How to blog and keep blogging can be a big challenge for everyone placing their blog at the heart of their content strategy.
Advertising and traditional methods of getting and sustaining the attention of your target audience are no longer the most efficient and effective ways of building that essential trust and engagement in the long term. They give you short bursts of attention but it’s almost impossible, with the noise of the digital world, to see advertising and traditional marketing as a long term option.
So now we can include the art of how to blog and keep blogging at the centre of our marketing and communications. Whether we are a therapist, creative, designer, musician, artist, accountant or travel agent, we all need to understand how to blog and importantly, how to keep blogging.
The blog is an essential and regular window into your world and trust me, everyone is interested in you, whatever you think!
Most successful bloggers, when they set out on the content production journey, didn’t understand how to blog and certainly how to keep blogging.
The art, or some would say science, of how to blog and keep blogging is about having a clear and inspirational single theme. You might have a passion for creating small model cars, or your life passion might be sharing the experiences of your world travels. No matter how small or large, glamorous or humble, if you understand your single theme then you have the clothes rail from which you can hang your blog content, the articles you produce.
With the clothes rail theme always in your mind, you can now start to build a pot of ideas. Titles for articles, images that support your ideas, and importantly, somewhere to store your ideas as you think of them, even if blogging isn’t possible in those moments. Evernote or the notes facility on your smartphone could be useful repositories for your ideas and images. Get obsessive about capturing these things, in the moment, because you’ll always need new ideas and inspiration to avoid the dreaded writers’ block.
And then it’s about just starting. Don’t expect millions of adoring followers and fans in your early days. What’s important is that YOU enjoy the process, and think of it as providing a therapy of sorts, a wonderful journal on which you can reflect in the future, or a creative outlet. Whatever works for you. Blogs must be your joy and this will ensure that you begin to attract like-minded others.
Turning your blog from art into a science comes a little later when you begin to watch the effects your blogs have on your audience, how they respond and engage and what resonates the most. It’s about balance and staying true to your clothes rail. Reveal great things, surprise, intrigue, you decide. But in time, monitor what works and what doesn’t and you’ll fine tune the outcomes and begin to deliver the results you dreamed about.
Through 2019 you’ll see an evolution of MY blogs from purely marketing into mindfulness, sustainability, ethics and helping people and their businesses to become more sustainable, mindful and profitable… awakening the potential within (there’s my clothes rail). I feel passionately about this evolution and will share ideas, thoughts, interviews and discussions by written word, podcast and video. These are exciting times and I too am on the journey of figuring out how to blog and keep blogging.
