Six tips for easier and more effective blogging...

Just published this on e-Cademy in answer to a question, thought it should be on here too. It is a few ideas that I like to use, and which may help make your blogging easier and more effective....

1. Subscribe to "Google Alerts" for a couple of key-phrases related to your area of interest. For example if I were doing SEO for a cornish hotel I might subscribe to an alert for "Hotel Cornwall", "Tourism South West England" or similar. Then each day or week (as I choose) I get an alert telling me any sites which have added new content on my topic. I can quickly click through to those sites and see what they are writing about. (Incidentally I did find at one point that by subscribing to an alert for just "Cornwall", most of the information that arrived was either about Camilla Duchess of, or news about the quangos that seem so common in this part of the world!)

2. If I really like an article and I blog through "blogger.com" (which is a very easy and free one to use) I can right click on text in the article, select "send to / blog", and the content will be instantly added to my blog as a new post. What - isn't that plagiarism? No its the food on which the web thrives - linking. The publisher has given me some relevant content for my blog, but I have given them a link back to theirs. Its a fair trade from which both of us benefit.

3. If I really like the content from another blog I can subscribe to its RSS feed, and get all its new stories. These may either be published on my blog, or sent to my inbox just to keep me up to date.

4. However your blog still needs some unique content - you can't survive only on linking in to relevant content from elsewhere. When your Google alert arrives and the post you see provokes a thought that you can see may be of interest to your readers, then write. At the end of the day it is only your self-discipline that will get you regularly writing original posts and truly feeding your market (or potential market) with quality, original content.

5. Now back to the Google alert. Once you have some original content posted in your blog and used a few other techniques to get the traffic and subscribers coming, you may start to get back Google alerts of your own content. The ultimate validation of your own content is when hundreds of other sites begin to link to it, propelling your blog and your business to the top of Google for your key-phrases. The alerts will tell you when those back-links start to come - its a good feeling!

6. I'd finally like to refer you to my recent blog post about the power of high quality blogging content, and the man that made it work with spectacular results. This type of writing is one example of what is called "Link Bait", but its well worth understanding how that works: The power of high quality internet content - Channel Computing blog.

Hope that lot makes your blogging a little easier and more effective, there's certainly few ways of keeping up with latest developments as easily.

Good luck,
Pete