In order to prevent needing to put out random forest fires, forest agencies engage in controlled burning. Reacting to sudden events can make you feel overwhelmed. Instead of putting out random fires as they pop up, you can engage in controlled burning. So you’re not doing things reactively and scrambling. Even if you don’t think of yourself as organized, at the very least you can set aside regularly scheduled time to engage with your customers on social media and curate & create content for your marketing efforts. Having a timer can help you stay on track.

On the flipside, you don’t have to jump every time you hear a beep. Sure answering emails promptly is a good thing. But maybe not when you interrupt something else that’s actually more important.

Keep your eyes on the prize

Remember your goals and check your activities against them: are you making the needles move, or are you just pushing pixels around? Busy-work makes you feel like you’re getting things done, but it’s empty work calories.

Avoid distraction (not easy on the internet). Remember the dog from the movie UP? Squirrel!

According to the Cluetrain Manifesto, hyperlinks subvert hierarchy. Well, they also make it difficult to stay on target because they’re exploratory by nature. Again, a timer can help with this by providing a reminder you have to reach a goal, not just putz around.

Take a break

It’s okay to take a break once in a while. You’d like to think you’d be horribly missed or that you’ll lose all your business, but the truth is neither of those will happen. Your ego may not like that much, but your wallet will be okay. I didn’t post anything over this past weekend and nobody cried about it.

Just don’t let your break go on for too long. It can be insidiously easy to let inertia build up into an immovable object blocking you from your dreams & goals.

These work for me, but what about you?

Have your own strategies for coping? Share them and help everyone. Any of these sound good to you? Try them on, see if they fit.

photo credit: joshunter via photopin cc

This article originally published on Remarkablogger, where infopreneurs go for cutting-edge business blogging information, consulting, and coaching. Get your Blog Reboot or Pick my brain today.

Affiliate marketing can be part of a strong foundation for an online business.

Let’s say your money comes from freelance services. What if you experience a dry spell and get no clients for a while? What if you have difficulties getting a client to pay on time? What if a deal you thought was “for sure” falls through? Without additional revenue streams, you could have a hard time.

Content & Revenue Together

In addition to providing more (and more steady) revenue, affiliate marketing provides you with content, too. This is because people love to read reviews about something before they buy it. In fact, a recent survey showed that people prefer to read blogs for product information over other sources because they trusted them more.

This fits in nicely with your need to produce relevant content. Only in this case, your content benefits you in more than one way. Your content will accomplish the same things it normally does for you, such as enhance your credibility and educate your customers. But it will also provide you with an additional way to make money from affiliate sales.

The problem with affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is not necessarily easy. Why? Greed vs. trust, that’s why.

Your readers need to trust you or they’ll not only fail to buy through your affiliate links, they’ll stop reading your blog, too. But people get greedy and make mistakes without even realizing it. You may not see the dollar signs flashing in your eyes, but other people will.

The only way to avoid this that I know of is to always make sure you put your customers and readers first, no matter what. The question of truth is this: would you recommend a product or service even if you weren’t an affiliate?

A good rule of thumb is this: if you yourself use and like a product or service, then it’s fine to recommend it to others. Being compensated for that isn’t wrong.

Nobody believes in your rainbows

But you’re not out of the woods, yet. How you review something matters. If you continually only ever have positive reviews, people will begin to suspect that you’ll say anything just to make money from affiliate sales. It’s almost impossible to recover from a lack of trust like that.

Talk about what’s both good and bad with a product or service as you see it. Give your readers real information to help them decide if your affiliate offer is right for them. They’ll respect you for it and continue to trust you.

Do you engage in affiliate marketing?

I’m not sure if it’s fitting or ironic that there are no affiliate links in this post.

In either case, my question to you is: have you done affiliate marketing? How’s that going for you?

photo credit: Claudio.Ar via photopin cc

This article originally published on Remarkablogger, where infopreneurs go for cutting-edge business blogging information, consulting, and coaching. Get your Blog Reboot or Pick my brain today.

