Best Time to Publish a Post

What time of the week is the best to publish a post? Some will probably say that we should post everyday, but taking into account that this is often not possible, which day of the week is the best? The best day would be when the most readers would visit your blog. While it is hard to be certain, supposedly the best day would be Monday or Tuesday, as that is when most people check out blogs after a weekend away.

Another way to approach this issue is to analyze when do you visit other blogs the most often. Yet another alternative way is to analyze a particular niche, and try to deduct when would people be the most interested to read about a particular subject. For example, a site dedicated to politics should post updates whenever there is an important political event. If your site is about lotteries, you should update it whenever there will be new information available.

I think that we need to agree that it is not that easy to decide when it best time to post. However, those who post every day do not seem to have this problem, so maybe the solution is to post more often? Posting every day will ensure that your visitors will always have something new to read when they visit your blog, even if they visit it on a daily basis.

Determination

There are millions of blogs out there, so the competition is very steep. In order to have a lot of visitors you need to have a valuable blog. A valuable blog in my opinion is a blog that has high quality posts, and to have high quality posts, you have to be determined to write such posts. It might sound obvious, but there is a big difference when it comes to intentions and determination behind writing posts.

For example, some people are only writing posts out of boredom, only for the sake of money, or because they promised their friends or families. Of course, their blog might accidentally be high quality, but it will not last long without the proper motivation behind writing posts. I encourage all of you to consider once again what your motives behind your blog are. Over time such an approach might improve the overall quality of your posts.

Anyway, the question what makes a high quality content has been asked many times in the blogosphere. While there are many answers to this question, but there is a rule which I think is quite logical. Quality is often comparatively determined. This is true in any niche where there is competition.

There will be always someone who has the highest quality content, and someone with the lowest quality content, simply because you can compare their blogs as they are in the same niche. I will not discuss any specific ways to judge which content is of higher quality, but you need to remember that you are competing with other blogs or even other types of websites with similar topic to yours. You should also be aware that the standards of writing might be completely different, depending on the particular niche.

Keeping Your Blog Professional

Before you try to make your blog very popular, it is a good idea to work on it so that it looks professional. One of the things that will help you in this matter is updating your blog regularly. If you do so, people visiting your blog will get the impression that you are serious about blogging and try to update your site as often as you can.

To maintain regularity in blogging some recommend writing a few posts in advance, and saving them in a Word document. When the day comes when you want to post on a blog, you can just enter Word and copy the text. You never know what might happen, so writing a few posts in advance may help you a lot when you want to keep posting regularly.

Additionally, you will be able to relax more knowing that you already have posts prepared in advance, and the only thing that you have to do is to copy it and paste them in the right place. I know many situations where a blogger has abandoned his blog for a few weeks due to real life issues and lack of time. That could have been easily avoided if he had at least a few posts written in advance.

Would You Be a Good Blogger?

Blogging is not as easy as it sometimes might seem, and there are some questions you can ask yourself before you start blogging. If you do not ask yourself any questions, you might end up abandoning your blog. It is better to realize what blogging is really about before you dedicate a lot of time to it. Ask yourself the following questions:

1. What are my expectations? Expecting too much in a too short time can result in being discouraged. On the other hand, being happy with your everyday progress can be really encouraging. Creating a successful blog takes time, and your reader base might not be growing as fast as you would like to. However, as long as it is growing steadily there is nothing to worry about.
2. Can you work on a regular basis? Won’t you get discouraged? Blogging requires you to work on a regular basis, so writing an article once per month may not be sufficient to have a popular blog. You should consider blogging at least a few times per week, preferably almost every day.

I hope you read carefully the above questions. However, in order to establish a new blog you do not have to answer “yes” to all of the above questions. There is nothing wrong with experimenting with different hobbies like blogging, even if after some time a person can change his mind and in consequence abandon his blog

Writing Posts

Did a few days already pass since your last post, and you feel obliged to write something new? Do not worry, as there are a lot of things to write about, and all you have to do is stay focused. Here is some advice that may help you:

Do not get distracted by other things around you. Do not visit other blogs in the meantime, unless you look for inspiration. You might get overwhelmed by the fact how well other writers are doing, and this might prevent you from being a creative writer yourself.

