Blogs are a great way to demonstrate your expertise and also to give people something interesting to read when they visit your website. However, there are many people who are nervous of blogging for all kinds of reasons. These are a few guidelines to get you started or move your blogging activity up a notch a two.
Why blog?
- Share knowledge
- Educate others
- Develop your reputation as an expert
- Keep your website updated and fresh
- Create content for social media
Then the next issue is what to blog – and there’s a whole article with blog ideas here for you to download. There are no rules on what you can blog about as long as it’s interesting to your target audience.
This infographic is designed by Graphs (www.graphs.net)
This many sound daft, but writing is not the only way to blog. If you’re one of those people who hates writing try one of these options:
- Post an audio file (try AudioBoo)
- Post a video (YouTube – and Google loves YouTube so that has added advantages)
- Post an infographic – where images and information are arranged in a visual image (like the one on the right created by Jeff Bullas).
- Talk to someone who does like writing and get them to write your thoughts for you (we have lots of clients that do this)
How long should your blog be?
It can be anything from a few words upwards. Say what you have to say and don’t pad it out unnecessarily. A great example of someone who does this very well is Seth Godin. Some of his blogs are less than 100 words – like this one – others are longer. Whilst Gihan Perera writes around 500 words for many of his educational blogs. They are both great blogs!
The frequency of your blog can be anything from daily to monthly, but I’d recommend aiming for 2-3 times a month.
Where to blog
Another odd statement – where else would you blog except on your blog? Well there are different approaches to having a blog; you could have your web-designer create one on your website so you are adding great content to your site all the time. However, some people have a separate blog on one of the blog platforms like WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, etc. If you have this I’d recommend that you have your own dedicated domain name for your blog and that it is linked to your website.
You can also blog on other people’s blogs. Find people with a similar audience to yours who are not competitors and offer to provide a blog for them to publish. Most people are delighted to have guest bloggers as they generally publicise their blogs to their own audience too so everyone wins. Of course, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t invite people to guest blog on your blog too.
There are also open blog forums that you can contribute to – that’s how the Huffington Post got started. Take a look at:
There are dozens of others and it’s a way to get your message read by a much bigger audience.
This should have given you lots of ideas – happy blogging.