Breakthrough Advertising

Breakthrough Advertising

If you want to really understand how copywriting and advertising really works from the inside instead of following someone else’s formula, you need this book. It might be the most expensive book you’ll ever buy, and it will be worth every penny. It’s a very meaty book and it is not an easy read. Prepare to have your mind blown. If I was only allowed to ever have one book on marketing, it would be this one. I can think of no higher endorsement.

Problogger

ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income

Yes, “pro” blogging is different than business blogging. Having said that, Darren & Chris’s book is a fantastic resource for any blogger. The fundamentals of blogging are much the same for both pro or business blogging, so you’ll get a lot out of this book.

Web Copy That Sells

Web Copy That Sells: The Revolutionary Formula for Creating Killer Copy That Grabs Their Attention and Compels Them to Buy

There’s actually nothing at all revolutionary about this book: it’s really about solid fundamentals as applied to writing for the web. My copy of this book goes back a few editions. If you’re new to business blogging, this is a great primer.

Content Rules

Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business (New Rules Social Media Series)

C.C. Chapman’s book is very focused on business blogging and content marketing. It manages to educate and inform in a very accessible way. This book is great for all business bloggers, from the new to the seasoned.

The Small Army Strategy

The Small Army Strategy: A Guide for Turning Fans and Followers into Fanatics and Friends for Life

Only just recently published, Srini’s book will go off in your head like a bomb. It’s filled with the most obvious wisdom you’ve never read, before. And then after you read it, you wonder how it’s possible this book didn’t already exist.

What’s your favorite book on blogging?

Those are what I consider to be the five best books for business bloggers. What are your favorites?

photo credit: boltron- via photopin cc

This article originally published on Remarkablogger, where infopreneurs go for cutting-edge business blogging information, consulting, and coaching. Get your Blog Reboot or Pick my brain today.

Why would anyone ever want to read this?

That is the most important question you could ask yourself about what you’re writing on your blog.

Sometimes, you just have something to say and that’s good enough. But sometimes it’s not.

Why would anyone ever want to read this?

If you have an answer for that, you probably should work that answer into what you’re writing. Because “why” is never as “self-evident” as you think it is. I know this simply because of all the craptastic headlines I see that would be absolutely meaningless even to their intended target audiences, not to mention random strangers on the internet.

Your audience is going to see that headline and know nothing about how you built up to publishing your blog post and why. It had better get them to click on it or it’s DOA. In fact, there will be no arrival. It’s just dead.

Imagine a writer sending in a manuscript for a novel to a publisher. The editor tells her it’s terrible. The writer responds with, “But I spent five tortured years writing that!” The editor says, “Nobody cares about that. What they care about is that it’s any good.”

Nobody cares about your blog post unless it there’s something in it they care about, on their terms. Unless you can state why anyone should care to read it, they likely won’t care. If you can state why anyone should care, it’s because you know what they care about and that’s what you wrote about.

It’s simple to the point of being almost too simplistic. But there’s a lot of depth and complexity behind your answer to that most important question.

I can’t even count how many blog posts I’ve abandoned because I would ask myself this question: why would anyone ever want to read this? And if I couldn’t come up with a satisfactory answer, I abandoned the draft. I already barely have time to blog, which is funny, because  blogging is my business, right? But in many ways I’m no different from you. And I know you feel like you have little time to blog.

And the last thing you want to do is waste that time publishing something nobody cares about.

If you find you can’t answer that question for yourself, you’ve got some serious improvements to make in your blogging and possibly even your business as a whole.

If you’re having a little bit of a confidence issue, this might seem like an especially tough question to ask yourself. But nobody cares about your confidence issue (mostly because they don’t know you have one, not because they’re mean). But consider this: if you can clearly answer why anyone would care to read what you’re writing, that’s a pretty big confidence booster.

