Too Busy to Blog? Save Time Blogging with These Tips

Business blogging can demonstrate your expertise in your field and can attract new clients looking to solve the kinds of problems you specialize in solving. But blogging can be hard work. Not only do you have to write posts, but you also have to post them to your blog using keywords and metadata tags to help optimize your website’s SEO. You’ll want to share your articles on social media, and possibly submit some of them as guest blogs to other websites that your prospects may already be reading to attract a new audience.

A big key to blogging is that you must publish articles on a regular frequency. It is best to start out publishing blogs less frequently than to publish a blog a week for three weeks and then to burn out, or get busy and not publish anything for two months. This can be a real challenge for small business owners and independent consultants. If you think you can realistically write one blog post a week, start with posting one every two weeks. You can write more posts, but save them in a ready to be posted status so that when your client work gets busy, you will have a backlog of posts that can be published with minimal effort. If your inventory of written but not yet published articles gets large enough, then you can easily increase the frequency to once a week. Posting regularly is more important than posting frequently as you want to ensure ongoing engagement with your readers and also indicate to search engines that your site has regularly updated content.

Here are my tips for blogging regularly, and making the process as painless as possible, and perhaps even fun.

1. Separate the different steps to creating blogs to optimize your time and energy. Brainstorming ideas for blogs, writing, editing, and posting all require different types of brain functions. Writing requires creative thinking, while editing and posting require diligence and attention to detail. It takes practice to not edit while you are writing, but doing so will improve your posts and be less draining and more fun.
2. Hire an editor. Your biggest value added is likely in creating ideas for posts, and in writing them. I can write a post on a topic that I know a lot about very quickly, but I struggle sometimes to ensure my posts are clear enough to be understood by a layperson. For this, I hire an editor. This makes blogging so much easier and is fun for me because I get to just write.
3. Consult with an SEO expert. This may sound expensive, but you can do this effectively with a few hundred dollars. Hire someone with SEO tools who can research and provide you with the keywords that you should be using to attract your ideal clients. A good SEO consultant should interview you to understand your business and your offerings and then research competitors and your marketspace on the internet and suggest the keywords that will get you the most traffic. You won’t want to stuff an article full of keywords indiscriminately, but having a list of keywords that goes along with the variety of topics you will write about will make your blogs more findable, and more valuable to you and your prospective clients. I would not suggest you do this yourself. SEO consultants have tools and experience that goes beyond what a typical business owner can do on their own, and a good one can provide great value in a handful of hours.
4. Use a visual blog tracking board to help blogs flow from idea to being read by your target audience (Example below). There are countless small steps to getting blogs onto the screens of your readers. You don’t want to have to remember them all, and you want to do them consistently. Having a standard process and a kanban type system can ensure consistency, frequency, and peace of mind as you work on your blog. I use a Cardsmith visual blog tracking board. You can find a template board and then make it your own. It provides a place to brainstorm ideas, prioritize ideas, and tracks all of the small details as well as gives you a visual indication of what you need to be focusing on: — write more blogs, get more ideas, locate images, or post more on social media. This video will demonstrate the details of the Cardsmith Visual Blog Tracker.
5. Consider alternate platforms for your content. Creating a blog on your own website is the obvious choice, but platforms like LinkedIn or Medium also offer long-form content, and writing there allows for new audiences to discover you. Think about who your ideal audience is and where they are frequently on the web, and craft a strategy appropriate for your business. You can publish on these platforms in addition to your own website, but you’ll want to disclose that it is previously published content.

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