When you have a blog, one of the main goals should always be to keep it up to date with fresh, relevant and exciting content. That brings people back to the blog time and time again, it helps the search engines to re-crawl through your site, thus increasing SEO capabilities and visibility, and it keeps you engaged in the blogging process too.
But for this to work, you need to make sure that you are actually producing enough content for the blog. And as it happens, it can be hard to know whether you are or not. Here, we will look into some of the ways you can determine whether you are writing enough blog content, and discover some solutions if you find that you aren’t.
How Much Content Do You Need To Start A Blog?
When you are first starting out, you might find yourself wondering just how much content you need just to get going. A lot of the received wisdom around this says that you should have at least a few backup pieces ready to go so that you are starting off on a strong foot. That is not a bad idea, but how many backup pieces should you actually aim to have?
While there is no single right answer to this – after all, it depends on what your business plan is, how much you are able to write in a week, and what your time commitments are – a good rule of thumb might be that you should have around 4-6 short form blog posts ready to go when you launch your blog.
Then you can plan these into your schedule from day one, ensuring that you have a plan for keeping the blog up to date and giving yourself a head start on creating even more content later on for the blog.
Finding Ideas
Of course, to be able to do that, you need to have come up with a few strong ideas that you are genuinely excited about, and this is part of the process that a lot of people find quite tough to begin with. It’s a good idea to spend some time brainstorming as many blog posts as you can. A good approach to this is to do some thorough keyword research, and then think of some click-friendly blog titles incorporating those keywords, which you feel you could write content about.
Aim to have around 50+ blog titles in mind before you do anything else. Then you can simply pick out a few that are particularly attractive and start writing those pieces. Before you know it, you might have those 4-6 that you ideally need in order to start your blog.
But the quality of those pieces turns out to be important, too.
Writing Useful & Engaging Content
The way in which you write is really important in all this. It’s no use to anyone to simply stuff a bunch of keywords together in the hopes of gaining attention. What really works for SEO purposes and for making your readers want to come back for more, is to provide genuinely useful and interesting content that people want to read.
At the very least, you should ensure that your blog post answers the query that the keyword relates to. You should also not be afraid of long-form answers, where you go into detail around the subject in general – research has shown that these are often some of the most popular blog posts of all, despite what many assume about attention spans on the internet.
As long as the content you are producing is engaging and useful, your readers will love it – and so will the search engines.
Utilising Guest Posts
Even if you are a true word whizz, it can be tough work to write thousands of words a week of high-quality, engaging content. That’s where guest posts come in. Many bloggers make use of guest posting to ensure that their blogs are always kept updated, and also to provide some interesting variety within their niche, or even as a way of opening up into related, similar niches.
If that sounds attractive to you, there are plenty of ways to find guest posters. You can contact some bloggers whom you know and admire, or put out an open call for guest posts which you can put on your blog itself, or on your social feeds. Or for an easier experience, you can simply use this guest post service, which will match your blog up with a writer to get a piece written for your blog.
However you do it, it’s definitely a good idea to make use of guest posts if you are keen on keeping your blog updated while lessening your own workload.
Create A Content Calendar
One of the simple tricks that can really help you out, in the long run, is to create a content calendar for your blog. With this, you can outline how many pieces you are going to publish on your blog, along with an idea of when you will publish them. You can then have something to work to, and a kind of soft deadline – which will become a lot more important once you actually have readers clamouring to read your posts! This can help a lot of bloggers to keep on writing, and it is a really important tool that everyone should try.
Bear in mind you don’t have to produce a huge amount once you have got your blog up and running. A lot of bloggers don’t post any more than once a week, and still manage to grow the blog, gain a readership, and make money from the process. So it’s important that you don’t burn yourself out in the process of trying to produce enough content.
With all that in mind, you should be able to produce plenty of good content for your blog. The result will be an SEO-friendly blog that readers return to, and which they share with their friends and associates.
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