One of the most common problems with writing a blog is generating enough content to keep on blogging! Even if you’re a daily journal type blogger (like me), sometimes there just isn’t anything new to say. So what do you do? Well, I think blogging is a pretty personal thing, and you’ll have to come up with your own solution, ultimately, but I can tell you what I do.
1. Always remember What Not to Post. This can be hard, especially if the only things you have to post about are on your personal list of Things I Will Not Post About. But do not stray. You’ll regret it in the long run.
2. Brainstorm some post ideas. At first, especially if you’re writing a topical blog, the ideas will be fast and furious. Capture as many of them as you can, maybe in a Word Doc, maybe as a draft post, but don’t use them all right away. Schedule them for regular intervals. After the first round dries up, you’ll have to practice some other techniques for generating post ideas. One of my favorites is mind mapping. Pro Blogger takes you through the mind mapping process for generating blog post ideas.
3. Make an editorial schedule. You’ll probably want to do this first, before you’ve even launched your blog, but if you have an established blog, it’s never too late to implement. My schedule is Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and I have a list of blog ideas covering as many weeks in advance as possible. I’m not completely tied to the list, in case something cool happens that I have to blog about instead, but at least I avoid blogger’s block completely, and always have something to write about! I use an Excel spreadsheet to do this, but you could use anything you like: calendaring software, Word doc, or even just draft posts in your blog platform.
How about you? How do you keep on keepin’ on with your blogging? Give me some more ideas in the comments!
Back in the early days of blogging, circa December 2000, you could pretty much get away with saying anything, because nobody knew what the heck a blog was anyway. Wanna trash your family? Sure! Want to complain about your job? Right on.
But, people, you can’t do that anymore! Blogging is in the public now, and your blog is not hard to find. If, like me, you’re using your blog as a marketing tool, it’s all the easier for people to find it and to link it with you.
All of that means that you need to think about your blogging a little more, and be a little careful about what you’re saying. I can see some of you writhing under the restrictions already. If you’re the kind of person that has to say what you have to say, and damn the consequences, this is going to be hard for you. You might consider starting an anonymous blog (although what’s the fun of a blog if you can’t share it with the people you know?) or a password-protected blog.
For those of you that are braving the public and attributable blog, though, here are my suggestions on What Not to Post:
- Anything you don’t want your boss to read.
- Anything you don’t want your mom to read.
- Embarrassing photos of anyone who could beat you up.
- Stories involving your friends that they didn’t say you could post. Otherwise, they’ll end all conversations with you with the phrase, “But don’t put that on your blog!”
- Stuff you’ll wish you could take back later. Teh Internets remembers everything.
Good and scared now? Then my job here is done. 
Go forth and post!
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a term that gets thrown around a lot in the webmaster world. Basically, SEO is a process by which you make your website more easily searchable by the big searchy types (Google, Yahoo, MSN) and get a better rank on those search results pages. SEO experts will have you believe that you need said experts to optimize your site for you or you are DOOMED to a crappy page rank and no search engine hits ever, so help them God.
That is not necessarily true. I know I’m going to have angry SEO experts sending me nasty emails for this, but I think Search Engine Optimization is largely a racket. You do not need an entire company to make your site searchable. You just don’t.
There are many things you can do on your own to make your site searchable, and, at the same time, make it a better site for your visitors.
So here’s Sonja’s SEO Guide for the Rest of Us:
Get someone to link to your homepage. A lot of times, that’s your publisher. If you have a profile on your publisher’s site, make sure it links back to your site. Once you are linked from another site, the search engines can automatically find you. This goes for all your other places on the web too. Have a MySpace page? Make sure you link back to your homepage. A blog? Same thing. A word of caution though: beware of big sites whose main purpose is a “link exchange.” If you are linked from a page a search engine has classified as a bad apple, it may actually hurt your page rank.
Put titles on your pages. Look at the top of your browser window right now and you will see a title in the bar at the very top that says Promo-Ho.com or Promo-Ho.com: SEO Guide for the Rest of Us. That is your title and it is very important. If you are using a blog platform, this is likely the blog title you submitted when you set yourself up for the first time. If you are designing a website, your editing program should have a title input space. Never leave that space blank! Be sure your title is concise and appropriate. For example, the title on my author page is Sonja Foust, Romance Author. If you have a particular genre you write in, you might use that instead: Jane Doe, Historical Romance Author, for example. Why are titles so important? This is the first thing people will see when they search for your site as the big, bold, linked piece of text. In addition, search engines look at titles first to judge the contents of your site.
Use as much text as you can. Some web designers love Flash (fancy animations) and graphics and lots of other fancy stuff, and that’s fine to an extent, but search engine “crawlers” (the little robots who circulate around the internet and read every website ever created) can’t read Flash and graphics. If you can make it work, your navigation menu should be text rather than graphics, or at least have an “alt” tag that matches the text of your graphic. (Your web designer will know what that means.) Use as much text as you can in the content of your pages too, rather than pictures, and when you do have pictures, don’t forget to descriptively “alt” tag them.
Have a clear navigation design. This will involve a menu running across the top or along the side of your page, most likely. Every page should be reachable from at least one static (unchanging) text link. Usually, that means the menu on each page should look exactly like the menus on all the other pages. If you have graphics in use for your menu bar, you may choose to do a duplication of your menu bar along the bottom as text, as I’ve done on my site.
Make your content good. Google says, “Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it” (Webmaster Guidelines). Your bio is a good place to do this. “My name is Jane Doe and I write historical romances with mysterious twists,” will do better than, “My name is Jane Doe and I’m a mother of three,” when someone searches for a historical mystery, for example.
Use meta tags. If you’re not a web designer and you have no idea what meta tags are, don’t run screaming yet. They’re pretty easy. Meta tags go in the head section of your document. You’ll have to look at the HTML code of your site, and then insert appropriate tags as explained at Google Help. Don’t fret, though. If this is something you don’t feel like tackling, it’s not the most important thing in the world, despite what some SEO experts will tell you.
If you can follow some or most of those simple guidelines, you’re well on your way to being searchable on the web. Good luck! As always, leave suggestions or other comments in the comments.