This article originally published on Remarkablogger, where infopreneurs go for cutting-edge business blogging information, consulting, and coaching. Get your Blog Reboot or Pick my brain today.

Let’s just get that out of the way immediately.

You must decide for yourself if you want to pepper your posts with smiley faces, which are known as “emoticons” (a shortened version of “emotional icon”) or sometimes “emoji.”

WordPress is happy to help you out in this and will take your colon and closing parentheses and convert it into an image, like this:

Or you can turn this feature off, which means only the characters you type will be seen. That doesn’t mean you can’t use emoticons, it just means you’ll have basic text emoticons.

Why is this even a thing?

Why is this even an issue? Because of the blurring boundaries between communications using various devices. People used emoticons originally in text messages and instant messenger chat programs before the age of the smartphone which is now upon us. It was hard to communicate effectively and quickly using a limited characters and clumsy interfaces. In order to make sure you weren’t misunderstood you added a smiley face of whatever kind appropriate to your message.

Typing long, verbose responses just wasn’t common in text messaging or in instant messaging, so people used emoticons along with many of the “shorthand” codes we all now know and use, like LOL.

Using emoticons became so convenient that they started appearing in emails, too. Even business emails. At first, this was regarded as unprofessional and it probably still is by many. Nevertheless, it’s becoming almost universal.

And so now you have emoticons in blog posts, too.

Why you may not want to use emoticons

There are good reasons to not use emoticons. Despite that they’re creeping into all forms of text communication, many still find their use unprofessional.

It’s lazy, because you’re using an emoticon instead of taking the time and effort to choose the best words possible so that you’re understood.

There is a slightly more obscure reason not to use emoticons. In text-to-speech situations, hearing a computer voice say: “colon, close parentheses” not only falls kinda flat, but blind people probably hate it. Probably about as much as they hate infographics.

Emoticons are often used as a way to try to say “I’m kidding,” after you say something that might be misinterpreted. There are two problems with this: telling people you’re joking often kills the humor, and it still doesn’t work for sarcasm.

Why you still might want to use emoticons anyway

Emoticons are inappropriate when you’re trying to be super-serious, so if you want to convey a lighter tone, they wouldn’t be out of place.

You also might want to use them because everyone knows what they mean and your goal is to communicate as clearly as possible. And maybe you don’t have all day to figure out the perfect words.

Those two reasons are fairly strong, I feel.

What do I do?

Do I use emoticons? Rarely, but yes, I have. I have no problem using them in social media and instant messaging, but most of time I don’t use them in blog posts.

How about you? Do you use emoticons? Why or why not?

photo credit: Miguel Pires da Rosa via photopin cc

This article originally published on Remarkablogger, where infopreneurs go for cutting-edge business blogging information, consulting, and coaching. Get your Blog Reboot or Pick my brain today.

The Basics: Using and Adding Categories

I’m not sure if there’s an HTML 5 fallback for the above video, so apologies to those viewing this on an iOS device (which doesn’t allow Flash media). The video also goes into the difference between categories and tags. If you want to know more about categories and tags in general, check out my post on it.

Add and delete categories without writing a post

You can create and manage categories without writing a post or a page. The above video shows you how. One cool trick you’ll learn in the video above is how to convert categories to tags. This is helpful if you’ve ended up with more categories than you really need or find yourself overusing a few tags.

Batch Cat

Batch Cat is an older plugin that still works with the most recent version of WordPress. It’s simple to use but the interface may not be the most intuitive for some folks. That’s why I made the video above to show you how it works (If you can’t see the video in your reader or email, you can check it out on YouTube).

Add categories to pages

This plugin lets you assign categories (and tags, also) to pages. You probably won’t ever need this, but when you do, you really do. Helpful if your site has lots of pages, but you don’t want to create parent and child pages and use categories instead.

