A Six-Step Plan for Faster, Easier Writing - DailyBlogTips

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A Six-Step Plan for Faster, Easier Writing Posted: 03 Jun 2014 06:13 AM PDT The faster you can write, the greater the results you'll see as a blogger. Let's say you have six hours a week, and in those six hours, you normally manage to write three posts – averaging two hours per post. You publish two of them on your blog and use one as a guest post. That's not bad, but what if you could double your output and write six posts instead of three? You might choose to publish slightly more on your blog (e.g. three posts not two), and you'd also be able to produce three guest posts every week. So how can you double your writing speed? Just follow this step by step plan. Step #1: Come Up With Lots of Ideas at Once One of the biggest time-wasters for many bloggers is struggling to come up with an idea. You might find yourself sitting staring at the screen, doodling on a bit of paper, or starting off a post only to decide the idea wasn't great after all. When you have a good idea, though, it's often really easy to race through your post – it almost seems to write itself. There's a really simple solution here, and it's to come up with your ideas ahead of time. Set aside 30 minutes to come up with at least ten ideas, preferably more. You'll find that once you start jotting down your ideas, they come faster and faster. Step #2: Give One Day a Theme If you're posting more than once a week, choose a special theme for a particular day. E.g. some bloggers have Friday as a "roundup" day where they write about great posts from within their industry. You might have noticed that we've recently started a "Bad SEO Practices" series on Mondays. This makes it easier for me to plan content – and though you might think it'd make it harder to come up with ideas, the truth is that when you give yourself constraints (like a specific topic to stick to), you'll find that you're more creative. Your themes could be temporary and run for a few weeks, or they could be permanent and run consistently throughout the lifespan of your blog. Step #3: Find the Right Time and Place to Write Writing is a high-energy activity, and one that it's very easy to procrastinate over. It really helps to find out when in the day you're at your best. For me, it's generally mornings – you might be a night owl or an afternoon person, though. As well as finding the right time, experiment with using different places to write. Perhaps you normally sit on the sofa to blog on your laptop – but you're often distracted by the TV, or by family members wanting to chat to you. Maybe getting out to a coffee shop, or writing in a bedroom with the door shut, could make all the difference. Step #4: Stay Focused When You're Writing One tempting but dangerous mistake is to get distracted while writing a blog post. I completely understand why this happens (it happens to me too!) – you might get stuck, or feel tired, and it's all too easy to flick open a browser and check Facebook or see what's new on BuzzFeed. Alternatively, you might have Skype and your inbox open as you write your post, so you're distracted with messages from friends that you want to reply to quickly. This can dramatically slow down your writing. Not just because you're spending time doing something else – but also because every time you switch your focus away from your writing, you make it hard to get back into the flow. Most people can't focus for long periods of time, so try writing in short bursts of 20 – 45 minutes. (You might like to use the Pomodoro technique.) You'll probably surprise yourself with how much more productive you can be. Step #5: Don't Edit and Write at the Same Time As much as you can, avoid trying to edit while you're writing. Sure, you might need to backspace once in a while to fix a typo – but if you find yourself deleting and reworking whole sentences, you're slowing down your writing a lot. Also, it's tough to see the big picture when you're still adding in all the details: once your post is finished, you'll have a much better sense of whether that sentence should stay or go. If you can, try to edit a day after drafting your post – you'll come to it fresh, you'll be more likely to spot mistakes, and you may well find that the post as a whole is better than you initially thought. Step #6: Create a Personal Pre-Publication Checklist There are often a bunch of little tasks to do when you're getting your post ready for publication, and if you find yourself struggling to remember these (or going back after publishing it to fix them), it can bog you down. The easiest solution here is to create a personal checklist that includes anything you need to do once your post is written and edited. For instance, these are a few things you might include: Add a "more" link so only the first few paragraphs show on the front page. Put subheadings into the correct format. Add bold text to pull out key points. Include at least one link to a relevant post in the archives. Check that there's a call to action at the end. You don't have to master all these six steps at once – even if you can manage just two or three of them, you should see a clear improvement in your writing speed. If one of these worked especially well for you, or if you have a different step to add, just drop a comment below.   Wanna learn how to make more money with your website? Check the Online Profits training program!

