The amount of articles offering advice about blogging is overwhelming because blogging or content marketing is one of the most effective ways to increase your search engine optimization (SEO) status. The theories of what is important in blogging swing back and forth like a pendulum. Lately the trends are focusing on the creation of a content marketing strategy, the need to be a great storyteller, the frequency of posting, and the length of your blog posts. If you’re like me, when you see all these articles you try to consolidate them into a philosophy that makes sense. Here is my current philosophy of blogging.
Content Marketing Strategy
While many people talk about the importance of content marketing strategy, that doesn’t mean that you have to spend weeks of work and write a lengthy document that will gather dust on a shelf. Instead, consider simply talking to everyone who is contributing blogs, identify different goals and objectives from the group, try to reach a consensus of opinion, and, most importantly, create a schedule for blogging.
Storytelling
One of the trends I’ve seen lately are articles that focus on how to be a great storyteller. Personally I’m not sure how effective it is to train people to be great storytellers because while some people are naturally great storytellers, many people are not. But you don’t have to be a great storyteller to understand the basics. The basics focus on why this is important to the reader. For certain kinds of blogs you can actually create a template of questions. For example, when we write case histories our approach is to ask the following. What was the problem? How do we approach that problem? What were the findings? What was the recommendation? What were the results? With this tool, case histories write themselves.
How Often
Some people claim you should write a blog every day and others only suggest two a month. One camp that says you should sit down every day or once a week and create a routine where you write blogs. When I first started blogging in September 2007, I was writing three blogs a week for Graphic Arts Magazine and my strategy was to schedule four hours a week on Friday to write.
The problem is that if you write often, you will simply run out of subjects to talk about or new things to say. My personal recommendation is to blog somewhere around 3 – 10 times a month and focus more on quality than quantity. If you could write only one blog a month, but it resulted in 3,000 unique page views, it would be more worthwhile than 10 blogs a month with only 300 page views.
How Long?
Books and courses on blogging talk about a word length of 250 to 500 words. My personal belief is that a blog should be approximately 3-5 paragraphs. For me, 3-5 paragraphs often exceeds 500 words, as does this blog. But if you look at one of the best bloggers in the world, Seth Godin, his three paragraphs are often just three sentences.
In my opinion, substance is more important than length. I would rather have a blog be a little longer than a little shorter and include, “take away ideas,” “analogies or questions that frame the issue,” and “take home advice.”