7 Ways to Keep Fresh Content Flowing On Your Blog

“How do I keep posts flowing on my blog?”

This is a question that most bloggers face at one point or another - particularly bloggers who have been blogging for 6-12 months.

The reality is that there comes a point where most bloggers feel either uninspired, unmotivated, that they’ve got ‘bloggers block’ or that they’ve said everything that there is to say on their chosen topic. This is something that we’ve all felt at one time or another - so what does a blogger do about it?

The first thing that I want to encourage you with is that all is not lost. Every blogger has this challenge at one point or another (in fact most of us face it regularly) and it is possible to break through it. They key is to persist through the tough times - something that many bloggers do not do.

At this point it is important to sit down and work out how you will generate content going forward. There are a number of strategies that come to mind for doing so - all of these I’ve used at different points and I hope that some will give you inspiration and a way forward:

1. Mind Mapping

My favorite technique for coming up with new topics is using mind maps. I outline my mind mapping technique here but in short the technique is that you take one post idea (one from your archives perhaps) and then brainstorm ways that that topic can be expanded upon into numerous new topics. You then take some of those new ideas and think about ways that they too can be expanded upon into new posts. This technique can literally help you identify hundreds of new topics to write about.

Whether you use Mind mapping or some other kind of brainstorming technique the key is to set time aside to do it. I try to do this at the start of each week and find that if I do that the writing task for the week ahead is a lot smoother - sometimes just coming up with the ideas is as hard as the writing of posts.

2. Involve Readers

One of the resources that a blog who has an established readership has (remember we’re writing this series for these types of blogs) is that it has a knowledge based within it’s readership that can be drawn upon in a variety of creative ways to help create content for your blog. There are a lot of ways to do this - but here are a few:

• Guest Posts - in every 100 or so readers there is bound to be 1 that has the knowledge, expertise, motivation and skill to contribute posts to your blog. The key is to identify them and give them the confidence to contribute a post to your blog. Pay particular attention to those leaving comments on your blog. You’ll find that some comments just go the extra mile and contain wisdom and depth that are not far off being the standard of actual blog posts. Also don’t be afraid to invite contributions by writing post asking for guest posts or having a page linked in your navigation inviting contributions.
• Reader Questions - stuck for a topic to write about? Ask your readers to ask questions. A post inviting reader questions can draw out some great ideas to write about.
• Community Written Posts - one of the things that I’m loving about Digital Photography School at the moment is that some of our best posts are actually ones that our readers provide the majority of the content and teaching for. My role is not to ‘write’ the content for these posts - but to ask a question and set some boundaries for a discussion - and then open it up for readers to add their suggestions. Examples: How do I take band promotional photos?, How Would You Photograph a Funeral? and How to Photograph Grandma?

3. Explore new ‘Voices’

One way to break out of a rut as a blogger is to experiment with new types and styles of posts. Sometimes doing so can unleash creativity and new ideas. So if the majority of your posts are ‘tips’ posts - try an opinion piece. If you always write ‘news’ type posts - why not try something with a bit of humor or controversy.

Further Reading: I’ve outlined 20 types of blog posts for bloggers battling bloggers block here to give you a little inspiration.

4. Update Previous Posts and Topics

Even after a few months of blogging you can hit a point where you feel like you’ve covered most topics in your niche. Many bloggers get to this point and simply give up the blog - however I’ve found that most posts that I’ve written in the past can be expanded upon, updated, improved or rewritten with fresh insight.

Also keep in mind that many of our old posts will only have been written by long term readers and your new readers will not have seen these posts.

Further Reading: The Why and How of Updating old Blog Posts.

5. Guest Posts

The decision to allow guest posters onto your blog has both good arguments for and against it - but it is certainly one way to keep the flow of content going on a blog when you’re a little low on inspiration or don’t have enough time on your hands to be writing content (see also Why Guest Bloggers are Great for a Blog).

Getting people to submit guest posts on a blog is not always achievable when a blog is very young and the blog has little profile - but once you gather a readership and build your reputation as a growing community it becomes easier to attract contributions from other bloggers and freelance writers looking to grow their own profile.

If you’re new to the idea of finding guest posters for a blog - start with your own readers (as described above - look in the comments section of your blog) and then also look at other blogs in your niche or even forums that are on a similar topic to your blog. I’ve also had some real success lately with finding guest posts for Digital Photography School from non bloggers, particularly pro photographers who are looking for a little extra exposure to their business sites.

Further Reading: How to Find a Guest Blogger for Your Blog

6. Hiring Writers

Another way to approach bringing others onto your blog as writers is to look at hiring a blogger (or team of bloggers) to help you create content for your blog. This has some cost associated with it - but can (if you do it right) increase the quality and frequency of posts as well as decreasing some of the admin of relying upon guest posts.

