Content Writing & Copywriting Blog

Does the frequency of your blog posts matter?

Oct 26, 2007 18 Comments »

I have observed that sometimes it matters how much you post on your blog and sometimes it doesn’t matter. Actually it depends on what you’re trying to achieve through your blogging. Some blogs post six to seven posts daily. Some of these posts are very long and some are shorter. I think the blogs that host multiple long posts are written by multiple bloggers because it is not easy to write so many long posts in a single day. You can write multiple blog posts yourself, on your own if your blog posts consist of just one or two paragraphs.

How should you decide your frequency? Again it depends on your plan regarding your blog. Adding many posts in quick succession builds your blog property quickly — just make sure the quality doesn’t suffer because low-quality posts are not going to do any good to your blog. So, many posts with lots of links to other, external blogs — I have personally experimented this with HowToPlaza — gets you indexed, at least by Google, extremely fast. HowToPlaza posts started appearing in the search results within five days. This was not my intention because I was expecting that it would take anywhere between two to three months for the posts to start appearing on the search engines. I was able to post, initially, ten posts on average, because most of the posts were very small in nature.

If you plan on writing longer, comprehensive posts, I suggest you should go slow on your posting schedule. Along with being lengthy if your blog posts are analytical in nature you should give your readers sometime to assimilate the message. The ideal frequency would be one post every day. Posting every day keeps you in touch with your readers but it is not necessary. Whatever frequency you select for yourself just stick to a routine. For instance if you blog readers expect a post on Wednesday that give them a post on Wednesday.

Here on Content Blog I don’t follow a routine because I have been trying to follow a one-post-a-day routine. Sadly my other obligations prevent me from doing so.

As always quality precedes quantity. If most of your readers access your blog posts through their RSS feed readers then frequency hardly matters; provided you generate good blog content your blog is going to succeed. These days it is advised — rightly so — that you should write less, write well, and promote a lot. So more than writing your blog posts you should visit other blogs and online forums and interact there. You should also write as many guest posts as possible. Traffic is as important as your blog posts so set your blogging frequency keeping that in mind.

Technorati Tags: blogging, blog publishing

Another Reason You Shouldn’t Get Too Crazy About Your Page Rank

Oct 25, 2007 3 Comments »

According to this link at TechCrunch Google is drastically reducing the page rank of blogs and websites that deal with selling and buying links just to manipulate their page rank. This is the reason you shouldn’t indulge in manipulating your rankings and SEO factors. You should let things work naturally and just focus on generating quality content. People indulge in artificial methods only when they don’t have something real to offer. Just think it this way: what is the use of raising traffic to your blog or website if there is not much there to read or view? If you have quality content then people will come to your blog or website on their own provided you create a positive buzz around your Internet property.

This should also act as a reminder, that don’t make your online business hinge on just a few factors. For example don’t just depend on Google for your traffic; derive traffic from other websites and search engines too. Agreed, that Google can really affect your traffic and the best way of countering it is never to build your blog or website primarily for Google. Consider Google just as an added advantage. Work on ranking higher on other search engines too and list your link in as many relevant online directories as possible. Generate lots of quality content so that other websites and blogs link to you naturally, at their own discretion.

Having said that, Google needs good content to remain in the business. So the search engine company is not doing any favor by sending traffic your way and neither does it want to bully you to follow its guidelines. It just tries to improve its search policy to provide the best results to its users so that its users keep coming back to conduct more searches. Focus on your content, focus on usability, focus on quality, and focus on networking, and let the other things happen naturally.

Incidentally, some blogs like Copyblogger (from PR6 to PR4) and Problogger (from PR6 to PR4) don’t even sell links from their websites and still their PR rankings have been dropped. Search Engine Land has comprehensive information on the topic.

Technorati Tags: page rank, google

Does Free Content Help You Sell

Oct 22, 2007 3 Comments »

A few days ago I wrote a post on how the rock band Radiohead is selling its music albums by not selling. The band has provided the music for free and has left it on its fans whether they want to pay for it or not.

Many years ago when I was designing websites I created a free auto responder-based nine-day HTML course that people could receive every day by submitting their emails. In the final installment I asked them would they like to pay for the similar course. 95% of the respondents said they would be eager to pay if the course was well formatted and contained a little bit of more real-world examples. I was quite encouraged but now I don’t remember why I never got down to preparing a professional, worth-paying-for course. Anyway the point is that people are ready to pay if you provide them great value in a good package. Brian of CopyBlogger talks about how you need to sell information rather than providing free content on your website and make money in his latest report (you need to signup). Although I totally agree with the concept of selling knowledge and making money on the Internet making money by providing free content is not as difficult as it is made out to be. (He is totally right when he says that it is not necessary that an idea is going to work for you just because it has worked for the others.) You just need to generate enough valuable content: content that really helps people and content that is not available on other websites. And of course you need to generate the right buzz. And of course you need to have some alternate source of income while you are building up your content repository.

Making money off free content doesn’t always have to be about making money off advertising. You can make use of free content to generate lots of traffic for your business and to build your brand around your profession: even if you decide to sell information products from your website you need to generate lots of traffic first.

