Peter is one of those people that you will notice everywhere. First time I saw him, when he left a comment at Daniel Sharkov’s blog on my very first guest post. That article exploded and carries a lot of value to this very day. Immediately after that Peter started showing up everywhere, with consistency never seen at any other Social Media savy person. He was omnipresent on the part of the web where I was frequenting on. I was amazed how he keeps up being on Google+, Twitter, Facebook, Empire Avenue, you name it, Peter was there.
Him being that much ahead of the game in this department I wanted to share his blogging secrets and requested from him to shoot me a guest post. This is the very first guest post on Alpha Efficiency, so I welcome all suggestions in the comments. Without Further Ado, Peter!
My old friend Bojan asked me to write a blog post about being productive as far as blogging is concerned and although I’m not usually that keen on guest blogging I decided it would be an interesting exercise. No doubt Bojan’s productivity regime is stricter than mine and he doesn’t tolerate the distractions I’ve learned to live with, but here goes.
First and foremost, if research, writing and design do not come naturally to you, don’t bother taking up blogging. If the idea of coming up with about 750 original words with accompanying photos or graphics, at least twice a week, at regular intervals is just too daunting, stick to micro blogging with Facebook, Google+ or Twitter.
Blogging isn’t a stroll in the park, it really isn’t for everyone, but it can be very rewarding and a great social media base for any business!
Writing a quality post is only about 60-70% of the blogging task and as I said many months ago, a blog post without an audience is just pictures and words. Getting the post out for people to read and react to is just as important, but your content needs to be original and interesting.
We’re all familiar with the phrase ‘content is king’ but to me, ‘quality content as standard’ is far more relevant is the 21st century.
BLOG CONTENT
Always be consistent, don’t write about sky diving one week and flower arranging the following week, this is almost guaranteed not to work. Decide who you want your blogging audience to be and keep that audience satisfied and coming back for more.
Don’t expect blog traffic and comments immediately, this probably won’t happen unless you are some kind of a celebrity. It takes time to find your ‘blogging voice’ and it takes additional time for your audience to become responsive. Don’t be disheartened by a modest audience to start with, that’s just how it works and your marketing will take time to develop. At the end of 2010 my monthly audience was around 200 on a good month, now it’s around 8-9000. That’s quite a leap, right?
Add photographs and graphics that will enhance your written copy, you may decide to have a magazine layout, that’s your choice. You will eventually find you own preferred style and I would advise sticking with it, people tend to like what’s familiar. Don’t add too many photographs or graphics as it makes the pages slow to load and people might get bored with waiting and go elsewhere.
Videos are great and people love them, if you have a WordPress blog and the right plug in they’re very, very easy to add to a blog post, but again, don’t overload the page as it’ll take too long to load.
As I mentioned earlier, about 750 words is the perfect amount of content, I have published posts with well over 1800 words and far too many photographs and it’s a waste of time. People get bored, they don’t have half an hour to devote to a blog post, it doesn’t matter how exciting your topic is.
DO NOT write huge blocks of copy or no one will even start to read your blog. Break your copy into readable, sensible, portions and space photographs out accordingly.
You will learn from experience, my 1st social media satire contained 9 cartoons and they were too big, I now regularly publish just 5 small cartoons and people are quite happy with that, it’s enough.
MARKETING BLOG POSTS
Timing is essential and I’ve tried just about every possibility, for me, based here in the UK, publishing a new post very early Monday morning is the best time and my social media satires have gone out every week for the last 23 weeks based on this principle. Any time between 5am and 8.30am is just fine to capture parts of the USA and Europe audiences.
Don’t bother with posting at the weekend, most people are on Facebook or Google + or just away from blogs!
Marketing is simple, send out your posts to as many places as you can, use Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Posterous, Digg, Tumblr, Google+, Google Buzz, Delicious, Reddit, Squidoo, Friendfeed, Diigo and all the other places you’ll find on ‘sexybookmarks’.
I also recommend Sharebar for adding BizSugar, Blokube, SERPd, Blogengage, Zoomit and the like, lots of traffic can comes from these places.
Join Facebook blogging groups too and communicate and share ideas with others bloggers. This is an essential part of the learning curve.
There are other groups to join too, ones that won’t be interested in having you unless you’ve either got a great blog and lots of Twitter followers, or both. If you want to know more about this Tweet me or add a comment to my blog.
I hope this has helped you and yes, I know it’s over 750 words, 750-ish, OK?
If you want to know more about blogging, I’ve lots of blogging related posts on my blog that might help you get started. I look forward to hearing from you. MarketingM8
