All too many blogs die out before they become successful. They are not failures, not in the traditional sense of “this does not work”. They simply do not become productive enough to sustain the bloggers’ interest in maintaining them.
Writing is an emotional exercise. The less emotion you put into it the less you gain from it, and therein lies the problem for a majority of work-for-hire blog posts, the freelance stuff you buy for a few dollars that fails to bring in thousands of daily visitors. Your emotional connection to the content you publish is directly correlated with the content’s performance.
Now, we all have counter-examples. Randy Ray found a freelancer a few years back who wrote an article that continues to draw in thousands of monthly visitors today. That’s pretty good for an emotionally unconnected piece, is it not? But having read the article myself, I submit that the author was emotionally connected to it. The freelancer wanted to write about that topic.
In fact, when we do content for clients ourselves (as opposed to assigning the task to one of the writers we work with), Randy and I often divvy up the writing assignments based on who is more interested in them. There are days when a writing task goes to the least unmotivated writer, but if Randy or I look at a topic and we feel an interest in it, we’ll volunteer to do it.
So let’s take a look at how anyone can harness the energy of passion and turn it into an editorial process.
Start With Your Interests
Whether you work for a shoe company or own the whole gambling affiliate business, if you are going to put a blog together you need to begin with what interests you. If you’re not a gambler then you won’t spend much time reading (or writing) gambling articles that interest you. So to be a successful gambling affiliate you either have to become interested in the topic or you have to hand the blog over to someone who does have that interest.
Sure, the affiliate industry is riddled with crappy blogs that are slapped together from random freelance articles but when you talk to people who live and breathe gambling Websites they can always tell you off the top of their heads which sites they feel are the best and why; and in every case where I have asked our affiliate clients to give me their top five favorite sites, they always think of well-made sites run by a small team or a very passionate owner.
You don’t have to agree with the politics of the guy writing the blog if he writes stuff you love to read. The same is true whether you are looking for a favorite blog to follow or a permanent writer for your own farmed out blog. The rule of thumb is: Whatever you publish must make sense to you and must be interesting to you. Accept no substitutes.
Beyond that simple rule, the reason why you want to stay within your interests is that your BS meter operates better when you care about what you are reading. If you or your writer is turning out unbelievable crap then you are more likely to notice and make adjustments if you care about the content. Not caring about the content is the number one reason for why business blogs fail to attract new interested visitors.
Create a Workable Schedule
If you are writing the content yourself then the writing will not be easy. You have to set aside time to write the content and then you have to go back and edit it. To do proper self-editing you must leave the content alone, often for a day or longer, until it is no longer fresh in your mind. With experience you will become confident enough to do that by publishing and then walking away, but most people should begin by writing their articles in a text file or word processor document and then letting it sit for a few days.
By writing your articles in advance of publication and reviewing them a few days later you give yourself the ability to read the content as other people will see it. You are less likely to gloss over the obvious errors you missed in the first place. More importantly, you’ll be more objective about how interesting it is when you read it. If you have to force yourself to read all the way to the end of the article it’s not going to work well, unless you have an established audience that willingly reads everything you publish.
If you are paying someone else to write the content then you have to work within the limits of your budget AND you need to allocate time for editorial review. Editorial review should never stop. Even if you only review the articles after they are published, you need to read them, clean them up, and make sure they meet your minimal criteria for being:
- Interesting
- Entertaining
- Informative
Believe it or not, an article does not have to be nearly as informative as it has to be interesting. In fact, I listed those three criteria in order of importance. We seldom find articles that are uniquely informative; we generally read the same ideas over and over again on many Websites. Although information value is extremely important to whatever you publish, no one will want to read it if you fail to maintain their interest and entertain them.
Set Production Goals
This is not an admonition to start setting up project management tables. Project Management provides value in a mechanical process, such as where you are turning out copy for the sake of turning out copy. If you want the content to achieve something then forcing a deadline stifles creativity.
But creative people can set production goals that are not tied to a timeline. Where a blog is concerned production goals usually fall into topics and informational points. A production goal may be “I will publish three articles about successful blogging”. An production goal may be “I will include a reference to a double-blind study about how mice escape a maze”.