When you share your knowledge openly and freely with your visitors it establishes your authority and people begin to respect you and know you for your knowledge. You begin to get more business queries through your free content. I have seen many bloggers generating thousands of readers and then announcing their book writing venture on their blogs, sharing little tidbits of the books and talking about subjects revolving around the books. This helps them generate the positive buzz and by the time the book are released there are already hundreds if not thousands of eager readers waiting for them.

Coming back to generating free content in order to make money online; I don’t think that all the important subjects have already been covered. Don’t get discouraged by the fact that some very famous bloggers are already writing on the subject you want to write on. They’re known and well-respected doesn’t mean there is no scope for other blogs. Google gained prominence even when most people were using Yahoo! to search on the Internet.

When you do some research you will notice that most of these bloggers are famous because one, they write a lot and generate great content and two, they network a lot. Even if you feel that you have nothing new to add don’t let it stop you from writing. There is always an un-written, unique perspective that you bring in when you start giving your own take on a particular subject. Just start writing. An added benefit of generating new blog posts on the same old topics is that provided you optimize your posts, the search engines are going to rank your posts way above the already existing blog posts.

Most people don’t succeed on the Internet, not because their ideas are not innovative or not genuine; they don’t succeed because the required effort is lacking and the required exposure is lacking. Right content plus exposure plus lots of the right content can surely bring you success.

Technorati Tags: make money online, blogging, free content, blog advertising

The Radiohead Phenomenon

Oct 20, 2007 1 Comment »

Since everybody’s writing about the rock band Radiohead selling its music off its website I thought I should also write something about it because basically it is about selling/promoting your content from your website.

Radiohead decided to offer its latest album for free on its website and let its fans decide what they wanted to pay for the album if they wanted to pay at all. This is an interesting development but then it is not quite that interesting; it depends on who you are. If you are a lesser-known artist will this strategy work for you? It can and it won’t, again it depends on what steps you take to promote yourself. Radiohead has an advantage; it already has a big fan base and anything they do will be covered by the media including thousands of blogs. And this really happened. As soon as the news broke out hundreds of blogs wrote about the decision and shared their comments with their respective readers. Just think how much exposure, free exposure, the rock band received. Can a lesser-known rock band perform a similar fete? It can if the artists prepare in advance.

The key here is establishing yourself and creating a fan base. This is for the rock band. But what about a normal content provider, say, for instance what if a writer wants to sell books from his or her website? Some writers like Aaron Wall are already doing it but the difference is they are not offering their books or rather ebooks for free. Can you sell your content by offering it for free? Recently the New York Times started providing its content for free because people were not ready to pay for it. So as a writer if you give people a choice of paying you or not paying you but nonetheless accessing your book, will you be able to make enough money? What if everybody downloads the book for free and nobody pays you?

Your blog can help you in this regard. With your blog you can develop your own fan following. Once you have thousands of fans I’m pretty sure that a percentage of them will surely pay you just to show their appreciation. Again in order to make them pay you you really need to offer something that is worth paying for. So before asking for a payment you will need to ask yourself, is what you’re offering unique and highly valuable?

The success of such a venture –offering content for free and leaving the choice of payment on a voluntary basis –depends on lots of targeted traffic. If you have just hundred targeted visitors per day not many are going to pay you, but if you get thousands of targeted visitors to your website or blog than some of them will definitely find your content valuable enough to pay you. What do you think about it?

Technorati Tags: radiohead, selling content, music website

The Drawback Of A Sudden Boost

Oct 19, 2007 No Comments »

Since most of my work involves writing — in fact all of my work involves writing — the realization that I could dictate using MS Word was a great boost. All you have to do is get hold of a microphone, attach it to your computer or your laptop and then train the dictation software bundled with MS Office and there you have it: you say and the word processor writes it. The more you train the dictation software the better it types. My productivity increased five times all of a sudden.

But in order to dictate you need quieter surroundings; if there are lots of noises around you the mic catches all those noises and then types them according to its own take on them. So I shifted to another room where I could close the door and do my work in silence. For the first few hours it was great. The problem started when I started using the dictation software even for writing shorter passages. Although it is a great tool, still the accuracy is anywhere between 85% and 95%. So while you’re dictating many times you have to make corrections. If it is a long document, say 1000 to 2000 words, then making repetitive corrections doesn’t seem to be a problem. But if you just have to write 100 or 200 words then it is better to type it rather than dictate it and I realized it after wasting lots of time.

Even shifting to a quieter room has so far turned out to be not-so-productive because I think I’m used to working in the sitting room, in the hub of all the activities. I think sitting in a separate room I thought I was working a lot but in fact I was not.

This doesn’t mean I’m going to abandon the idea of working in a separate room and dictating instead of typing. If I implement these changes properly I think I can enhance my productivity significantly so I’m going to stick to them without getting distracted. And another thing, the dictation software is forcing me to improve my pronunciation because if I don’t pronounce the words right it doesn’t write them correctly :-). Right now I have a very bad pronunciation.