Pretty sidebar categories

This plugin will let you create a nice-looking category display in your WordPress sidebar. There are many plugins for displaying categories in various ways.

Category checklist expander

From the administration side of categories, it’s an annoyance that the little widget window that lists your categories when you write a post is so small. This plugin expands it to show all of your categories.

How many categories should you have?

There are no rules about this, but my suggestion is you should probably have no more than seven at most. Three to five are ideal. With WordPress’s menu system, you can easily add links to your category archive pages in your site’s main navigation.

How to create good categories

The best way to have great categories is to plan them in advance of writing any content for your blog at all. It may be too late for you, but don’t worry, that’s why much of the above material in this post is relevant to you. The next most important thing to do is never create categories on a whim as you write. Decide your categories and stick to them unless you’re changing the focus of your site.

To create a good category, think about how your audience would classify your content, not how you the expert would do it. Think about the topics your audience would find interesting. If they saw your category name, would they think, Oh, that sounds interesting and click on it? Let’s say you were blogging about taxes. People would probably want to know stuff like how to get more deductions, how to get bigger refunds, how to deal with the IRS, and so forth. Those might make for good categories.

Don’t be afraid to see how other sites have created their categories. Take a look at large news sites or magazine sites and see how your niche fits within it.

Weekend work

Weekends are a good time for some laid-back maintenance, so have fun tidying up your WordPress categories.

This article originally published on Remarkablogger, where infopreneurs go for cutting-edge business blogging information, consulting, and coaching. Get your Blog Reboot or Pick my brain today.

No, it’s a matter of how you choose to use your time.

Let me share several “out-of-the-box” ways you can use your time. Before you know it, you’ll crankin’ out more blog posts (and good ones, at that) than you ever thought possible.

Loosen Up

First of all, you may be laboring under too strict a notion of what a good blog post should be.

Each blog post you write does not have to be the “ultimate.” If people are good at anything, it’s over-complicating things. Your readers will appreciate just getting one clear, distilled thought, once in a while, instead of an entire instruction manual.

• Instead of making many points in a post, make shorter posts out of each of the one points, or several points that naturally group together.
• Write shorter posts, anyway.
• You don’t have to do all the work. Get the ball rolling and have your community help you out by posing questions on social media. Come back later and copy the responses into your post (be sure to give credit).
• Your posts also don’t have be hardly any words, at all. Shoot a quick video or take some pictures if that fits in with your niche. You don’t need to prattle on, just add enough text to give context and for SEO reasons.

Strike When the Iron is Hot

The only time you have to write blog posts is not when you are sitting in front of your computer. I’ve seen bloggers make videos while they were driving or sitting in their cars. Why? Because that’s when the idea hit, that’s where they were, and at that moment they had time so they made some magic happen.

There’s no reason why you can’t do that, too. Video is for everyone, now.

But it doesn’t have to be just video.

• Buy a little notebook and keep it with you to jot down ideas.
• Buy a digital voice recorder (the ones built into phones are often awkward to get going) and keep it handy. You can record whole damn podcasts while you’re driving to work, going to grocery store, or waiting to pick up your kids from school.
• Use your smartphone and/or tablet to jot down notes, observations, and ideas in Evernote or similar.

The important thing is do not let those little thoughts get away from you, because you will lose them forever.

The “coral reef” method

If you’re constantly collecting links and jotting down notes and ideas, you will build up a collection of fodder for use in your posts. Let me give you an example from my own site. Every Saturday I publish a WordPress Weekend post. The material for these mostly comes from me surfing the resources I’ve found and followed. I star them in Google Reader or create notes about them in Evernote.

Eventually, I collect enough material to start loosely categorizing it. Whenever I want to create a post, I find all my notes and bookmarks that seem to have a certain theme to them and copy them into WordPress. I can create a great post out of that raw material in a very short time because I did all the detective work, already.