Bad SEO Practices #2: Article Marketing Sites / Article Directories Posted: 02 Jun 2014 08:35 AM PDT In case you missed it, here’s the first post in this series: Bad SEO Practices #1: Buying and Selling Links. Have you come across article marketing? It means writing for sites like Ezine Articles, which are a repository of articles that anyone can republish – so long as they keep the author's bio box in place. (You might hear these called "article directories.") Back in 2008 when I started blogging, I spent a bit of time writing ten or so articles. They sent me a bit of traffic, though nothing spectacular. More importantly, they helped me get links from other people's newsletters ("ezines") and websites. The drawback to this was that many of the pieces on article marketing sites weren't particularly good … plus there's not much value for readers in the same article being repeated across multiple different websites. Back in 2011, EzineArticles was hit hard by Google's algorithm update (along with plenty of other article directories). And over the past couple of years, SEO experts from sites like Search Engine Watch and Moz have spoken out against article marketing, saying that it might harm your search engine rankings. Right now, you'll be wasting your time submitting to article marketing sites. There are plenty of better places to focus your efforts (like writing unique, value-packed guest posts for major sites in your niche). Even worse, the links you get from article directories may actively harm your Google rankings. And of course, when anyone can reprint your work, you might find it popping up on spammy sites or even on your competitors' blogs. Do you really want that? Article marketing may have worked six years ago, but it doesn't work today. If you're doing it, stop wasting your time. If it's something you've been thinking about, don't bother.   Wanna learn how to make more money with your website? Check the Online Profits training program!

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ProBlogger: Theme Week: Publish Your Blog Post Without SEO, and 1000s of Visits Will Be Forever Lost

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Theme Week: Publish Your Blog Post Without SEO, and 1000s of Visits Will Be Forever Lost Posted: 02 Jun 2014 09:44 AM PDT We welcome Rand Fishkin to the ProBlogger Theme Week today to talk us through all things SEO. While this week we’re exploring all the things you can do with a post after you hit “publish”, Rand is reminding is to take a second before we do and have a look at the things you can do to optimize your post before it even gets into the hands of your readers. For days, you’ve been agonizing over this post. The hours of guilt for not starting it sooner, the toil of finding the right topic, the relentless editing and re-editing, and now, at long last, the publish button is there, tempting you to end the struggle and at last declare this tiny battle over. (above: the blogger’s tantalizer, teaser, needler, and tormenter) If you give in to that sweet release, it will feel good, at least for a little while. But in the months and years to come, you’ll look back at that post and, perhaps in revery, read it again, and think to yourself: “That was a really excellent post I published. Why has it had so little success?” It started so well. The post had some retweets on Twitter. It got shared and liked a few times on Facebook. Maybe it even got a bit of traffic from Google+ or Pinterest. But, then, the traffic stopped. Your post wasn’t “new” anymore, and the web world, it seemed, no longer cared for something more than 24 hours ago. In fact, the data backs this up – social sharing half-lives across networks are <7 hours. There is another way. The vast majority of content consumed on the web isn’t actually found through social media. In fact, the largest driver of traffic to web content (outside of direct navigation) is still the same source it was 3, 5, and 10 years ago, and remarkably, in spite (or perhaps in part because) of the rise of social & mobile, this source is still growing. You’ll probably recognize it: Search, and Google in particular (with 90% of worldwide share), still drive vastly greater quantities of traffic than all the social networks combined (some good research from DefineMG here). Given Google’s 3.5+ Billion searches performed each day, that shouldn’t be a surprise, but to many bloggers, thinking about search, Google, and all that “SEO stuff” has been put aside in favor of Facebook shares, likes, tweets, +1s, and the more visible feedback and applause that come from social sources. That bias is understandable – a visit from a Google search doesn’t have a fancy embeddable counter you can show off. 30,000 visits a month from search engines doesn’t carry nearly the same social proof that 30,000 Twitter followers does. But, it should. The vast majority of visitors who come via social have a browsing-focused intent. They’re looking for something interesting, distracting, temporal, and, only rarely, directly or immediately applicable to an activity that will lead to them accomplishing the goals you’re