Blog

Whether your blog is giving you sufficient bang for your
blog-writing buck depends on:

1. What your blog’s about and how relevant it is to your target audience

2. Your use of metadata and SEOs

3. How much time you spend writing your articles

4. How smart you are about what you write and how and when you publish your article

5. Whether your idea of ‘success’ is winning new clients, sharing information and/or other markers

1. What’s your blog about?

You’re more likely to get bang for your buck if your blog is:

• About something that is going to be of interest to the sort of people who  might be potential clients.
• About something you know like the back of your hand (because then it’s more likely to be good, clear information).
• Well-written and easy to read so that people will not only start reading your article but finish it.
• About something that’s either relevant to your business or to your areas of
  interest/expertise, whilst making sure your blog is not obviously promoting
  or advertising your business.
• Constructed using relevant metadata and SEO terms so that gives you brownie points in terms of Google rankings.

For example, the purpose of my website is to advertise and promote what my business sells. Whereas the purpose of my blog is to share information with whoever visits my blog and subtly complement the website in promoting my business. I write work-related articles about editing, writing and transcription; but I also write non-work-related articles about books and movies and art exhibitions, and different aspects of managing small businesses.

2. Metadata and SEOs

Although I am no expert in metadata and SEOs, I’ve found that:

• If the article is about my services (e.g. scribing, editing or producing transcripts) I insert those relevant terms into the metadata and include those relevant SEO terms within the text of the article where it makes sense to do so.
• If the article is business-related but not about any of my services (e.g. this article about blogging), I will link the topic of the article back to my business services (which are scribing, editing and producing transcripts) by including some examples drawing from my experience running my business; thereby including relevant SEOs that fit well into the context of the article.
• If the article is not strictly work-related, try and ensure a few of the SEOs and metadata are related to your business. For example, when I write a book review (which is not technically work-related), I’m likely to mention the words ‘writing’ and ‘editing’ in the article. I do this because I’m a writer and editor, and because I’m looking at how the book has been written and edited, and also to make sure the book review is indirectly relevant to my business.

For more information go to: How to write perfect meta-descriptions for SEO (15 steps).

3. How much time do you spend writing articles?

When I started writing blog articles I didn’t count how long it took to
produce each article. Then I started counting and discovered I was taking up to 6 or 7 hours to write and edit each article – hours for which no-one was paying me. I realised that if I wanted to get better bang for my blog-writing buck I’d have to spend less time writing each article.

And so I decided to try to spend no more than 2 or 3 hours writing and editing each article and quickly discovered I could only meet this target if I 1) stuck to articles about subjects I knew really well (which are easier to write), and 2) wrote shorter articles.

The easiest way to make sure you don’t spend too long writing each article is to write short articles. For more information go to: 7 reasons to keep your blog articles short.

4. Are you a smart blogger?

If you’re a smart blogger, you:

• Don’t write more articles than you need to. Publishing one blog article a week arguably gives you similar results (in terms of how search engine spiders view your website and business) as publishing two or three blog articles per week.
• Share your blog articles on social media platforms (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn) regularly – once or twice a week is okay – and at the times of day or night that your potential readers are likely to be online.
• Republish or recycle your articles on different platforms. For example, many of my ‘new’ LinkedIn articles are rewrites of previously published blog articles. As long as the new article is about 30% different from the original, search engines (and readers) see both old and new articles as two different articles.

5. Is your blog ‘successful’?

Whether your blog is successful in giving you and your business sufficient bang for your buck depends on what you mean by ‘success’. In my view, your blog is probably successful if it has been:

• giving you good job satisfaction and enjoyment
• helping you win any clients or work, either directly or indirectly
• resulting in broader or stronger networks and relationships with colleagues and/or clients
• opening up new areas (e.g. social media groups) that are resulting in referrals
• increasing your ranking on search engines which has resulted in your business being noticed by more potential clients.

Image: Licenced use purchased from Adobe Stock October 2023.