How To Avoid Blog Burnout
Blogging is a time consuming process. It involves the process of gathering, reading, digesting and compiling information into a nice, meaty post that gives your reader an insight into the unique way you see and understand issues. Most serious business bloggers have at least two or three blogs that they write simultaneously. I have ten, but don't update all regularly. Bloggers are also extremely passionate about what they do. Their blogs are a labour of love and they often tend to lose track of time, reading, writing and updating their blogs. But there's only so much time in the day and only so much abuse a body can take. So how do you avoid becoming a burned-out business blogger? Here are a few tips to help keep you and your blog(s) fuelled up and running for the long haul. 1. Get your priorities right Is starting a new blog really going to help your business (or personal) objectives? If not, then don't. Simple as that. Save your energy for the tasks that help you achieve your objectives. 2. Discard the chaff Do you have blogs that are not "hot" anymore? If you have a blog that's not getting much traffic or is about a topic that no one wants to read about anymore, give it a quiet burial. 3. Grow up Are you continuing to blog (whether it serves your purpose or not) out of some misplaced emotional attachment to your blog? Then you probably need a 12-step program. Lots of blogs are abandoned everyday because they stopped serving their purpose, or more often, because the bloggers just grew up and moved to greener pastures. Find more appropriate ways to spend your time or promote your business. 4. Get a life Blogs are a poor substitute for family and friends. We bloggers tend to take our loved ones for granted because we work from home (and anywhere else we can). Its important to schedule our day to make time for family, especially when there are children around. 5. Get "un-wired" In order to keep the ideas coming you need to do things that nurture your mind and body. Shut down your PC and get away from it for a while. Go for a movie, take a walk in the park, workout in the gym. Get out of the house and get some fresh air. You'll be amazed at how easy (and fun) it can be it to get your creative juices flowing again. 6. Give yourself a break If you missed blogging about something important because you had something else equally pressing to attend to, don't beat yourself up over it. Stick to a realistic blogging schedule. Nothing is so important that it can't wait a day or two. Sometimes procrastination is not a bad thing at all. If it helps, write a bunch of posts at a time, so you can take a break and attend to other matters when you need to. 7. Quality, not quantity Blog frequently, but not too often. Most bloggers will agree that two or three posts a week is a pretty good frequency. I usually manage to make that grade, but never push myself more than I have to. The key is to make your posts count. Don't post about anything and everything in your field just because you have to. Posts that are original, meaty and full of opinion are more likely to get read and linked to than posts that are just a few words with a link to the news source.
So if you're beginning to forget what your family looks like, if you think blogging is taking over your life, and your sanity, step back a bit and get things in perspective. Stop letting your blogs rule your life.
As for me, when it's a choice between the blog and the beach, the latter wins hands down.
_______________________________________________ Priya Shah is the CEO of eBrand360. Her areas of specialization include internet marketing, search engine optimization and business blogging. Subscribe to her free Blogging eCourse at her business blogging blog. This article may be reprinted as long as the resource box is left intact and all links are hyperlinked.
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Did you know that there are free ways that you can get links back to your blog overnight? That after a few days they can number in the hundreds?
No matter what you market on the internet at some point you'll face the issue of increasing the number of visitors to your site. What most people don't know is that there are literally hundreds of ways to get free traffic. Here we'll focus on three overlooked ways to get additional traffic to your site using a blog.
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Now, maybe you've done this before but stopped, because you're
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In the near future, blogmasters will be able to use special code to prevent spam in their comments section, so this will become less of a concern.
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Or lurk to find out where your target market typically hangs out when they're online ? you'd be surprised at how many inexpensive and targeted advertising sources you can find through this method.
(If you're looking to get linked, there's another way that we'll go over next.)
This tip alone has earned me a few dozen links from prominent blogs in the past four days alone.
These links are worth ten times a reciprocal link because they send targeted traffic from established sources, and come from experts with records of proven results.
You can be sure these kinds of people will check you out before they linked to you, since they may be judged by the quality of the information they share.
The second method to more blog traffic is the most confusing for newer people, and this is probably the reason its benefits remain overlooked.
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Once you've made yourself familiar with the blogging community you have entered, you can often pick up the pulse of conversations within your site's theme. Then, when you see issues that you want to expound on, you can send the other site a notification to let them know you cited them on your blog. That link will appear on their site, and often draws visitors to you.
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So why don't more people use Trackback?
One reason is that what is arguably the most popular free blog system, Blogger, doesn't have Trackback. However, Haloscan.com can remedy this with their free service ? it's a cut and paste away.
Many new bloggers don't get what it is and how it differs from commenting. And of course, the dynamics of it are a little more complex than I've stated. But learn to use Trackback properly, and you won't need to beg for links to your site ever again.
It's harder to estimate an exact number of visitors that come as a result of trackback links. But if you posted five days out of seven, and was able to get a trackback link to your site three times a week, by the end of the year you'd have almost 150 topical links back to your site, which are more valued by search engines than a typical link trade with an unrelated site.
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Make sure that your Auto-Discovery tag is in place and it can mean hundreds more prospects, links and subscribers.
It's a shame this is the one of the least used traffic methods for most sites, let alone for blogs. In four days, this method generated just over 1000 visitors. 157 newsletter leads, 98 new feed subscribers, and 206 links to my site. You may not get these same results right away, but using these simple strategies can still get you more exposure than you have now.
These aren't normally the highest quality links, as they rarely make sure of anchor text. However, bloggers are citing me using Trackback, sometimes in lieu of linking to the site where they originally found the article.
To see this in action, do a search on "Can A Ping Really Help Your Blog Get Top Search Engine Rankings", the title of an article I submitted earlier this week.
That article was published within a week of this one- the results speak for themselves. Many of these sites aren't the ones where my articles are normally published.
There are, of course, plenty of other ways you can leverage the content in your blog or RSS feed to increase the traffic to your site. The methods outlined here may be a bit outside the norm, but, as you'll soon find, that's part of the reason they are so effective.
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