Write something funny and amusing as a start up. Once you start writing something, you will see that it will be getting easier and easier to continue doing so. It is the hardest to start writing at all.

Do not put additional burdens on yourself that are unnecessary. If you usually write articles 200 words long, stick to it, and do not start writing 300 or 400 word long posts. Of course, this will also depend on your niche and topic of your post.

Ask your family and friends for their assistance. They can be very helpful not only for finding something to write about, but their presence can also give you additional motivation.

Reward yourself for your hard work. After completing your tasks do something that you did not have time to do in the past and always wanted to.

Multiple Authors of a Blog

We can see the phenomena of multiple authors of a blog more and more often. There is something that attracts some bloggers to gather together and co-author one blog. However, maintaining a blog with a few authors can be quite challenging. That is why I would like to give you a few tips on how not to allow this experience to get out of hand:

1. Make sure that you team-up with like-minded people. There is nothing more annoying than having to deal with someone you don’t like or understand.

2. Have similar goals. This is definitely an important point, because ultimately each blog has to have some goal. It will be a lot better if all of you work towards the same goal.

3. Be demanding when choosing the bloggers. You want to have the right people for the job, so make sure that you familiarize yourself with their writings before you decide to work with them.

4. Control the quality of the posts. Do not allow any of them to be of a lower quality than others. You need to have some standard according to which you measure the quality.

5. Check if the content is not duplicate. You don’t want to have co-authors which are stealing content. You may use Copyscape for this purpose.

6. Coordinate your schedules from time to time. Plan meetings or maintain regular email conversations.

Blogging is Time Consuming

Most people who do not blog do not realize that blogging is very time consuming. There are multitude of things to do including marketing, search engine optimization, networking, promotion, using Digg, guest posts, posting, comments, moderation, template design, protecting from hackers, and writing reviews.

I suspect that I did not even mention all of the things to do. A blog is like a business, but the difference is that usually only one person has to do all of the things. In companies there are different people responsible for different aspects. Sometimes there are even departments only responsible for one aspect like marketing. Naturally, you do not have to work on all of the aspects, but if you will not, then you won’t be really able to compete with other bloggers.

One of the most important things you need to focus on is marketing. Marketing is an interesting subject and a crucial part of a successful blog. That is why it is beneficial to learn from marketers how they manipulate how people think. It might sound scary, but that is really what marketing is about, and I don’t believe there is any fundamental flaw in it. I think it has been discovered what is the secret in marketing that allows to attract a large number of people. Successful marketers believe it is all about emotional connection, specifically to be able to connect with what’s behind the brand, with what’s behind the promise of the product. If that is achieved, it can create loyalty beyond reason.

RSS Feed and Email Subscriptions

I would like to discuss RSS feed and email subscriptions. In this post I am not really going to answer which choice is better, but I just want to say that in some cases email subscriptions might be a better choice. WE have to admit that most blogs focus on RSS feeds and RSS subscribers a lot deal more than on email subscriptions. This is probably due to the fact that RSS subscriptions are very convenient, and are more and more popular.

So why would anyone not want to be an RSS subscriber, but rather prefer to subscribe by email? The answer is that many Internet users simply didn’t learn yet about RSS feeds, and might not know how to subscribe to a feed or use RSS feed readers. This post is especially directed at blogs which deal with non-technical topics.

I think it is important to remember that some people do not know everything when it comes to more technologically advanced stuff like RSS feeds. It is crucial to take that into account if your blog is in a niche that includes a lot of people who are non-technologically oriented. Offering various ways to subscribe to your blog posts is a great way to increase the number of readers you have.

Storing Your Important Data Online

You do not have to store all your data on a disk to have access to it at all times. It will be even more convenient for you to store some of the more important data online. If your computer refuses to work or something else happens, you will be able to access your documents quickly from any other computer from an Internet cafe. To do this, the easiest way is to store your data in your email. All you have to do is send an email to yourself.