I’ve hired a small team of writers for DPS who I pay on a per post basis (as well as giving them exposure in the posts that they write) and have found this experience to be well worthwhile. For a start it has attracted a good caliber of writer to the blog, increased the knowledge base and expertise of the writing, added to the variety of topics we can cover and increased the frequency with which we can post.

When it comes to hiring writers - I’d advise starting with your current reader base - you might find that some of your regular readers would take on a regular writing job for a little financial reward. Another approach is to look at other bloggers on your topic or to even advertise on a job board like the ProBlogger Job board. I advertised for my team of writers almost 18 months ago and had so many great applicants that I couldn’t use them all and most of them still write weekly posts for me today.

Another quick tip on hiring writers - you can also hire them for short periods. As long as you’re up front about the length of the period that you’re hiring for I’ve found that bringing on a staff writer for a couple of months when you know you’re going to be away or have your attention on another project can be well worthwhile doing.

Further Reading: How to Advertise for a Blogger

7. Develop an editorial calendar

One technique that can help a blog grow beyond its infancy is to begin to think longer term about the content that you produce. I personally find that when I only think a day ahead about the content for my blog that it can be difficult to build momentum in the content that I’m writing. It’s also difficult to keep coming up with topics.

A way to help overcome this is to set aside time either on a weekly or even a monthly basis to map out the direction for your content in the period ahead.

This enables you to do some brainstorming/mindmapping (see point #1 above) and set the course for your blog. Doing this takes some discipline and can feel like a chore when you sit down to do it but the result is that it gives you a lot of freedom and can take the burden of having to come up with topics from your shoulders.

I find that the months I set out a plan for the content on my blogs are much better than the months that I do not. I usually find on these months that I end up writing a series of posts and that readers really respond well to the momentum that I build.

Another spin on the idea of an editorial calendar that I know some bloggers have a lot of success with is to set different ’styles’ of posts for each day of the week. For example:

• Monday might be ‘tips’ day where you write a ‘how to’ or ‘tip’ related post
• Tuesday might be ‘review’ day where you review a product related to your topic
• Wednesday might be ‘news’ day where you summarize the latest news in your niche
• Thursday might be ‘link’ day where you link up to another blog in your niche
• Friday might be ‘opinion’ day where you express your opinion on a topic
• Saturday might be ‘reader discussion’ day where you post a question or poll for readers to interact with
• Sunday might be ‘from our archives’ day where you highlight an old post on your blog

The sky is the limit in terms of the types of posts that you write (look at the 20 types of blog posts list that I mention above for other types to consider) - the key is to find types of posts that are relevant to your topic and that readers respond well to. This might feel a little contrived or structured for some bloggers, but I find that many bloggers find it to be a freeing experience, particularly to get them through a tough period.

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How to Grow Your Blog to the Next Level With SEO

Today I want to focus upon the topic of SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

While SEO is something that is well worth while focusing upon right from the start of your blog - I’ve found that it becomes particularly important once your blog is at least a few months old. In my experience it is not until a blog is 6 to 12 months old that it really begins to grow in its authority in Google.

I will not rehash everything I know about SEO here (I’ll link to some resources at the bottom of this post) but here are just two tasks that I think established bloggers will particularly want to focus upon (I’m assuming that you’ve got some of the basics like getting titles set up right):

1. Optimizing Successful Pages on Your Blog

I mentioned this earlier in this series of posts but one of the first things to do is to identify and analyze the pages that people are arriving to your blog on from Search Engines. If you’re like most blogs you’ll find that a handful of your old posts generate a significant percentage of your search engine traffic. Identify these pages and you can then go about increasing the ranking of those pages even further in Google by doing some of the following:

• increasing keyword density of these pages - don’t add the keywords that people are searching for too many more times, but it can help to add them 1-2 times more, bold the keywords, add them to heading tags, add them to image tags etc.
• increase the internal links to these pages - if you find a page that is getting a lot of search traffic, any extra links to the page that you can generate (from both within your blog and outside it) can help its authority. You might want to even highlight some of these pages in your sidebar or navigation - or to link to them within other posts on your blog on a similar topic.

2. Create More Content on Related Search Terms

Once you start getting a handle on what type of information that people are searching for you should begin to make a list of other related topics that you might want to write about. You can get ideas from this by looking at keywords that people use to arrive on your blog and thinking about synonyms for those words but also by looking at online services likeGoogle Trends which maps what people are searching the web for.

Another good tool for analyzing search traffic and coming up with new topics to write about it 103bees which gives some metrics on the questions people are asking to find your blog. These questions are topics your readers are actually asking which shows you what they’re typing into Google. Another great tool to try is Lijit which is a search tool you can use on your blog (see it in my sidebar). This tracks what terms people are searching your blog for. The useful thing about it is that they also show you what terms people searched for that there was no search results on your blog for - very handy information.