This method takes a while to get off the ground. It starts out slow, but eventually, bit by bit, you build up a repository of links, resources, and ideas. Kind of like how a coral reef builds itself slowly over time.

This is an example of how thinking ahead and taking the right steps can save you tons of time and improve the quality of your posts simultaneously. Whereas if you just tried to “go faster,” you get sloppy and your quality is poor. Take a small amount of time to bookmark or create a note in Evernote. Take a small amount of time to tag and organize your notes. Get back a huge amount of efficiency, essentially giving you more time to blog.

Use a feed reader

Many people don’t know what RSS is or what news feeds are. That means they also don’t know about programs & services designed to let you use them. There are many, but I prefer to use Google Reader. I can scan through between 500 and a thousand headlines/articles a day (no exaggeration). I can star things for later or copy stuff into Evernote. I use keyboard shortcuts to navigate it even faster.

Use a social media dashboard

Adroit social media marketing has two requirements: a central place to manage multiple accounts, and the ability to schedule postings in advance. I get both with HootSuite, but there are other such services. I can manage Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ services from a single dashboard.

Because of HootSuite’s “autoschedule” feature, I can enter a barrage of postings in a short time and have them post in a more naturally spread-out fashion throughout the day.

Use automatic posting tools

WordPress plugins like Tweet Old Post and services like Twitterfeed or SocialPublish offer powerful ways to automate your social media content so you don’t have to spend time after setting it up.

Batch your tasks – do similar tasks together instead of consecutively

Batching is a powerful time-saving idea. Here’s the gist: instead of…

• Writing a blog post and scheduling it
• Then setting up your automated social media posts in HootSuite for that same post
• Then creating your email about the post in Aweber to send at a certain time

You…

• Write several posts in a row
• Schedule social media posts for those posts in a single session
• Create and schedule your emails all in a single session

Batching improves your efficiency by reducing all the mental and logistical “switching of gears” involved in starting a task and then ending it in order to do something different. As you warm up to the tasks you can work more quickly and efficiently because of the repetition. If you have a hard time staying focused, try using a timer.

Share your tips/questions

Have any time-saving tips of your own you’d like to share? Please leave a comment, everyone will benefit by sharing our wisdom and experiences. Any questions about how to do these things? Ask away!

photo credit: BramstonePhotography via photopin cc

This article originally published on Remarkablogger, where infopreneurs go for cutting-edge business blogging information, consulting, and coaching. Get your Blog Reboot or Pick my brain today.

The Good and the Bad

In a study of 1,183 people by Ashley A. Anderson, Dominique Brossard, Dietram A. Scheufele, Michael A. Xenos, and Peter Ladwig and published by the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, it was found that the tone of comments on an article affect the positive or negative reader perception of the article. The New York Times wrote about it here. The study asked participants to read a fictitious technological news article and the comments afterward. Some of the participants saw positive comments, some saw negative comments. The results:

The results were both surprising and disturbing. Uncivil comments not only polarized readers, but they often changed a participant’s interpretation of the news story itself.

In the civil group, those who initially did or did not support the technology — whom we identified with preliminary survey questions — continued to feel the same way after reading the comments. Those exposed to rude comments, however, ended up with a much more polarized understanding of the risks connected with the technology.

Simply including an ad hominem attack in a reader comment was enough to make study participants think the downside of the reported technology was greater than they’d previously thought.

That’s one piece of the comment puzzle.

Comments are content

Another important puzzle piece comes from something I heard Liz Strauss say at SOBCon 2009, and it’s stuck with me ever since: “Comments are content.“

Let that one sink in for a moment: comments are content.

I’d spoil this by talking about it too much. It’s simple enough.

Comments are an Investment

Why do people comment on your blog  posts?

• Because they enjoy it, because they’re stimulated by the discussion and they have something valuable to share.
• Because they’ve become emotional and they’re reacting.
• Because they have a question, suggestion or want to point out a mistake.
• Because they’re on the prowl to “generate traffic” or backlinks and they’re engaging in SEO spam.
• Because they’re trolls and think you’re easy prey.

