So you have started a blog and you are really excited about it, so excited that on the first day of having it running you throw up four or five posts. The 2nd day you throw up another four posts and continue doing that for the next week or so. Now your blog is on its 3rd week and you have are a little burnt out so you decide to skip a few days… hey you have all that content from before so you have time right? The 6th, 7th week roll around and you still haven’t added a new post… this is now a problem. Although skipping days or maybe even a week in between your posts is not a bad thing and will not “hurt” your blog, you could lose some relevancy you gathered in the first couple of weeks. However, by skipping two or more weeks, you are running the risk that the Search Engines won’t be visiting your site as often as they used to when you were doing a post a day/week.
So how often should I update my blog?
If you look at our blog here you will notice it gets updated at least once a week. In my opinion that is a great start. If you have the time/man power, doing a blog post a day will truly help your site the most. This isn’t always an easy task to accomplish though, so take it slow and try to do one or two blog posts a week for starters. If you have the time and a “go for it” attitude, aim for 4-7 blog posts a week. Just try to refrain from going more than a week without a fresh post or updated content.
What if I don’t have anything to write about?
Like I have stated before, if you are having trouble finding something to write about you may have picked the wrong niche to be in. You should ALWAYS have something to talk about, the only exception to this rule is if you created you blog based off a hot topic and then that hot topic completely died. Sadly if that’s the case you will most likely have to just drop the blog.
There are many tools out there on the web that can help you in your search for blog post topics. There are keyword tools which allow you to put in a keyword and see what questions people are putting into the search engines on a particular topic. There is also Google Trends that will tell you what the hot topics are for the day/week/month/year. Lastly, there are also Twitter hot trends that will supply you with what people are talking about at that given time. These are great tools to utilize and capitalize when trying to come up with a blog post.
Remember too, that if you are one of the first blogs to write about a particular topic, then you run the risk of getting an absurdly high amount of traffic. If that is something you want (WHICH YOU DO) then utilize these tools.
Should I do more than one post a day if it is a hot topic?
Absolutely!! If you have the time to consistently post updates on a hot topic by all means do it… just remember to keep it up as much as possible until that topic is dead. Remember though, you don’t want to spam either. If you can only write a few sentences on topic then it isn’t worth doing a whole blog post about it. This is where you can also capitalize on your Twitter profile. By posting those 1-2 sentences about that hot topic you have a good chance of people who are monitoring that topic to see your tweet and check out your profile and thus seeing your website.
It has been 3 weeks (or more) since I last updated my blog…is all hope lost now?
No way, the beauty of blogs is that you may have missed a month or so but with a little elbow grease you can be back up on the search engines within a couple weeks. You just have to put in the time and put on your “try hard” pants and get a blog post out every day or every other day to make up for the lost time. Soon enough the Search Engines will come crawling back to your site (get it… crawling) and you will see the results again.
Well that about does it for this week’s edition of running a successful blog, I hope some of these tips were helpful and useful. Also if there are any questions that you still have, please by all means, post them in the comments and I will either answer them in the comments and/or even add them to this post as well. Like always I would really like to hear comments and or suggestions that I may have missed.