Here is the truth of the matter… blogging just isn’t for everybody. It’s “easy” from a technical aspect but it’s hard work in that you need to be consistent to see any significant results from all your hard work. True, you can hire writers if you wish to (and there is certainly nothing wrong with that) but if that’s the direction you wish to take things then you’ll be approaching blogging from a different business model perspective which is not what we’re covering here.
Regularly Scheduled Program
Writing a good blog post can spark interest in your readers. You need to produce content at a regular enough schedule that your loyal reader-base will have something to rely on when they wish to come back to your blog to “catch up” on the latest post or article produced by you. Doing this ensures that things work more smoothly and there’s a higher chance on those days you’re known to produce new stuff there may be a small influx of traffic… not always but if you happen to make regular announcements this could be the case.
Reliable Contact
Once your blog has carved out it’s own space within your chosen niche you will find that people might begin to reach out to you for various things. This of course depends on if you happen to keep it regularly updated, produce at least decent content and make your brand (if you wish to create one) seem friendly and approachable. Every niche is different, every aspect will have variations on how they should be handled but the overall concept will always be the same. Your blog should feel like a source of solid information as well as a place where your readers can feel welcome to visit and those who also happen to be in the same industry as you can approach you for partnerships and networking. One of the most powerful things you could possibly do for yourself is network with others who you can find a mutual business relationship with.
A Reasonable Blogging Schedule
If you’re blogging you probably rely on SEO to some extent and keeping a regular schedule helps with that. If you keep a regular posting schedule you stand a good chance of seeing much more steady traffic… somewhere to the tune of 25% or more vs. not keeping a regular posting schedule. Luckily SEO isn’t the only way to get traffic to your blog (as was discussed in part 2 of this 3 part series) but it certainly helps a lot.
Think about this for a moment… writer’s block is a thing and it plagues us all. How much easier would it make your life if you could just sit down one day and plot out a bunch of topics for the entire month, put them on a calender or something and then use that as your guide to research material and finally write those articles as needed. It makes things a lot easier, trust me on this one coming from a blogger himself!
How frequent should you post, what should your schedule actually look like? Well, it depends on you really:
- What can you keep up with?
- How long does it take you to research and then write an article?
- Can you keep up with your schedule without burning out?
- How much time do you need between posts to allow them to rank from SEO?
- How long do you wish to give readers time to interact with posts until the next?
- Literally anything else you can think of which requires time.
Let’s say for example you rely on social media to garner traffic. How much time seems effective to let people retweet your stuff? What about Facebook engagements and possibly other sources of traffic, it all adds up and it all takes some amount of time. You aren’t expected to know this upfront and honestly nobody can outright tell you how long to expect these things to take… it’s trial and error and just doing it for yourself and collecting data over time.
Let’s Talk PAID Traffic
You are not restricted to only free traffic. Sure it’s the cheapest way and a very good way to start but after you have been doing this a while you will discover that you’ll know how much you average in revenue per month and can then come up with a paid traffic strategy to really ramp things up.
Your blog should already be making you some form of revenue before you jump into paid traffic because things can get expensive quick if you don’t already have something in place to offset your ad-costs. This is something we teach in our affiliate training program, the subject of paid traffic and how to do it right… but for now it’s not the focus. It’s more just something to keep in mind until you’re ready for it.
Build An Email List!
I can’t stress this enough but if you’re not building a list then you are missing out on a massive opportunity to control your own source of traffic. There are so many ways to do this and for various reasons such as:
- Simply getting more regular traffic flowing to your blog
- Promoting various offers as an affiliate
- Starting a Newsletter (which could be used to strike up deals with advertisers)
- Basically anything you can think of to help monetize your list in an ethical way.
I just had to throw this in the mix, having a list of subscribers is a powerful thing so don’t pass this one up no matter what, you should always be working on building a list if you’re going into business.
How To Schedule WordPress Posts
It’s honestly really simple to do this manually… there are plugins which allow you to do this a bit more hands-off but we’ll leave that up to you to discover since it’s so easy to do this the default way.
Writing a good blog post, this will take however long it takes… something to consider is that you’re not bound to ONLY long-form articles such as the one you’re reading right now, this is just the style of blog we prefer here. You can do anything you like!
- Videos with a blurb to introduce it
- Resource / Link roundups (collecting helpful resources and sharing inside a list)
- Interviews of others in your market/niche
- A good old fashioned podcast! (This can be video or audio)
- Infographics or Slideshow presentations
There’s no limit to what you choose to do with your blog, it’s yours after all. You can mix and match different elements for best results or stick with a certain form factor and just go with that, it’s all up to you and what you want to accomplish with your blog’s results.
So… as I was saying.
Create your blog and when it’s ready to post simply change the date & time through the “publish” feature on the right-hand-side of the post page withing your WordPress Dashboard.
Change the date to whatever you wish as illustrated below then click “ok”…
Then simply click the button which should now say “schedule” instead of “post”.
It’s honestly just as simple as that. Doing things this way will allow you to “set & forget” your blogs once they are written. This method of scheduling posts is best suited for when you have an actual schedule produced which you can track things on. You’ll be able to Mark down what day a particular post is meant to go out, what the name of that post is and anything else you consider important for your records to keep track.
Alternatively you can just write up a bunch of posts and let them sit in “draft” mode so they’re ready to launch at a moment’s notice by just clicking that ‘publish’ button and making them go live. This is a much more relaxed way of doing things and it works well for many… just keep in mind it’s also easy to let many posts build up and some may become “old news” if you let them sit for too long depending on your niche market.
In Conclusion
Blogging is still very much alive and well. For however long people will continue to learn the skill of reading and writing blogging will remain relevant and anyone who says different simply doesn’t understand how to do it or they want you to think blogging is dead for some reason… don’t let them fool you.
We teach a number of strategies for generating traffic as well as how to optimally monetize that traffic in our official members only training course. If you’d like to have a look at what we offer for yourself with no obligation to you then have a look and see. The link to our homepage is in the logo just below… Or you can Click Here
You can find part 1 of this 3-part series right here: Click This Link
