Blogging is harder than I imagined.
Don't believe when someone tells you blogging is easy especially when you rarely write and have a large backlog of things to do for your Saas.
So, I run Blanq and most of my time is spent on fixing bugs, building features and DevOps. Like everybody else, I started a blog attached to my application.
For my second post, I came up with ideas, searched for keywords, optimized for SEO, installed tools, and eventually wrote the whole damn thing. At the end of it, I was pretty much exhausted.
As a single founder, creating posts for the blog, optimizing them is a lot of work and requires a considerable amount of my time which I otherwise would spend on my Saas.
While I agree that blogs create visibility for your service and bring new customers but, it does take a super-human effort to run one.
For folks out there, How do you manage and run your blog? How much time do you spend on it? What's your strategy?
PS:
My blog post if you are curious - https://blog.blanq.io/3-big-reasons-why-you-should-use-a-custom-url-shortener/
You may be spending too much time optimizing. I'd suggest writing. Spend the majority of your time in text. And then post.
Write, hit post.
Write, hit post.
Write, hit post.
Optimize along the way, but you don't have to spend too much time on that.
This is great advice! I was an SEO provider for 7 years and it was a DRAG. Yes, organic traffic is great. But it can't come at the cost of creativity. I think Ryan Holiday said it best, that blogs are the sandbox where great ideas form (for videos, books, product features, podcasts, etc).
I've been trying to shift toward that mindset (it's tough!). I remind myself that blogging is a means to an end, and that end is simply "to get/be better".
If you build an audience along the way, that's great. But if not, that's okay too. Because the REAL value of blogging is that it makes you sharper, more critical, and ultimately improves whatever you're working on. Maybe 3 months of articles that generate zero hits leads you to an idea for a product video that gets 300k views in a week-- that kind of thing happens all the time.
I agree with this (though I'd add a quick "edit" in between writing and hitting post). At the end of the day, if SEO's your game, you need a balance between quality and quantity (and luck, which seems to get higher with quantity)
Yeah, my current strategy is quite elaborate and writing comes last. As you said, I will focus on writing first and optimization later.
I think that worrying about SEO at the beginning of a writing journey is not the best approach. The first thing you need is to get content out, have a body of work. You can't optimize if there's no content. If you really want to optimize, you will need to understand what keywords and in what communities your content can be valuable. That is very time consuming, and, as you say, there is always something better to do, such as fix a bug.
Using a blog for marketing (i.e. to lure users into your product) is a very slow road, and requires an impressive amount of work. Basically you rely on having content that people will find when looking for things on Google (Digital Ocean, Ahrefs are great examples).
So, if I were you, I wouldn't stress about SEO at all. Just write high-quality articles (meaning, articles you are happy with, that give enough to be worth reading), don't write with marketing in mind. For example, in your own article, you just note the positive sides of your own business, not the risks. You don't discuss what happens if the link-shortener goes out of business, nor how do they affect SEO. The example of custom domain (the cnn), makes you wonder why do you need a link shortener instead of publishing directly with that url structure.
The best you can do is try to write something people would like to share. Then, you will be able to start studying patterns.
BTW, you could have shared your blog post using your own shortener. That is, by far, the best marketing strategy for your business case.
Yeah, I forgot to eat my own dog food(facepalm). Anyway, thanks for the advice. It is becoming clear to me - focus on humans and not robots.
(I believe you can edit your post? Never too late...)
I'm trying to tackle this problem a different way. Think of every Zoom call you have as the beginning of a blog post!
In your video calls with your team, your clients, prospects, etc, all kinds of interesting stuff comes up - often stuff you're an expert in and you can explain to someone else.
Record a call, make a transcript, then you have the start of a post that you can build on. Completely removes the dreaded blank page from the process.
This is what I'm doing with editvideocalls.com - helping people repurpose Zoom recordings into shareable 1-3 minute video clips.
Yes, content is a full-time thing if you want to do it properly 🙂
For some reason, we demote "blog" as being easy, but I always have this comparison ready.
How long does it take to create a video? Like a proper video? If you think that takes a long time and is difficult, not to mention you have to figure out the whole camera set-up, lights, scripts, editing, etc. The same goes for writing - to be good at it, you need a lot of things combined and that translates into long hours.
If you are doing this alone, it's going to be a long, long process. I would suggest getting some help. For example, you can write your content, but outsource tasks such as editing, optimization or even uploading. This will definitely make your life a little easier, while you can focus on the content quality.
I totally get that writing a blog can be a daunting experience. I think you need to tackle it as solving any big problem in life. Try to split it into parts, meaning start small. If you are just starting out, maybe it's worth going with twitter first. Just get in the habit of writing short tweets , every day could be a way of getting into the habit of writing. You can even create a thread of tweets, that could be used for a blog post later on.
So I think the key here, is to go step by step and not put yourself to big of a goal of writing 3 blog posts every week, as that is something you can achieve only gradually if you want it to work in the long run. Also, what is the goal of your blog? Can it be achieved in any other, more efficient way than blogging? Can you outsource it to someone? Just some questions to think about.
I have to second @AndrewKamphey's advice, with one exception: if you focus on nothing else, at least optimize the "slug" for the post.
Voice is important when it comes to writing, but I imagine you won't find that until you've been writing for a while.
