Blog Strategy- How to Blog When You Hate Blogging
Recently, someone asked me on Twitter for some tips on blogging. They revealed that first of all they hated writing and didn’t like the concept of blogging. There’s a lot of reasons why people want to have a blog. Although you might not like the concept of blogging you realize for your marketing activities that having a blog is good.
Not liking to generate content ………..well, that’s good and bad news 
The bad news is that when you are starting a blog you really need to keep the content coming all the time. I know I don’t always take my own advice 
Ideally, you want to write 3-5 blog posts per week. Yikes!
Having that amount of content gives the search engines something to come back to, more search engines means more times they will be indexing your pages and returning. This means that when you look at the cache results google should come by and give you little googley kisses more often. Sites that are cached more often tend to rise in rankings. As do sites with fresh content getting out there and attracting the visitiors.
So, if you don’t like to blog what can you do to get all this search engine love?
The simple answer is having a blog strategy.
First of all you need to train yourself and the search engines that you will be posting a number of times a week. In turn, this trains your visitors to return to your blog. If you don’t post regularly they won’t come back because they’ll think that you have become a ghost town. So get into the mind set right now that you are going to blog regularly.
Here’s the good news on how you can do it easily:
1) I use a to do list in my WP Queen dashboard. When I have a thought for a blog post I write it down on the to do list. Of course, you don’t have to do this in your WP dashboard you can just use a piece of paper or your personal organizer. Ideally, you want to have 20-50 ideas for blog posts. So, some ideas on my list are for seo, reviews, analytics etc.
Spend a couple of hours thinking about what you want the site to achieve, what content you need to provide in order to achieve that and look at your stats and see what your visitors are searching for. A plugin like Psychic Search is useful for that or just have a peak at your stats in your cpanel. Now, if you have time, I suggest that you actually sit down and write as many posts as you can in the one sitting. This is why writing posts in a series is often good because you write all the content at once and then use the future posting feature in WordPress to drip it out. A lot of the posts here are written in advance and future posted … including this one!
2) Go search for blogs, sites in your niche and sign up to their rss feed. Create a folder in your Google reader for your niche. Now all your information is in one place you can quickly scan through and see if there is an article that you can make your own commentary on, do a trackback to or get ideas for reviews.
Here’ s an example of my WordPress google reader folder. You’ll see from this that I could write posts on a few things like the FTC regulations the new WP Development portal both of those things would be interesting to me. Better yet, if I’m feeling super lazy I could just do a short intro saying that I’ve read a few articles on this topic and found this one really helpful and do a trackback to one of those lovely high ranking blogs. How long would that take? About 5-10 minutes.
3) Listen to what people are telling you. I often get questions in forums, via email and other messages from people asking me certain things. When they ask rather than tell them create a blog post for the information. This allows you to repurpose your content and rather than going back and forth via email you are getting them on your site. This post is being written because of a single tweet. What opportunities are you letting pass you by?
4) The quick and easy route has always been PLR. There are some good quality private label rights products on the market and surely something for every niche. The real issue is that you must make this your own. You have to give your blog your own voice. So, rewrite the PLR and add your own observations, thoughts and links to any useful resources. Remember, you want to make your visitors happy
5) Cheat. Seriously. If you have a blog for instance on WordPress You can go to You Tube or any video sites and look up tutorials/reviews/funny videos etc in your niche. These tutorials that other people have made might be of value to your visitors. Go have a peek now. All you need to do is find materials that are useful to your visitors and incorprate that in your blog. It could be photos from Flickr, videos from You Tube etc (remember to check licensing first) or any other user generated content site. Write a short introduction on why the video etc will be useful and post it. You could easily do 5 of these style of posts in an hour. Do a bunch of them and future post them at different times.
When you have sorted out your content it’s time to sort out your SEO. Yes, you do need to seo your blog posts. Find the keywords that you want to rank for (and can win on) and optimize your blog post for that keyword. I suggest that you don’t make a piggy of yourself. One to three keywords per post is enough. Seriously. Remember, your visitors title should be interesting all the SEO happens on the backend using plugins like Platinum SEO, AIOSEO or Headspace
Take advantage of the future post feature in WordPress so content is churning out when you don’t feel like writing. If you are struggling with the concept of blogging then the best blogging strategy tip that I can give you is to create as much content in advance as possible. Let it drip out while you go create the next batch.
Finally, mix it up. Combine your blog posts between things you decided you want to write about with questions your visitors are asking you add some useful videos and the like and mix it all in. This way you are giving your visitors variety as well as useful information. You are giving the search engines constant reasons to come visit your site and your blog doesn’t look like a ghost town any more.
Now, when your blog has lots of search engine love and it is a popular place to hang out you can farm off some of that content creation to other people who will do it for you for free. Yes, guest bloggers. Have a form so people can sign up to be a guest blogger for your site. Have them submit an article for your approval. All you need to do is provide the sign up form and have a quick read of an article. Really easy. The guest blogger will be happy with the exposure to your visitors and your happy because you didn’t have to write that pesky content. True win/win situation. Obviously, your guest blogger must product quality content that is relevant to your niche.
In the end if you remember to ask your visitors what they want, listen to what they are telling you, either in comments, email, twitter, stats and give it to them as best as you can then you will have enough content to last you a life time.
enjoy
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My name is Leanne King and I'm an Australian internet marketer and WordPress fantatic. I share my knowledge of WordPress here on my blog, through my products, private coaching and in private forums. In my spare time I like to develop products for WordPress users that are easy to use.
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