There are many reasons, but the above are some of the biggies. Knowing why someone comments can help you decide how to manage their comments or their presence on your blog. Repeat commentators are making an investment in you: they enjoy your blog posts and enjoy engaging with you. They’re not just about getting traffic for themselves. They value their relationship with you. Do you value your relationship with them?

Comments are work

When your blog is new and you’re not getting much traffic or comments, all your work goes into building your network and creating content. Once the ball gets rolling, what you’ll find is that managing comments is a lot of work. It can easily take just as much if not more time than writing blog posts. It doesn’t matter how you decide to manage them (moderated or not, you reply to all of them or not). Because comments are valuable content, and because they represent a valuable investment in you from your readers, you can’t phone this in. If you’ve decided you want to respond to your readers’ comments, I believe you should put as much work into your responses as they did in their comments. I believe in meeting people halfway.

Comments are community

Your frequent commentators are just as much a part of your brand as you are. Visitors to your site are going to be affected by what they read in the comments on your blog posts. An impression will be made. Hopefully, it will be a positive one. Your frequent commentators are your highly visible core community. Treat them with respect. They’re also likely to be your best customers. Not only will you get to know them, they’ll get to know each other, too. Never take them for granted.

Choosing a system

There’s nothing wrong at all with WordPress’s native comment functionality. I like the features and functionality of Disqus and choose to use that service. Some people really like Livefyre or Facebook comments. Triberr comments are another alternative you can use. Various plugins can enhance WordPress comments very nicely, such as providing an easy way for people to have new comments to the post emailed to them and subscribing to your newsletter at the same time. A quick search of the WordPress plugins directory will reveal all kinds of goodies you can use if you want to. The reasons why I like third party comment services is that they combine what would otherwise be a Frankenstein’s monster mish-mash of other plugins and a lot of work into a seamless interface.

Moderation in all things

One important decision you need to make if you’re going to allow comments (not everyone does) is whether or not you’re going to moderate them. Moderating blog comments means no comment is published to your post until you’ve read it and approved it. I don’t moderate comments in this way because I don’t want to hold up the discussion if I’m not free to approve comments. I’d rather come in afterward and clean up the few spam or unintelligible comments that make it through. What can happen if you don’t stay on top of comment moderation is that you’ll get like five people who all think they’re the first to respond to the post. You can choose settings in WordPress that will cause some comments to be held for moderation based on criteria such as containing links or certain words. If you place a link in your comment text on Remarkablogger, your comment will automatically be held for moderation until I can take a look at it. If someone is offensive enough (whether in language or tactics such as spam), you can ban them entirely from your site. This is easily done with Disqus, which I’m using for my commenting system as of this post. It can also be done in “regular” WordPress. Here’s some information straight from WordPress on combating comment spam. There are also plugins for dealing with comments. I will moderate comments that are inane or nonsensical. Empty flattery does not contribute to the discussion at hand. If I can’t even understand what is written, then that person’s English is so bad there can be no real conversation… or they’re using a “spin” program or a translator program to spam worthless content.

Responding to comments

I try to respond to every comment I receive. I want you to know your efforts at commenting are acknowledged. That you’re not just speaking into the void.

If you put a lot of effort into your comment, I will likely put a lot of effort into my reply. If you don’t, I’ll still acknowledge you.

Do this enough, and you’ll begin to feel like you’re repeating yourself. Most people don’t like that feeling. But each person who comments deserves their reply and often that means you’re saying the same things over and over, like “Glad you liked it,” and such. There are only so many ways to say these things, it’s inevitable.

Don’t take your commentators for granted, if you don’t like feeling repetitive, too bad. First world problems, and all that.

Suck it up.

People will always debate whether or not it’s okay to swear on a blog. I swear here all the time and if you swear in the comments, I’m fine with that as long as you’re not being lazy or trying to shock people for its own sake.