hoping for on your website (a subscription to your posts, a following of your social accounts, purchasing your products, etc). On the other hand, searchers know exactly what they want and when they want it – right now. Almost no searches are entirely serendipitous, but most every social visit is entirely so. A searcher is seeking to find information, accomplish a task, or transact in some way right this minute. That’s why they performed a query. If your blog post (and your website, more broadly) helps them achieve this goal, the value of that visit to both parties can be fantastic. Here’s the tragedy: When you look over those past posts, you might realize that yes, dammit! It’s time to do some SEO! No more ignoring Google, Bing, Yahoo, and the rest. But, sadly, that ship has probably sailed. One of the harsh truths of blog-focused SEO is that a few hours after a post is published, 90%+ of the ranking ability is spent. Sure, you could go back and tweak some titles, language use, or even URLs (depending on your CMS), but those don’t have a good chance of helping the post perform moving forward. It’s that first burst of activity – of social sharing and people emailing it around and links coming in – that set the stage for ranking success in the search engines. The words, particularly the title, of the post are how others will describe it when they share, link, tweet, and pin. Those words are strong signals to search engines of how and whether to include your page in the search results. Likeiwse, the first few hours are when you’re most likely to earn that attention and awareness of potential linkers. Links are still a huge part of how search engine algorithms rank pages, and without them, you’ll usually struggle to perform. Both of these are short-lived opportunities on which you need to execute if you’re going to have SEO success with your blog. Thankfully, you can resolve to make this a priority in the future. It may sound like a bad infomercial, but you can substantially upgrade your blog’s SEO potential with less than 5 minutes per post. Here’s how: Step 1: Keyword Research Step 2: Post Title & Body Content Inclusion Step 3: A Teensy Bit of Proactive Outreach Step 1: Keyword Research Earning additional search visits from the content your blog produces over a long streth means ranking for a keyword term or phrase that gets at least a few queries each month. You probably don’t want to tackle competitive phrases where you’ve got little chance to rank on page 1, but you also don’t want to to be ranking brilliantly for a search term no one ever types. In general, phrases with fewer searches are going to be less competitive (if you want to get more data-driven about analyzing the relative difficulty of ranking for a keyword, there’s a tool for that). Google’s Keyword Planner Tool is still the best one out there to show relative volume levels. Here’s what it looks like: I plugged in a few possible searches related to the post you’re reading now (which is, in a very meta way, about doing SEO for blog posts). The suggestions you see above are what Google’s keyword tool returned. They expanded on a few of my ideas and showed me some terms I wouldn’t have otherwise thought to put in. But, before we go further, there’s four important points to be wary of when you’re looking at the Keyword Planner: A) These aren’t ALL the terms and phrases Google knows are related to your keyword(s). For whatever reason, they’re not comprehensive and, on any given search, may omit numerous good options. This is why it pays to refine and rerun once or twice, and to expand your brainstorm list of terms. It’s also why I’ll suggest using another methodology in combination with Keyword Planner below. B) The numbers you see are not accurate. We’ve seen them show numbers that are 1/4 of the actual searches for a term and we’ve seen them show 4X the real figure. What is useful are the relative quantities. If Keyword Planner says term XYZ gets twice the searches that term ABC gets, you can be fairly sure that XYZ > ABC. Don’t panic about choosing a term with only 10 or 20 searches/month. These low numbers are actually where we see the least competition and the least accuracy from Google in under-reporting real volume. C) This “competition” does not refer to how hard it might be to rank in the organic results for a given keyword. Keyword Planner is showing a competition level that’s related to AdWords bids and how many campaigns are targeting these terms. Don’t be too discouraged if it says “medium” or “high” as the organic results won’t always reflect what the paid ads do. D) Likewise, the cost column can be mostly ignored when thinking about SEO. The one area it can be helpful is to provide a sense of how transactional in nature the search query is, and the value of that traffic to others. If you’re thinking about offering ads on your blog, for example, you might want to note how much advertisers are paying to be in front of searchers for a keyword related to your topic(s). The other keyword research source I’d encourage you to pursue is Google’s autosuggest. It often illuminates keyword ideas that