There is A LOT more that you can do to increase the search engine authority of your blog. Part of it just comes down to writing great quality content over the long haul (which over time increases the number of doorways into your blog and grows the number of links from other sites to it) but below I’ve listed some other resources from both withinProBlogger and from SEO experts that will hopefully give you plenty of things to work on.

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Hitwise: Twitter surpasses Digg's market share

Could the odd confluence of a US Airways jet crash-landing in the Hudson River and Barack Obama's presidential inauguration finally push Twitter over the top and into the broad mainstream consciousness?

That could be the case, according to statistics released Tuesday by Hitwise, an Internet analysis firm.

Hitwise reported that as of Tuesday, Twitter, the popular microblogging service, had for the first time surpassed the market share of visits of the hit content aggregation site, Digg. 

According to Hitwise.com, the market share of the microblogging site Twitter has now caught up to that of the aggregator Digg.

(Credit: Hitwise.com)

According to Hitwise, Twitter now stands at number 84 in its Computers and Internet category, one space up the chart from Digg.

A glance at a chart tracking the share of both services reveals that Twitter has been slowly, but steadily, gaining on Digg over the last few months, finally matching--and even passing--Digg last week. Hitwise said that as of the end of last week, Twitter was netting 0.021 percent of traffic in its Computers and Internets category, just a touch up from Digg's own 0.021 percent.

Perhaps a driver that allowed Twitter to overtake Digg was the tremendous interest last week in Twitter users' reports of the US Airways crash in the Hudson. One photograph of the plane, posted to TwitPic.com, a service that allows mobile Twitter users to append photos to their tweets, was viewed so many times that it took TwitPic's servers down for a while.

Hitwise noted that the general rise of social media has fueled Twitter's recent success, with many users of the site coming from services like Facebook, or MySpace, whereas Digg's traffic comes in large part--38.8 percent last week--from Google.

But in another report issued recently, Digg still far outweighs Twitter when it comes to total users, according to Compete, a site analytics service. Compete reported that Digg had 34.4 million users as of December, while Twitter lagged far behind at 4.4 million. 

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Social Networking:New Ways to Communicate

Social networking has created new ways to communicate, share information and build online communities of users who share similar interests. These networking sites give a platform to interact with people having similar interests. Millions of people are using these sites actively. It seems that social networking will soon be an enduring part of daily life.

These online communities offer plenty of opportunities to small and big businesses owners to reach the potential customers.An excellent website which has a fair traffic would definitely wish for more and more traffic to rise above its competitors. All you need is to create accounts for a variety of social media websites. Here are few tips you should keep in mind when getting started:

• Show your expertise and build trust.
  
• Find employees and business partners in the professional networking sites mentioned below.
  
• Try to find friends and join groups in the social bookmarking sites. Participate actively by commenting and voting on others favorites/bookmarks.
  

Here are few Professional-Networking Sites :

1. MySpace,
   
2. Facebook,
   
3. Ecademy
   
4. MEETin.org
   
5. LinkedIn.
   

Largest Social Bookmarking Sites

1. digg.com
   
2. Yahoo! Buzz
   
3. Technorati.com
   
4. del.icio.us
   
5. Propeller.com
   
6. StumbleUpon.com
   
7. reddit.com
   
8. mixx.com
   
9. BlueDot.us now known as faves.com
   

Social Media Wins In Marketers' '09 Plans

Marketers are directing their 2009 budgets toward content, custom media and social media initiatives, according to a new study from online marketing resource and vendor-matching tool Junta42.
More than half--56%--of marketing and publishing decision-makers plan to increase their content marketing spending next year, Junta42 found after surveying its community of corporate marketers and publishing/agency professionals.
What's more, a full 31% expressed their intention to increase spending on content significantly, while 25% said they planned to increase it slightly.
Even in the face of dramatic cutbacks and decreased budgets, only 4% of respondents said they planned to decrease spending on content dramatically next year, while 9% said they planned to decrease it slightly.
"These findings are an acceleration of what we've been seeing for the past few years," said Joe Pulizzi, founder of Junta42 and author of "Get Content. Get Customers."
Notably, surveyed marketers were very clear that social media will be at the top of their investment list next year.
In terms of most important products/tactics, social media--other than blogs--resonated with 68% of subscribers, followed by e-newsletters/email (60%), blogs (56%), case studies (55%), online video (51% ), white papers (46%) and microsites (43%).
"If marketers will spend less in 2009, it won't be coming from their content development budgets," Pulizzi said. "More and more marketing professionals now realize that tomorrow's marketing is all about developing a conversation with customers."
The Junta42 community is made up of both corporate marketers and publishing/agency professionals. For the study, 42% were corporate marketers, 22% were traditional publishers/media, 19% were marketing/advertising agencies, 15% were custom publishers and 3% were association marketers.
In addition, 85% of the surveyed audience makes marketing purchase decisions for their organizations. The Junta42 email study was delivered during the first week of December. A total of 1706 subscribers were invited to take the study, of which 196 completed the survey.

