All Entries Tagged With: "time"
How Long Should You Spend On A Blog Post?
Blogging is a unique content mechanism. In many ways it is an individualist enterprise, but there are some consistencies between blogging techniques. Even then, within all those consistencies, there’s really no right way and wrong way. There are multiple right ways and a variety of ineffective ways to go about blogging.
If you know your topic well – and you should – you can write a 300 word blog post in 10 or 15 minutes. It’s off-the-top-of-your-head writing. But you probably don’t want to write every blog post that way. Sometimes you want to spend a little extra time composing a great blog post that will serve as good link bait and great reading for your regular readers as well as serve as a good hook for your new readers. How long should that blog post be?
I think most successful bloggers will tell you that a blog post shouldn’t be too long. You certainly don’t want to write 5,000 word blog posts every day. Occasionally is OK, but not every day.
If you spend more than an hour writing your blog posts every day then you are probably spending too much time on your blog. But if you write 15-minute blog posts every day then you are probably not spending enough time. Most of your posts can be the shorter, 300-word, 15-minute posts and you can get away with it. But you want some variety so that you don’t get into a routine that bores you and causes you to lose interest. You also don’t want your readers to lose interest and go away. So every now and then you should probably spend a little extra time writing that longer blog post just to spice things up a bit.
Give Your Blog Time To Perform
One of the most common mistakes people make with blogging is expecting too much too soon. You aren’t going to get a wave of orders overnight from your blog. If you’re lucky (and a lot of people are lucky in this regard) you’ll get your blog crawled and indexed at the search engines rather quickly (like 48-72 hours). There is no guarantee, of course, but I’ve seen it done.
Even then, if you get your blog indexed that soon, you won’t see any real results from it right away. You’ll get traffic, but you won’t get any sales until people trust you. To do that they’ll need to subscribe to your blog over a period of time and get to know you. When they feel comfortable knowing they can trust you, they’ll buy from you. But it may not be from your blog.
People don’t generally buy from blogs. They’ll read a blog every day if it’s on a topic that interests them. But they won’t buy anything. They’d much rather buy over the phone, in person, or through a static website. But what you say on your blog can lead a person to that decision to buy from you on your website. You just have to give it time.
