 If you’re wondering where to start your business blog, I’d recommend our last two posts: Should You Have a Blog? and How Can I Plan My Blog?
Today, we’ll look at another pro-blogging conundrum: how to cover up the fact that you can’t always post regularly. Posting content to your blog makes your readers happy. It makes search engines happy, although not as much as it used to. And, heck, it may even make you feel kinda good about yourself. You’re organized. You’re posting. Look at you go. Except, of course, when you can’t post as regularly as you planned. Then what? You don’t need to give up on looking professional. You just need to - you guessed it - plan to fail. As in, sometimes fail to regularly update your blog. Hey, it happens. Here’s what you do. How to Make It Seem Like You’ve Got It All Together Let’s be realistic. Life happens. Stuff happens. That comes along with being a live human being. So, don’t expect that you’ll be able to write one perfect post at 9:00 am every Monday for the next five years. While having a weekly 'blog day’ is your best bet for being regular, no one will care if you sometimes miss it by a couple of days. Where you start running into trouble is when you post erratically.. Wow, viewers will think, check out those crazy time management skills. And then they’ll congratulate themselves for hitting their daily snark requirement and click onto Google to find something else. So, here are two cheap and easy ways to make it look like you know what you’re doing: Write posts in batches. Maybe sit down one day and spend a few hours on ‘evergreen topics’ - general info about your particular specialty. If you’re a builder, it might be a post on how energy-efficient windows work. If you’re a baker, maybe a quick couple of paragraphs on American vs. Italian buttercreams. And so on. The idea is that your topics aren’t time-sensitive. They’ll be relevant tomorrow, next month, and next year. Then you can use your blog’s publishing feature to schedule when each one goes live. Voila! A month’s worth of posts, done. Alternately, you can stockpile these evergreens and pull them out when you’ve hit writer’s block or when you’re going on vacation for two weeks. Just leave off the publishing date. Honestly, as long as your blog has plenty of posts, no one will know, or care, that you wrote them all on one very slow Friday. Note, though, that while your readers will be fooled, Google won’t. You won’t get credit for a steady stream of fresh content. But then again, we’re not really writing for Google, are we? This doesn’t mean that you should never include time-sensitive posts on your blog. On the contrary. Your blog is one of the best places to put them because it’s ever-changing by its nature. The good thing about timely posts is that they’re usually easy to sort out and write. We’re having a sale. There’s been a development in our industry. They’re doing a profile of our company on local news. These are all pretty straightforward topics. But for those times when you’ve nothing to write about - or when you’d rather hit the beach than type at your PC - a stash of timeless posts will give you a guilt-free out. Pretty cool, huh? Next week, we’ll go in-depth on another essential facet of creating a business blog: Creating your target audience. Join us! Comments are closed.
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