Business blogging is becoming pretty much a standard practice. Blogs allow fresh content, which is a search engine favorite, and they allow a way to connect with your commuinty. Once you have bought into the concept that a business blog will help grow your business, the inevitable next questions are going to be: What do I blog about and how to I find the time to blog? Let’s look at the first question.
What Do I Blog About?
There are all kinds of way to find topics. Start by reading blogs by other people in your industry to see what they are writing about. This is a great post from Chris Brogan’s blog 100 Things to Blog About. You can’t get any more straight forward than what Chris includes in the post. Another helpful post is from Problogger 13 Things I’ve Learned about Successful Blogging. Both of these men have successful blog and you can benefit greatly by frequenting them no matter what stage of blogging you are in but especially as a novice.
How Do I Find Time to Blog?
Blogging is work and anyone who tells you it is not must have a way better plan than me. I have found what helps me the most, and I am by all definitions a novice, is to create a blogging calendar. Decide how many times you think you want to post a week, create a calendar and start adding topics as you research and plan. You are not tied to the calendar so if something comes up you feel your audience would benefit from then by all means blog about it. A calendar does, however, help to prevent writer’s block when you finally have time to sit down and write you are not struggling for a topic.
Some bloggers write all their blogs for the week at one time. Sites like ping.fm allow you to post your blogs and set the dates you want them distributed, along with scheduled tweets about your blog. In fact, you can set the date inside the Wordpress.org blog for the date it is to be published. To me this type of scheduled writing makes the most sense, I have just not been able to get more than one or two post ahead. That is my goal for the next few months – to try to have at least a few post ready to go at all times.
Share with us in the comment section below ways that you find topics to blog about or ways you find time to blog. I know I can use all the help I can get.
Other post you might find helpful: Beginning Blogging Lessons from Pooh
photo credit: dimnikolov
