Between my day job, start-up, and hobby, I operate 6 blogs. The purpose of these blogs are not necessarily revenue drivers, but are just a space to express and share my experience, and to point them at things that I find interesting. With that said, as any writer knows, it feels great to get readership. With free technologies such as Google Analytics and the excellent built-in analytic of WordPress, it’s literally feels like it’s feeding the addiction of writers of their desire for attention.
What happens when you give an addict too much of the good stuff, for free? Yep, they burn out. If your objective of blogging is for the purpose of generating more traffic, then the insight offered by these analytic programs will sometimes lead you down the wrong path. If you have a good understanding of SEO, you start to blog for keywords, blog for searches, blog for back-links. An unhealthy cycle that not only burns out the writer, but also leads to more worthless content on the internet. I have to admit some of my earlier entries were fueled by this desire for readers, and it usually backfires.
To make sure that your blog stays on point, and remains useful and relevant, I have devised the following “system”. This draws from not only my experience as a technology person, but also as a writer in traditional print media.
- Set a publishing schedule. The nature of writing and publishing of any kind is that your readership will spike (relatively) when you publish a new entry, and gradually decline from there. That usually fuels the desire to post more content, more often. However even the best bloggers only have so many ideas, and some ideas are really more suitable for the 140 character world of Twitter, not an entire entry. So depending on your workload, set a publishing schedule! For me, it’s once a week across my 6 blogs.
- Use drafts to stick by your plans. It’s one thing to set a schedule, it’s harder to stick by it. I grew up watching my mother writing newspaper columns, so I understand the importance of pacing yourself. This not only keeps the ideas fresh, it also prevents burnout. Now I understand sometimes an idea comes to mind and you really want to get it written, that’s when you use the draft feature. Save it, and polish/publish around your regularly scheduled publish time. Otherwise you exhaust your ideas too early, and can get frustrated when you don’t publish for 2 weeks and see traffic dip.
- Keep it a good length. Just getting traffic and eyeballs doesn’t mean anything if the people are not reading your entries, agreeing with your ideas. A higher line chart with an equally high bounce rate doesn’t help anyone. So write clean, concise articles that are helpful. If your idea keeps flowing, write a part 2. When you do write it, make sure to come back to part one and add a link.
- Write for humans, optimize for bots. NOT the other way around! I often tell people, once you learn SEO, you NEVER code the same. Once you learn how Google functions, it’s extremely tempting to title your posts with keywords, fill your article with keywords, add a ton of links, etc. This will only results in a high bounce rate as your entries will look like gibberish to humans. It’s critical to find the right balance between proper human reading and “spider food”.
- Keeping things organized. Lets face it, we’ve all setup WordPress too many times that even the super quick and easy install is getting a bit tedious. It’s tempting to leave the system in place once it’s setup, and only use the “post” feature. However as a blog evolves, sometimes you’ll notice categories are no longer relevant, or that your Social Media plug-in is somewhat out dated. Make sure that you refresh your blog often, and ALWAYS backup before you make critical changes.
I think this entry is ready for publishing. 
