You’ve already done all the work to set up a blog – either personal or business – and you’ve been religiously adding posts to your blog on a regular schedule. Then, one day you run into a problem. You find you just can’t set aside enough time each day to write blog posts. Even worse, you may find that writing for your blog every day, even if possible, results in a sort of writer’s block.
This is the most common reason most blogs fail – the owner runs into the writer’s block brick wall and just doesn’t post regularly enough. First they post daily, then a few times a week, then once a month, then… they stop completely. And the blog dies…
When you set up a blog you should decide up front how often you are going to add new posts to your blog, and then commit yourself to sticking rigidly to that schedule. Here are a few methods for making sure you can keep your blog current:
Select One Day per Week to Write Blog Posts
Rather than writing a new post each day or multiple times per week, set aside one day each week to write several good posts for the next week. Scheduling yourself to do nothing but write for your blog for a specific amount of time, say four hours, one day a week, is generally the easiest way to guarantee you’ll have enough content when you need it.
Get Rid of Distractions
Once you’ve set up your weekly appointment with yourself to write for your blog, make sure you get rid of any distractions. Put your cell phone on silent, turn off your Skype, instant messaging, etc. In fact, if possible, turn off your your Internet completely. Opening only your writing program (Word, Notepad, etc.) will help you avoid sneaking a peek at Facebook or your email and becoming distracted.
Use a Timer
A great investment in helping keep yourself on track is to buy a simple timer and put it to work. At the beginning of your blogging session set the timer for one hour. Use that hour to write one blog post. Then, as the saying goes, rinse and repeat.
Following this system ensures that you will have written at least four great blog posts in only four hours. You can build up an unpublished batch of “evergreen” posts that you can schedule to appear on any future date during the week or month!
By completing your week’s content early, it will help to avoid the inconsistency that blog readers loathe. A dead blog is no use to anybody – not your readers who will become uninterested and find someone else to follow, not the search engines which love to crawl fresh content and not your business because it no longer pulls in fresh leads.
Another great benefit of using these tips to keep your blog content fresh is that it leaves you with the rest of the week to work on other aspects of your blog, including driving traffic to your blog, building your e-mail list and even creating your own products to sell online.