04 Jul Overcoming Rough Times for Blog Owners and Blog Authors
Blogging has soared to unimaginable heights since its onset as a conspicuous web addition to journalism. Though it expanded the scope of topics and authors, making event tracking far easier since writing and reporting stopped being exclusive to writers and journalists, some problems emerged as well. All in all, blogging has enabled anyone to write about anything.
Today, large and successful blogs are most commonly those who offer the highest quality content. However, since Google recognized the importance of content, content requirements became a part of SEO, thus making blogging a means of improving search engine rankings. A blogger who now only wants to write about what he knows and loves and publish it either on his own or someone else’s blog could find himself in big trouble.
What Are the Main Issues Blog Owners Face?
As I have previously mentioned, Google requires quality content in order to rank a website well. However, it is not just about content and it’s not just about quality.
Technical SEO
Even if a blog owner applied basic SEO to his website, and now only wants to focus on writing, Google won’t let him. Namely, there are always things to do as far as the technical part of SEO is concerned: new WordPress SEO plugins, updates, adjustments, webmaster tools, checking the speed of the website, checking backlinks, fixing broken links – you name it. You can easily be forced to hire an entire team to handle all this.
Solution:
Stop overdoing things. You certainly need one day off from writing to fix what needs to be fixed and deal with the metrics and stuff, but there is no need to follow up on every update of everything you have on your website (plugins mostly) and all the available indicators of your website’s health. Make a schedule instead. Choose one day each week. You will use to that day to check for broken links and bad backlinks, and to pay a visit to webmaster tools. Updating plugins, adjusting them, checking the speed and performance of your website can be done once a month.
Metrics
Many website owners become overly concerned with metrics as soon as their traffic starts fluctuating due to some algorithm update, or simply because of the season or the time of the month. It’s hard to keep up with all the traffic metrics, let alone traffic factors metrics. Website owners can easily become lost and confused.
Solution:
Check traffic once every fortnight. I’m aware of the fact that everyone recommends to track down the sources of your traffic, bounce points, bounce rates, etc. and focus on what brings you the most traffic. However, even if you are selling something on your blog, which makes these metrics even more important, you cannot possibly hope to achieve all that by yourself. Instead, use Google Analytics and stop trying to make different cross-sections of traffic, audience, etc. Basic metrics will do.
Check the number of visitors, bounce rates, the demographics of visitors (the place they are from, the device they’re using, etc.). Check the traffic sources and keywords, and according to these parameters, you can get a clear enough picture of the type of visitors your blog is attracting, the places on the web they usually come from and on which you should focus, and the keywords they use to find you.
Social Media Interaction
Social Media is fun to participate in, but it can really become overwhelming. Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus alone can cause you trouble and take away precious writing time.
Solution:
If you are not yet ready to focus only on managing your blog and to let others write for you, try participating in social media biweekly. Though it will take more time to create a strong presence, your writing will not suffer. What is most important is to keep your participation regular and to share useful and fun content with your followers.
Spam and Guest Bloggers
You are interested in publishing really good content, so you’ve put your contact e-mail on your contact page and outlined the guest posting rules. You asked potential guest bloggers to send you a pitch first so you can approve the topic. However, you’ve let all that go because of spammers. You receive too many worthless pieces of content that serve no purpose. So you’ve replaced the address with a contact form directed to an e-mail you rarely use, and you rarely check the content sent to you.
Solution:
You may leave it at this, but I wouldn’t recommend it. There’s no easy way out of spam, but buried in all those e-mails you stopped reading are some really good ideas and pieces of content that could go a long way towards boosting your traffic.
What I would do is put up an e-mail subject requirement other than guest post or guest posting, and skim the e-mails I receive. Those with good subject and a promising beginning of the body text would be read, those that sound generic – deleted.
Also, I would try to develop a criteria for guest posts concerning structuring, titles, subtitles, paragraphs, etc. and put it up as guest blogging instructions. Those articles that fail to meet this requirement on first glance would be immediately rejected.
As you may see, I wouldn’t require from the writers to write a pitch first, because I consider it a waste of time. The finished article is either acceptable or unacceptable, and that’s it. Going through the entire pitch-to-finished-article process takes time a single blog owner simply cannot afford.
Make sure you always notify the author whether you accept the article or not. It is a basic rule of internet etiquette, even if your message contains a single generic sentence that says: “Sorry, your article is just not what we are looking for now.”
What Are the Main Issues Blog Authors Face?
Lack of Inspiration
No additional explanation is needed for this issue, we all know what it feels like.
Solution:
Browse the web. Read and watch. Find out what’s new out there using alerts, RSS subscriptions, Google search filters, and inspirational websites. An idea will pop into your head soon enough, especially if you try thinking in terms of different approaches to structuring an article such as how to, numbered lists, pros and cons, etc.
Writing, Natural Anchor Text and Structure
You may encounter these problems if you are not yet experienced enough. Just browse the web. There are many great articles with blogging and copywriting tips. First of all, your article needs to be coherent, skimmable and natural, and when you achieve this, you will have it easy with the anchor and structure.
Writing can be hard at times; words sometimes just tend to slip away before you manage to put them on paper. This is a hindrance in blogging, and learning how to write successful blog posts and following the tips more experienced bloggers provide can be of great help.
Finding Blogs Worth Publishing On and Getting Published
Since guest blogging is a very popular SEO technique at the moment, everybody is doing it. This means that you need to stand out by publishing on more prominent blogs. The first problem is finding such blogs. After you’ve created a list or found one online, you can use some of the following tools to check out whether those websites meet the authority requirements.
- OpenSiteExplorer – Check each website individually.
- MozCheck –Insert the list of URLs in and it will show you relevant SEO Moz /LinkScape metrics. It is free for up to 1000 links.
- SEOmoz Data for Google Docs – Have SEO Moz / LinkScape data formatted within a Google Doc for free.
- Bulk Backlink Checker
- BuzzStream –Import a large number of sites and get relevant link metrics.
You should also pay attention to the way blogs look like and their content manually.
To increase your chances of getting published, make sure you:
- Use correct spelling/grammar
- Avoid copy/paste errors
- Tailor each e-mail to the website you are sending your article to
- Have good, relevant topics
- Reference your own work
- Do not misrepresent yourself
These tips can help you overcome difficult periods or simply bumps on an otherwise successful road. Treat yourself and the people you cooperate with with respect, and pay attention to the quality of your content. If you do that, all will be well for you.
