Blogging Is Changing - 8 Rules You Need To Re-examine On Your Blog

The Goal  Is To Get The Best Return For The Time You Spend Blogging

Your blog should form the core  content strategy in your business. Think of it this way, your blog is  “land.” you own.Whereas, your social channels are all “rented” land. While it’s important to build an audience on your social sites (Facebook and Twitter recommended, at minimum), here the must do practice, provide regular invitations (links) to come read your blog posts, join your email list and, of course, ultimately do business with you!

Here are eight current blogging practices that may be near the end of their lifelines:

1. Post Five Times a Day to Increase Traffic

It was once considered a standard rule that traffic is directly proportional to the number of posts. Therefore, to increase traffic, you upped output and frequency. There are many bloggers who would benefit from an increase in post frequency. However, each blogger’s threshold of that frequency will vary.

For example, a prolific high-profile blogger such as Michael Hyatt recently stated: “I used to recommend blogging five times a week. For some time now I’ve blogged two to three times a week and have seen the same level of reader growth. By cutting back the frequency I freed myself up to do other things.”

Hyatt also referenced Tim Ferriss’ book, The 4-Hour Body, where Ferriss discusses the concept of the Minimum Effective Dose (MED). The MED is the “smallest dose that will produce the desired outcome” or as Ferriss quotes Olympic coach Henk Kraaijenhof: “Do as little as needed, not as much as possible.”

The concept of blogging as much as is needed to maintain or grow traffic is a new one. No longer do you have to increase blog frequency to increase traffic. Glen Alsop from Viperchill posts once or twice a month and gets 120,000 visitors per month while Seth Godin posts daily (sometimes even twice a day) and has similar stats.

New Rule: Therefore, the new rule of blogging is to find your frequency sweet spot. It may be more or less than your current frequency, but by experimenting, you’ll be able to find your optimal posting frequency – the minimum number of posts needed every month to keep your blog on an upward trajectory.

Put another way, Hyatt states, “To make progress on the things that matter most, we can’t afford losing ground by trying to do too much — even if we’re trying to do the right things.”

2. Leave Blog Comments

Like most people, I was quite surprised when Copyblogger closed off comments on its blog. Weren’t comments supposed to be the life-blood of engagement? And wasn’t Copyblogger all about encouraging a dialogue with your blog audience? These questions swam in my mind before I read Sonia Simone’s post explaining why.

It seems that the decision was in large part administrative. Copyblogger receives a lot of spam and to sift through that was becoming counter-productive for them. Instead of comments, they encouraged their audience to start a discussion on their social media outposts, most especially on Google Plus. But more than that, they lobbied that those who have something substantial to say should say it on their own blog and reference the Copyblogger post.

What Copyblogger ended up doing, in fact, is helping us remember that the only way to cut through the noise is to produce substantive content. And if a comment is thoughtful, then why not put it on its own pedestal as a complete blog post?

New Rule: Thanks to Copyblogger, the new blogging rule is to write out a blog post in response to a post and expand your initial comment to include a divergent viewpoint or more insights. Remember, if your insights are substantial, they probably warrant a blog post of their own.

3. Outsource Your Blog to a Professional

Content creation has always been outsourced and will always continue to be outsourced. But more and more bloggers are now realizing that outsourced content will never get them the leadership status they crave. This point is ironic coming from me, as my company produces content for clients.

Neil Patel recently wrote an excellent article for HubSpot titled “Why You Should Write Your Own Content,” where he said, “Content writing isn’t just something that I do on the side. It is a core component of what I preach and practice every day of my life. Content is that important. As an entrepreneur and a content marketer, I recommend that you write your own content.”

Patel cited five reasons why entrepreneurs should write their own content: better expression, brand authenticity, experience of speaking and responding to your audience, and staying abreast of industry trends.

New Rule: Produce your own content. If you absolutely can’t, then make content creation a bilateral process. Have brainstorming content meetings where the client and the bloggers together forge topics, direction, and voice. I encourage my clients to write their own posts in addition to the ones that we write for them. And I have seen the results first hand.

Entrepreneurs who write for their own blogs (in addition to outsourcing content creation) are more confident about what they want to say and are more in tune with their audience than those who outsource the entire process.

4. Always Write 100% Original Content

Oh pffft! With so much pressure to create content, bloggers need to cut themselves some slack and embrace the time-saving practices of content curation and repurposing. No one creates 100 percent original content all the time anyways. People are always getting inspired by others and riffing off of others.

New Rule: Curate, re-purpose, mash-up other people’s content and give your unique take on it. Give attribution and credit to your sources and references always.

Go to Salmas original post to discover the other 4 old Practices you need to change

5. Not Every Post Needs to Have an Image

6. Stick to One Type of Format

7. Write a 500-Word Blog Post

8. Don’t Publish Your Articles on Third-Party Sites

 

 

Blogging Is Changing - 8 Rules You Need To Re-examine On Your Blog