How to Blog Effectively

Effective blogging is blogging that values both your own, and your readers time. It’s an approach employed by the likes of Tim Ferriss and Tina Su: only post when you have something worthy to say. Essentially it’s valuing impact of your content over frequency.

Instead of posting every day like some bloggers do you might start posting 1-2 per week but go into greater depth with each post and be more willing to trash ideas that aren’t up to your standard.

Note: I’ll be using the word “effectively” interchangeably with “less”. They may not be synonomous, but doing less work while providing more value is the end goal, so I feel it’s appropriate.

Advantages of Effective Blogging

Blogging less may seem like a lazy thing to do, but it can actually be a very smart approach and potentially vital for the long term success of your blog.

• Creates a sense of anticipation. I don’t subscribe to blogs like Engadget because I know whenever I load up the page there will be something new to read. I’m not anticipating new content because I always know there’ll be some. Tim Ferriss’ Four Hour Work Week blog on the other hand has a greater gap between posts along with a fairly sporadic posting schedule. And its because of this infrequency (and great content obviously) that I feel the need to follow him on Twitter to keep track of the content. Unpredictability creates anticipation.
• Reduce risk of burnout. When starting a new project it is very common for bloggers to publish heaps of cool content in a short amount of time and then just stop all together. These bloggers are deriving their energy from the excitement of starting something fresh, but when that energy supply runs out (and it will) their blog dies. The alternative is to take things slower and be in this game for the long term.
• Free up time. Time is a limited resource and no matter how much you love your work it’s always beneficial to dedicate some time to other activities. One less post each week could give you hours of extra time to pursue hobbies, or just sit back and read a good book.
• Move towards an abundance of ideas. At this point in time I have ideas for 30+ articles I really want to write. And that’s a good feeling. If you blog too much there’s unlikely to be a point where you have a nice backlog of ideas which can be a stressful situation. By blogging less it becomes easy to keep a large reserve of great ideas for posts and this abundance helps fuel further idea generation.

How to Blog Less

1. Emphasise older content. Aside from news-centric blogs, most of your blog content will still be useful for weeks, to months and even years to come. Encourage readers to delve in to the archives and consume content for the days when you’re not posting.
   • Include a “Most Popular Posts” widget in the top right hand corner of your blog. This is a great starting point for new readers, just make sure you show the posts that are the most popular over the last 30 days as opposed to of all time. The latter will just keep the same few posts popular compared to giving all your content an equal chance at stardom.
   • Interlink blog relevant posts. If it’s relevant enough to mention within the article it’s likely that the reader will want to read it.
   • Install the “Related Posts” plugin and display it below your posts and in your RSS feed. When readers have finished your latest article this gives them a next step to delve deeper into relevant topics. For a visual related posts add on LinkWithin is a pretty decent choice if you don’t mind using a javascript include.
   • Go back to older, less-than-amazing articles and fix them up. Add content to them, make the writing tighter, and then re-publish the post. This does involve some work, but much less than writing up an entirely new piece of content. Do this every now and then to ensure your blog archives are bustling with top notch content.
2. Create videos. An average article may take me 1-2 hours to finish including editing. Comparatively, one of my screencasts takes around 25-30 minutes to create including the recording, basic editing and uploading. But the real benefit of video is that is has a higher perceived value. Either pick up a Flip camera or use screencasting software like Screenflow and get started.
3. Focus on the concept behind each post. Concept is more important than execution. Don’t stop editing your articles or anything that drastic, just spend more time thinking about the concepts behind your posts. Are they original? Exciting? Engaging? Never settle for dullness. But you should still…
4. Improve your writing ability. Good writers write less. Writing less makes you more effective at blogging. Instead of receiving second-hand information from myself read the books On Writing Well and The Elements of Style.
5. Maintain a consistent schedule. Predictability is more important than frequency. If you maintain a one post per month schedule, and stick to it, then I know I can expect more content in the future. But if you say you post once per week and you start missing deadlines its easy for readers to lose confidence in your blog. Set a schedule that you know you can stick to, and stick to it.
6. Optimise user retention. Subscriptions are essential to maintain a popular blog even in times of less posting. Few people will unsubscribe from a blog that is temporarily inactive because there’s no prompt to do so. The majority of unsubscribes will stem from low quality content rather than inactivity. There are three main subscription types that you should use: email, RSS and Twitter.
   • Capturing email addresses is one of the age old marketing tricks, and as long as you respect your subscribers privacy and attention, then it’s perfectly respectable too. For new bloggers, using the Feedburner email subscription box will often be enough, but if you have the money then Aweber will give you greater control in the long run.
   • RSS is becoming outdated but remains a common channel to consume content. Once again use Feedburner to make sharing your RSS feed easy and use an obvious graphic on your blog to encourage readers to subscribe; Feedburner provides a number of chicklets to make that easier.
   • Start tweeting links to your blog , either manually (using a service such as su.pr can help drive extra traffic) or TwitterFeed to automatically tweet about new content when it goes live. It’s becoming increasingly common for blog readers to follow blogs on Twitter rather than subscribe via RSS.

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5. So You Want To Be A Blogger, Part One – Choosing A Topic