But swearing and being nasty or mean to people are two completely different things. As soon as anyone gets nasty and becomes insulting or engaging in personal attacks, they’re gone. Argue about ideas and facts and opinions. Don’t allow personal attacks.

You’ll also run up against arguments and disagreements. These can degenerate into unpleasantness because often people don’t know how to debate without employing logical fallacies or getting overly emotional–and then they start to get personal. Make sure you can recognize and deal with logical fallacies. The same wisdom people apply to email applies to blog comments: don’t respond in kind, and don’t respond when you’re angry.

What works for you?

I’ve shared a lot with you about how I manage comments in order to give you a good overview of comment management. What works for me won’t always work for you, but at least you’ve got a framework for understanding comments and managing them. What’s your approach to managing comments? photo credit: premasagar via photopin cc

This article originally published on Remarkablogger, where infopreneurs go for cutting-edge business blogging information, consulting, and coaching. Get your Blog Reboot or Pick my brain today.

The problem is that you can’t keep doing that if you really want to succeed. Doing what everyone else does has never been a formula for success.

Also, a sort of collective wisdom has arisen that is nothing more than myth. And I’m not the first person to bust these myths, either. By this point, you probably could say that debunking these is, itself, getting a bit old.

But there’s always new people learning to blog and market their business online and it’s new to them. So let’s take a look at four bits of advice originally designed to help you learn how to blog, but which are no longer true (if they even ever were true).

You should blog every day

For every successful blog that publishes every day (or even more than once per day), there is a successful blog that does not. Seth Godin publishes every day, sure. So what. Glen Allsop, Jon Morrow, and Derek Halpern do not.

I don’t.

You should include a picture with each post

I like having pictures in my posts. Many do. But that doesn’t make it a fact of life that all blog posts should have pictures. Svbtle doesn’t. Hacker News doesn’t. Jade Craven doesn’t.

Why might you not want to have pictures? Two reasons: design and time. If you want the typographical design of your blog to be the star of the show, you may not want to make heavy use of images. But time would be the biggest reason of all to not use images. It takes a lot of time to find the right image for a post.

Your posts should be short

Seth Godin is famous for his short blog posts. It works well for him. I once wrote a blog post that was over 4,000 words (1,200 words is my average). Glen Allsop of Viperchill has written his share of very long posts.

Nobody pays attention to how long a blog post is when they love what they’re reading. You’re trying to accomplish something with your post and it needs to be long enough to do that.

Unless you’re really good at putting your thoughts into as few words as possible, the only way to get shorter blog posts is to edit down your messy, wordy writing. And that takes time, which you probably feel you don’t have.

Your posts should be optimized for search

Not everything you write is going to be an SEO wonder. Nor should it be. When you want to rank for a keyword, it’s very satisfactory to accomplish that.

But, sometimes maybe you just want to have a heart-to-heart talk with your readers and customers.

What’s the keyword for that?

Maybe there isn’t one, and that’s okay. You’ve got subscribers who will read anything you write.

Think

Think about why you’re doing what you do. Don’t follow blindly.

photo credit: Leo Reynolds via photopin cc

This article originally published on Remarkablogger, where infopreneurs go for cutting-edge business blogging information, consulting, and coaching. Get your Blog Reboot or Pick my brain today.

That’s the focus of this WordPress Weekend: resources to improve your administration experience. Three doesn’t seem like a lot, but I guarantee you can spend quite a bit of time making good use out of what you’ll find here. Besides… it is the weekend, after all. Leave some time to play or spend some time with your  family.

There may be a plugin or two mentioned in the resources below, but I’m not directly presenting any plugins this weekend (Yay!)

This article originally published on Remarkablogger, where infopreneurs go for cutting-edge business blogging information, consulting, and coaching. Get your Blog Reboot or Pick my brain today.