you may not have seen through AdWords Planner. In fact, some of the best terms and phrases to target are those Keyword Planner hasn’t listed, but autosuggest does (this is because many other SEO-focused content creators have likely missed them). Start typing, but don’t hit enter! Step 2: Post Title & Body Content Inclusion Once you’ve found a few keywords that might work, modify your blog post’s title to include it if you can. For example, when I started drafting this post, I titled it “Publish Now And 1000s of Visits Will Be Forever Lost.” It had a catch and it matched the tone I was aiming for with the piece, but it didn’t target any of those lovely keywords that can help it potentially earn visits for years to come. So I thought up three more: Publish Your Blog Post Without SEO, and 1000s of Visits Will Be Forever Lost Your Amazing Blog Post – SEO = 1000s of Lost Visits These Simple SEO Blogging Tips Will Save You 1000s of Lost Visits Even though I don’t like #3, it’s probably the best optimized title (note that Google is pretty smart these days about interpreting modifications of words like “blog” and “blogging” that have the same meaning/intent). But, that doesn’t mean I’ll choose it. As I noted above, a lot of a post’s potential success is based on its ability to get in front of the right eyeballs. A title that’s optimized for keyword placement but doesn’t resonate with social sharers and potential linkers isn’t worth compromising for. Instead, I’d go with #1 or #2 and I happened to like #1 just a bit better. The only other part of this step is to make sure the post itself has at least a mention or two of the target keyword phrase and is actually about that topic (nothing infuriates searchers more than discovering a page ranking in Google that’s not actually about what they wanted – and those user/usage metrics will, eventually, hurt your rankings). Step 3: A Teensy Bit of Proactive Outreach Chances are that when writing your post, you mentioned someone, used a graphic or image from somewhere else, linked to some reference-worthy content on another site, or called out a service or organization in some way. If you believe there’s any chance that they (the referenced party) would be interested in reading what you’ve written about them, don’t be shy – let them know. Twitter makes this incredibly easy (and Google+, too, for those of you using that service). In this post, for example, I referenced a study from Bit.ly, some search stats from Statcounter, and a great post from Define Media Group. Immediately upon hitting publish, I should tweet, G+, and/or email all three of them and say thanks, making sure to point them in the direction of this post. Maybe they’ll share it, maybe they won’t, but they’ll know I appreciate their work, and that goodwill might be valuable in the future, too. Likewise, if I know there’s a few people in my network or among those that I follow/interact with on social media or the offline world who might benefit from or enjoy this post, I should drop them a line, too. This might be 30 seconds of thinking about who to contact and another 2 minutes sending the messages, but the reward for that effort could mean the difference between a post that spreads, earns links, and ranks, and one that falls into the tragic “Flatline of Nope.” ———– A few last pieces of advice: Don’t worry too much about targeting a keyword phrase in more than one post. If at first you don’t succeed, try again! Google has no penalty for a blog that publishes 3-4 posts all chasing the same keyword. The only time I might not do this is if you’re already ranking very well for a term/phrase, in which case, I’d consider updating the old post vs. writing a completely new one. Updating & re-publishing can be a super power! If you’ve got a post that did well, but didn’t quite make it to the first page of results, consider revising it, adding in the most modern information, and publishing a new post to replace the old one. You can use a 301 redirect or rel=canonical tag to point search engines from the old version to the new one. If you need inspiration for titles or content in niches where you think there’s just nothing exciting to write about, I can’t recommend Buzzsumo enough. Give the tool a spin with a few searches related to your potential topics and you’ll see what I mean. Not every post needs to be or should be SEO-targeted. Writing for your audience, for yourself, or simply to court serendipity is a wonderful thing. But every few posts (or at least every few dozen), think about all those poor souls who are searching and finding none of your amazing work – do it for them :-) p.s. A couple years ago, I created a presentation centered around my love for bloggers and blogging entitled: How to Earn Traffic Without Selling Your Soul. If you’re worried that SEO means sacrificing the beauty of your work, check it out – it may just restore your faith that the two can live in harmony. Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger Theme Week: Publish Your Blog Post Without SEO, and 1000s of Visits Will Be Forever Lost

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