creating an utterly fabulous blog that brings hundreds of visitors to your website, but you can’t write, or just don’t have the time to do it, there are ways around it.

One of the best approaches is to spend a little time putting together a list of keywords (think of them as a springboard for potential post topics) that could bring relevant traffic (think potential customers) to your website. If the subject matter requires your particular expertise, jot down the points that must be included – then outsource the writing to a service that specialises in web copy. Alternatively, it’s possible to outsource the entire task to a writing service.

For those lucky enough to have an aspiring writer in the family, there’s yet another option – you could teach them the concepts involved in creating web copy that works and put them in charge of your blog!

Complete Blog Service

While many site owners prefer to check and upload their own posts, some simply don’t have the time to think about their blog, or the inclination to write blog posts. If you’d prefer us to manage your blog, ask us for a quote on our complete blog service. We’ll come up with the topics, create content for your blog and upload your blog content daily or weekly to suit your requirements. That doesn’t mean you won’t have any input – you’re always welcome to provide specific topics or request posts about special offers you have. It’s your blog! Images to illustrate your posts can also be included in the service.

Blog Packs

Clients who prefer to order a number of posts at the same time and then upload them over time can order blog posts in packs, with or without images. When you purchase your posts that way you receive your posts as individual documents, saved with the title of the blog post so you can store your posts and upload them at your leisure.

If you’re ready to get your blog working for your business email me today to discuss our blog service or place a pack order.