I have confimed that it works with Gmail. Just click on Compose message or New message, type your own address, attach the desired files, and your email is ready to go. However, there is still another way you can protect your data. You do not have to necessarily attach them to your emails thanks to add-ons like Gmail Drive. Gmail Drive is a special add-on which you can have installed on your computer, and it can come very handy.

By copying your content to your Gmail Drive folder, the add-on will automatically send all its new content to your email account. There is absolutely no need for you to do it manually, as the add-on will take care of everything.

Should You Be The Next Problogger?

There are some bloggers in the blogging niche that try to imitate famous bloggers like Problogger. Whereas the idea of imitating something that has been proven to work is a good strategy, the question can be asked why would people need another Problogger in the blogosphere?

Why would I visit a blog of somebody who is imitating Problogger, rather than go straight to the original one where I am sure to find high quality content and knowledge accumulated over many years. I have been asking myself those questions, and my conclusion is that you should try to be different than famous bloggers, so that you would appeal to a different audience. There are at least a few ways you can try to be different:

Decide what your target audience is. You may decide, for example, that you will do everything you can for your blog appeal to young people. On the other hand, maybe you will want your blog to appeal to working adults, or to high school students.

Try adding another topic to your blog. If you already cover, for example, the topic of fishing maybe you should add another topic like exercise. If those are your hobbies than anyone else in the world who also shares your hobbies is going to love your blog.

Drawing People to Your Post

Very often writing a high quality and unique post is enough to ensure that people will read it. On the other hand, there are many marketers who say that most readers make up their mind if they want to read your post just after reading the title. That is why the title of your post might be the most important thing to do to make people stay on your blog besides, of course, writing high quality content.

There is no magic rule when it comes to the title, and it depends what kind of audience you have. It depends on what you exactly want to achieve, but a good way to attract readers to read your post is to simply make them believe that they will gain something after reading it. If you have some kind of unique content, don’t be afraid to clearly state so in your post title. Depending in what niche you are, there will be completely different post titles that will try to attract visitors which are interested in that particular niche.

The knowledge of the preferences and interests of your visitors is definitely going to help in creating a great title. Will your visitors be drawn to a shocking title, a funny one, a puzzling one, an intriguing one? Your job is to try to figure that out.

Duplicate Content and Search Engines

Duplicate content is something that every serious webmaster is trying to avoid. Basically, duplicate content means that some specific content, like an article, exists in a few locations on Internet. Search engines often penalize websites for displaying duplicate content, as usually duplicate content provides a smaller value for Internet users. On the other hand, original content is something considered to be very valuable.

However, it seems that detecting duplicate content not always works as well as it should. From time to time, I hear bloggers reporting that articles on their site has been marked as duplicate content, because scraper websites have copied those articles to their own domains. If the duplicate content filter was working correctly, then the scraper sites would be marked as sites with duplicate content, not the opposite.

Generally speaking, scrapper sites are automated websites which pull content from other websites using web scraping. A lot of those sites are made for Google AdSense, but it is important to understand that a lot of them violate copyright law, as they do not even give credit to the original author. The webmasters of such sites do not put any work into writing articles, yet they might be ranked quite high in search engine results.

Some speculate that many search engines fail to realize on which site the content was posted in the first place. The websites which copy/paste content from other sites, but are indexed earlier might be actually treated as legit sites. While it is alarming, let’s hope that the major search engines will repair those content filters, as we do not want our content just copied/pasted to other websites. I hope that this article reminded all of us that original content is something we should strive for, and that copying copy/pasting content from other websites should be avoided at all cost.

Check Spelling

The spelling feature in Microsoft Word is a blessing to many bloggers. Since we are required to post our posts without grammatical and spelling errors, it is good to do some spell checking before you submit your post. In my version of Word, I do not have to do it manually, as Word does it for me and corrects me immediately, if I write something in a wrong way, or if I write a word which is not recognized.

If you have an older version of Microsoft Word, you might need to activate an option to check your grammar and spelling. You can do it by either going to Tools in the upper menu and then selecting Spelling and Grammar, or simply by pressing F7 on your keyboard. Of course, spell checking isn’t perfect and you have to spot some mistakes by yourself, but it should not be a problem if you are a careful reader of your posts.

