Inbound Marketing Blog

How to kick start your blogging habit

  

 Email Article  

Tweet  

  

  

We know that blogging is good for business. It's essential for anyone who wants to start an inbound marketing strategy. In fact, by blogging 20 times or more each month, businesses can earn 5 times more traffic and 4 times more contacts than businesses that don’t blog as often. But, knowing all this doesn’t make blogging any easier.

Meetings, clients, projects, reports, and just about anything else can get in the way of finishing your latest blog post. We can’t make any extra hours in the day, so how can we make sure that blogging gets the time in our schedule that it needs?  We need to turn blogging into something that we just ‘do’; we need to get a blogging habit.

Why do you need to get a blogging habit?

If you’re still thinking of blogging as an added extra in your schedule, you’ll struggle to maintain your post frequency. Thinking about blogging as just another task rather than as part of your schedule means it is always tempting to do it later. To start blogging more often, you need to change your mind set. It is not just a task, but an essential part of your daily or weekly routine. Here are a few ways you can start to turn blogging from a task intro a habit:

• Schedule a meeting slot for blogging. If you set aside a dedicated time in your diary, then you’re more likely to get the post written.
• Write down blogging ideas as you think of them. Keeping a notebook or word doc where you jot down all your blogging ideas will help to turn blogging into part of your normal routine. It also means when you’re starting a new post, you don’t need to struggle to find an idea.
• Write whenever you have a few spare moments. Use those moments when you’re waiting for a call or travelling to a meeting to write part of a blog post. Even a few sentences will help. Before you know it, you’ll have put together a whole post.

Pace yourself, so you don’t run out of blogging steam

When you first start out blogging, enthusiasm can mean you get a lot of posts done in a short space of time. But, inevitably, life and work will start to get in the way and you won’t be able to maintain this output. Resist the temptation to publish them all your new blog posts on day one and it will help you develop your long-term blogging habit. So how do you pace yourself when blogging:

• First of all, decide how often you will write a blog post and be realistic. If you think you’ll only be able to blog once a week in the long-term, then stick to this.
• If you write more posts than you normally publish in a week, hold the extra ones back. That way, if you don’t have time to blog one week, you’ll still have a post ready to go out.
• Set a publication date to match your blogging. If you’re planning on writing a bi-weekly blog, choose the days that the posts are going out and stick to this.

Always have a blog post in draft

There’s going to be times when you won’t be able to sit down and write a blog posts. Emergencies happen and deadlines loom. To tackle this, it’s good practice to always have an extra blog post saved as a draft. That way, if other things get in the way, your blog won’t suffer. Just remember to go back when you have some time again to add save a new draft.

Now you’ve got the blogging habit, why not download the Four Steps to Enhance your Content Marketing Strategy Presentation