I’ve been busy lately. Very busy.
I’m nearing 18 months of being in business and things are really taking off for me. I’m doing a better job of staying in touch with my clients and keeping them happy all while growing my network and gaining new clients. I’m doing better work than I was a year ago and I’m better with optimizing my time. Although, one thing that I’ve slacked on lately is blogging.
Content Marketing 101
Blogging is an important part of content marketing. Simple Blogging 101 – the more content on your site, the more search engine traffic you will get. Besides the obvious SEO implications, having a blog allows your potential clients to learn more about what you do, gain free insight into improving their own internet marketing needs and is good way to break up the “BUY BUY BUY” message that websites sometimes take.
But I’ve been too busy to blog. I preach all day to my clients the importance of being heavily involved in social media & blogging as a part of a well rounded content marketing strategy. What a hypocrite I am! How should I expect a busy bakery owner to spend time monitoring her social media feeds and blog if I can’t?
I made the decision that my clients always come first. As a business owner, I’ve never missed a deadline and I don’t plan on starting now. And if it means that my blog goes untouched for a few weeks, a few months – so be it.
Blogging is a Different Animal Today
Blogging used to be about visits to your site. How can I attract visitors to view my blog posts? But now with inventions of mobile apps like ZiteApp and RSS feeds, the actual random visitor to your website is a thing of the past.
I read a lot of blogs throughout the week. Very few of those do I actually visit their sites to read. I get them sent to me through my ZiteApp for iPad. Occasionally I will see a social media link on Twitter or Facebook and head to their website, but again, I don’t have time for that. I would rather be fed relevant information, digest the information, then pass it along to my followers.
I would rather write one or two interesting articles a month than write four mediocre posts a week. I think most bloggers would agree. But when you making rules like “I have to blog every Monday, Wednesday and Friday” – you are opening yourself up for boring posts or repetitive content. Not across the board of course, some of the more popular bloggers (Seth Godin, for example) puts out at least one thing a day. But there are many people out there with the ‘more equals better’ mentality when it simply isn’t the case.
Setting Goals
When I started blogging on my website, I was able to put up one article a week. I upped that to two a week for awhile. I was getting more traffic to my site, sure – but not enough to offset the enjoyment of finishing a client’s job or just enjoying some quiet offline time.
My new goal? To put out at least two good articles a month. I’m going to scale back to once a week as a minimum, but if I don’t have something good enough to write about, I won’t. I blog to come up with new marketing ideas for my clients – those are the people that are most important in my business life. So if I can come up with 2-4 new ideas for my clients a month; I know they’ll appreciate it.