Recently I noticed that the Wordpress platform allows bloggers for spell checking while they are writing their posts. From what I remember, this useful feature was not available in the past. Before this feature became available, many bloggers had to write their posts in Word document and then copy it to Wordpress, and then publish it. I am very happy that a feature like this exists.

Need Motivation to Blog?

Everybody needs some motivation to make everyday decisions. Whether it is money, pursuit of fame or love, our actions are determined by many factors. When a blogger launches a new blog he is driven by something that he wants to achieve. Without proper motivation, there is no blogging. If not motivated in any effective way, a blogger can eventually stop spending time blogging and might quit the amazing world of blogosphere. In this article I would like to present a few small, but important things that keep my blogs running and make me want to spend my time blogging rather than doing something else. Here they are:

Seeing the progress of my work. Blogging involves numbers and this is what I like about it. Whether it is data on the number of visitors provided by Google Analytics that helps me see the increase of number of bloggers visiting my site, or other ways to see progress like Alexa ranking, I really like it. To me, maintaining a blog is like practicing for a marathon race where you constantly get better: stronger, faster etc. I like to think that my strength are my loyal visitors, and my speed are various rankings. To back up this point, I would like to give an example of how I am motivated right now to blog. I recently got more motivated to blog, as I am receiving more traffic, which in turn makes me spend more time writing articles.

Seeing other bloggers progress with their blogs. Nobody wants to stay behind, including me. However, I do not view blogging as a competition, but rather a social activity additionally bringing me satisfaction, way to spend my free time and money. If everybody goes ahead, then there must be some good reason for blogging.

Pinging With Feedburner

Did you know that pinging can take no time at all? Pinging is a great way to notify search engines of any new content published on your blog. This way you can receive more traffic, and your articles will be more popular in the blogosphere. Feedburner can help you achieve this without slowing down the publishing of new posts. Secondly, while it gives you customizability, you will have to monitor and manually add update services and in case they change you will have to update the list yourself.

A way to avoid it, and in my opinion, the best way to manage the pinging of your posts is to use PingShot. To enable it, log in to your Feedburner account, select your blog’s feed, go to publicize and ultimately to PingShot and after customizing it, activate it. As I indicated it is tied to Feedburner and it is a way to automatically ping various content aggregators as soon as the content changes, but additionally this list is going to be kept and maintained by PingShot, which means that all of the work will be done automatically. This is what I meant that pinging will not take you any time at all.

General Content Quality Guidelines

I have been thinking a lot about content quality lately, but I think I did not mention yet any general content quality guidelines. It is quite apparent that content quality is often subjective. On the other hand, we have to face the facts that there still exist general content guidelines that would apply to many blogs. Here they are:

• Thought-provoking. Your articles should be thought provoking. It doesn’t mean that all of them should be, but at least some of them as a lot of readers enjoy an intellectual challenge. Many thought-provoking articles are often controversial, so be prepared that not everyone might agree with what you have written.

• In a lot of cases entertainment is important. This might be especially true in personal blogs, probably less in business blogs. Posting humorous articles can make your blog more likeable by others.

• Uniqueness. Your posts need to be unique in a sense that you do not copy posts from other blogs. Your blog will not be considered high quality if you will be “copy-pasting”.

• Well researched posts. This simply means that you know what you are talking about and you might prove it by referencing to other websites or books.

Choosing a Blog Name

Choosing a name for a blog can be really a challenge, First of all, it is not easy to come up with a good name which will fit a blog, but secondly, many attractive domain names have been already taken. Coming up with a good names for a blog, and later checking them out one by one if they are taken could take hours, but with the help of sites like domainsbot.com this can be a lot easier. As a matter of fact, I know several people who got an idea for their new blog using this tool.

As an example, let’s say you are interested in the domain name goodblog.com. You will soon probably discover that the name has been taken, but the site will suggest hundreds of domains with a similar name, out of which most of them will still be available. I could say a lot about the search options, but just take a look yourself, and bookmark it if you plan to buy a domain name in the near future. I surely benefited from the site, as like I mentioned, it saves a lot of time and allows you to find the perfect domain for yourself.