If unexpected external events do not prevent you from meeting your production goals, then any failure to meet them indicates you are either unfocused or not interested in the content. Being unfocused is not the same as being uninterested. You may be ill, have taken on too many projects, or you may be tired. Your interest is there but you don’t have the capacity to concentrate on getting the task done. Set it aside until you are able to focus again.
Production goals are always necessary for successful blogging. You should know in advance what you will be writing about; otherwise your writing will wait until you are inspired. It is not easy for me and Randy to keep this blog going, for example, because we spend so much time working on client projects. But we recognize the need to have a business blog that is interesting and so we make it happen. But if you look at the frequency of publication in our articles you’ll see that we are not as focused as we should be.
Choose Simple Metrics
Resist the urge to define Key Performance Indicators for your blog. KPIs are anathema to a new blog and they get in the way of maintaining a really great blog. Corporate vice presidents and executive teams love KPIs, of course, not to mention marketing departments, but KPIs kill productive blogging. If you fail to meet KPI-based production goals someone is going to demand you put out a crappy article (or, worse, reassign you to “more productive work”) and then the quality of the blog declines.
Every article should have the potential to draw traffic month after month. As you build up your inventory of articles the blog traffic will gradually improve. Any article that draws visitors over time is evergreen; stripping dates from URLs and refusing to publish dates on the articles does not make them evergreen, but making the articles useful, relevant, and consistently helpful for at least two years does make them evergreen.
Evergreenness is not enough to ensure that an article will draw traffic for a targeted keyword; people will be constantly publishing new content (ad pointing new links to that content) in targeted queries. The evergreen article wins by being relevant to many long-tail (low traffic) queries.
If you marry a blog to KPI-based production then your performance goals will be misaligned. You’ll be constantly demanding new content instead of focusing on improving the quality of the content over time. Your metrics should be telling you how well the content performs, not whether you met this month’s goal of 12,000 new visitors.
And So the Strategy Matrix Looks Like This
The purpose of the matrix is to ensure you have the right team (even if it is only you) writing and managing the blog. Any incongruity between interests, between schedules, or between production goals indicates there is a problem.
Now, does having a perfect strategy matrix guarantee that your execution will produce a superstar blog? Of course not. If you are unsatisfied with the performance of the blog you can adjust the matrix. If you increase the frequency of publication you should see a corresponding increase in traffic; if the traffic does not grow then your metrics should be able to tell you which content is not working. You’ll need to adjust production goals. If the metrics reveal nothing then you have to add to or change the metrics.
Again, using KPIs for a blog performance strategy is counterproductive. KPIs are demanding and pre-emptive, not analytical. Passive (after-the-fact) metrics are analytical tools that help you understand what happened, and maybe why it happened.
Your metrics should include data from at least one (preferably more than one) tool outside or other than page-level analytics. In other words, don’t waste your time by looking at bounce rates, time on site, etc. You need metrics to monitor the relevance of your production goals to the interests of your audience. You need metrics to monitor the performance of your publishing schedule to the publishing schedule of competitive sites. You need metrics to help you evaluate the quality of the content you publish.
Whether it’s Clicky, Webtrends, or Google Analytics your “SEO” metrics are insufficient. You need more than what the typical content marketer and SEO thinks you need. You have to think as an editor and as a publisher and as a writer (even if you hire people to write and edit the blog for you). Your metrics tell you if you are meeting your minimum standards for quality, your targets for creating useful and interesting content, and your production goals.
As I mentioned above, the purpose of using the blog strategy matrix is to ensure that the components of your strategy work together. If there is friction between any of these elements, you will have to work that much harder to make your strategy succeed and you will be less likely to follow through on whatever that strategy is.
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Does anyone else do anything this elaborate when mapping out their tactics for a new blog? This approach is probably great for beginners, but experienced bloggers like us usually do this sort of thing without even thinking about it consciously. (And yes, I know you already said that in your post, but I thought it was worth reiterating.) I’ve been blogging for years now, and I’m still not as good at it as I’d like to be.