Also, think of what you're doing as a chronicle, where you diarize both the monolithing and the mundane (not too mundane, though), because you never know what little things you do and know could be useful to someone else.
Hi, thanks for bringing this up. I am sorry but many people don't understand what a bog is I am in the process of starting one.
But from my little knowledge, it's not about how many posts you publish its all about how enthusiastic you are with the topic you are writing. How will it help change people life, how will your ideas help them change from 0 to 1? How will it make their life better? Will it help them generate more money, save money bla, bla, bla....
Then comes the actual writing that has to be done consistently. So you must love the topic and write and answer comments from your readers. Of course, the web is now full of information 4.4 million blog posts published per day.
My advice is chacing on SEO is like chasing a wild goose. It takes time to catch one so focus on writing, write, write, write until someone sees what you do, and send a comment.
Once you start receiving comments people will see you as reputable. They will want your advice, follow, and like your words.
After some time they will trust you and even buy from you. Trust me money is scarce no one just dish out their hard-earned money online. They have to trust you.
Finally, Google will see your efforts and reward your pages with better ranking.
You're 100% correct. I was having the same issue. It's why I created Content Koala. We write and manage your blog for you for a reasonable monthly subscription. Take a look: https://contentkoala.com
@start123 I had this same problem - I'm working on an app to make it faster to go from topic idea -> to keyword research -> to ROI analysis of each post. Since writing and editing takes so long, the idea is to only focus on content that will generate Google traffic.
Would you be interested in trying out the beta?
blogging nowadays is really hard... most especially from thinking out content ideas, competitors etc.
It takes will, time and patience to persevere..
Are you repurposing any content? For example, instead of creating a new blog post every week, you could create a YouTube video. That video gets transcribed and optimized as a blog post, but also gets posted on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. The audio of the video can be used as a podcast episode too.
I think that the sole purpose of blogging for SEO can be better spent creating the material that is more plastic and helps to fill the rest of social media profiles/lead gen channels.
I just started out so not reusing anything yet.
Maybe this could be a good time to think about it. Or migrate to a better form of content that doesn't take you ages to build and you can populate other profiles as well.
I found that ultimately lack of traction will kill your incentive to write. Hard to justify spending 4-5 hours on a blogpost if 20 people will see it and you gain one extra subscriber.
This mentality is toxic for creators. Imagine if we all just gave up because we only got one sale. Eventually, those 20 readers will double, and so on. It's about the journey
It's sometimes easy to get stuck with optimizing and perfecting a blog post. However, that is the blocker.
Try to get to the point with "start from the middle approach". Just get to the point and send your message. After that, add the ending and introduction parts. Make sure the time to deploy is very quick, such as in 1 commit the post, push to repo and it can be up and running already in automated fashion.
Don't spend time on optimizing SEO if you just have 1-2 blog posts. Get to 10 posts at least(vague number from my head) before spending time on those parts.
I spend about 3 hours a day working on my blog—it's definitely no easy task. For productivity, I have a word doc with filled with keyword ideas I can potentially rank for.
Whenever I come across an uncommon question, problem, or topic on the web from my niche, I'd write it down. This ensures that I'll never run out of content ideas and saves me time from keyword research.
We recently launched a subscription service specifically to address this problem of busy founders/marketers not having time to blog. You can check us out here - blogwritingservicesuk.com . I'm new here, so apologies if plugging isn't allowed!
Right? I had started a travel blog a loong time ago (went "around the world on $10 a day") and had started writing regular lengthy posts with my experience, detailed costs etc.
It took me a good 2-3 hours EACH DAY to compose, write, edit images, post, share, reply to comments etc.
2-3 hours less for enjoying the place I was in. So I gave up after a while. It could have been worth it but if I had prepared better I would have been more purposeful with my blogging.
I do plan to blog for my next project, but this time I know how much effort to allocate.
I think this is how we should look at blogging. Evaluate the importance of blogging to your niche and allocate time accordingly.
Blogs are WORK. No question about it. It's actually because of this exact issue that I completely changed the course of my business lol. I initially wanted to help people with travel, but my new priority is to come up with an efficient system so that blogging doesn't feel so overwhelming. I have a good framework but am still in creation, market research stages. My website is hippieonholiday.com. If you have any specific questions on time savers, etc, ley them on me I'd love to learn from you and help you kick some blogging butt.
Blogs are that bad. Split it into three criterias
We did a couple for our website https://treasure.cloud :
https://medium.com/@officialTcloud/who-else-is-looking-at-my-data-exploring-privacy-and-cloud-computing-cb037394331a?source=your_stories_page
https://medium.com/@officialTcloud/why-is-privacy-something-you-should-care-about-1e2d46abfea?source=your_stories_page
I am more than happy to put you in touch with the people that helped us.
Your blog looks amazing. Thanks for the advice. Would love to talk to people you mentioned.
So we pay someone to write them up for us in addition week looks far and wide for interesting articles already out there and try to spin it off in a relevant way to use. The user has to think wow that was a great article, I never knew this, or this has given me a different way of thinking.
Another person does the graphics for us too. I am more than happy to share their contact details with you. As for the person who writes the blogs, its fairly expensive but worth it for us. If you have a very low budget then i would recommend Fiver
This comment was deleted 4 years ago.