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How to Use Blogging For Your Internet Business

The Internet has given a new face to businesses. It is infact the most advanced way to conduct business. Internet business is the latest trend and hence Internet marketing is also in high demand.

Business---attract prospects---generates traffic---leads to sales---repeat customers.

Blogs have become a boon for businesses as they are extremely low cost and very effective. This is why the business owners and managers want to establish themselves as bloggers.

Here are few tips to get your blog up:

1. Join  blogging communities: Join a couple of blogging communities and make sure you stay within your niche. Build a good reputation within these communities by making daily appearances, interest and your expertise on the product. Establishing your reputation, develop a customer relationship and then  introduce your website. They will be glad to visit your website. Offer something different as well as valuable on your website and you will see good new as well as returning visitors. In any case, one time sales will not be fruitful but ongoing customer relationships will.

1. Identify your potential audience. As in any business it is very dificult to pinpoint your audience,  same here, in blogs you have to decide what you're going to write that will make them read.

why will anybody going to read your web log?

2. Decide your blog category. Next is determining where to locate your blog. Be careful while selecting the category for you blog. Watch for features that identify recent posts and the most popular message threads. This may be helpful in building traffic

3. Start talking: To really kick start your blogging traffic, visit and read other blogs, give your own views on the topic. This will attract the other bloggers to your site .

4. Blogrolling: Only giving fresh content and updating doesn’t bring visitors to your blog, “blogrolling” is one way to get more visitors to your blog.

Building traffic between blogs gives repeat visitors. Linking on your blog site identifies other sites on the Internet - related to your business or expertise will be valuable.

Write comments about what other bloggers have written, then link to them. Thus giving hyperlink while posting comments is another way to get visitors to your blog.

5. Keywords. Search engine is another way to attract traffic. Generating traffic by adding keywords in your blog title and blog content is indeed a good strategy. Suppose, your topic focuses on seo and internet marketing courses, then the words “seo courses” and “internet marketing courses” should be in the title, in the introduction, body of the content and also in the conclusion. This may give a push to your blog site toward the head of the search engine!! Also “Stay on one topic”, so that your content is focused on keywords.

6. Keep the content fresh. Stale content can bring the best blog down. Keep your blog as fresh and current as possible. Schedule your blog posts-may be weekly, fortnight or monthly.

Keep these steps in mind and see the traffic rising :)

Newbie Blogging Strategies

Blogging can be a fun, even if you are a newbie. Give your visitors that incomparable content which they are looking for and they'll come back for more of your blogging content. Here are a few blogging strategies for the newbies:

• Unique Topic and Content: The ideas of the blog should be unique. Do not blog on general topics. There are millions of websites with millions of searches, hence your blog title should be specific.This will also give you less compitition :) But do not make your blog title so specific that you don't get any visitors :( You will have to maintain the balance here and then start. This will give you exposure to you blog site and also give free traffic to your blog. Give good, informative as well as interesting content to the visitors. The visitors are only interested in your blog if you offer incomparable content.No visitor will spend time on stale and boring content. Deliver your messeges in a natural fashion, this will make your post more enjoyable and less like work. Remember making your content entertaining to the visitor will encourage them not only to return back but also refer others to your site.
• Stick to the Topic: If your blog is about "Trip to Europe", then it should not talk about real estate news in Europe.Should stay strictly to the topic.
• Quality Vs Quantity: The visitors will only read your blog if you offer unique copy of the content. So the quality is of great significance . In order to get more and more visitors, your blog should be large with lots of keywords. In other words your blog should have high quality content.
  
• Maintain Regular Schedule: Post your blog at regular intervals. Perhaps, it may be difficult to maintain on weekly basis, you can schedule your posts once or twice a month. When you stick to the schedule the visitors will return more frequently to your blog.
• Clear and Simple Content: Your blog is read by large and varied audience, hence keep the content of your blog simple and easy to understand.
• View and Comment on other Blogs: As a newbie it is good to visit other blogs within your niche. Leaving comments and inserting your link within the signature file on other blogs is a good idea to gain visitors !
• Respond to your Readers' Comments: This gives you a platform for open communication with your readers. Taking their suggestions into consideration and improving will definitely develop a greater feeling of community amongst readers!
• Blog Review: Review few best blog within your niche on a scheduled basis.This is one of the best way for a newbie to entice new as well as old readers to your site.

Implement these blogging strategies and soon you will be a Blogging Star!