The New Year is almost upon you, so it’s time to take stock and stop kidding yourself.
You’ve been working like a Trojan all year and your marketing efforts are starting to pay off. But because your activities have been pulling in more customers, your workload has increased making keeping up with the marketing really difficult.
Every week it’s the same; day after day you’re the one working late desperately trying to get all those blogs scheduled and articles written. You’re the one eating lunch at your desk as you try to keep up with your Twitter feed and Facebook comments.
Why?
Because either
You are the business owner and don’t trust anyone else to do it, or
You’re the only one daft enough to have shown a bit of gumption about content marketing and social media and knew enough about it to give it a go
Well now’s the time to stop – get off that eternal hamster wheel.
You have a perfectly good team around you, so it’s about time they started pulling their weight too.
Marketing a business has to be a team effort, so don’t be put off by their ‘but I won’t know what to say’, or ‘what shall I write about?’ excuses – if you can do it, so can they.
Yes, it’s time to delegate.
Blogging
The most common reason not to blog is not knowing what to write about.
Tosh – for a start, anyone in your company that deals with customers should have a shed load of stuff to write about. Just think about all those queries and questions that come their way – instant ‘how to’ guides.
What about all the advice they offer – perfect ‘top tips’ material?
How about issues customers have and the way you, as a company, resolve them – ideal case study material.
See, there’s no excuse – everyone in your team should be contributing at least one article a week.
Social media
Before you delegate your social media activities, make sure you have a social media policy in place so everyone knows how they should react to comments, what they can and can’t say etc.
Then you just need someone to monitor your Twitter and Facebook accounts so that all comments are responded to in a timely manner.
But make sure they understand the importance of building relationships and that they engage with your followers and fans; providing a stream of interesting and relevant tweets and status updates will boost your company’s visibility.
By the way, if you think by delegating all this stuff you can take the year off, sorry, it doesn’t work like that.
All this regular activity is going to be driving more business your way, leaving you to do what you do best – sell.
Remember, no one is Superman or Wonder Woman – by spreading the workload you’ll achieve your goals much faster, you’ll be less grey, far calmer and will also get to enjoy lunch away from you desk.
The following guest post was written by Alice Elliott. The author’s views are entirely her own and may not reflect the views of FreelanceCopywritersBlog.com. If you are interested in producing a Guest Post for this blog, please get in touch with your ideas.
For a long time writers have been waiting for Google to catch up with their predicament and realise their true value.
The onslaught of search engine optimisation and how it destroyed creative writing has been a blight on many a copywriter over the years. Being forced to research suitable and relevant keywords (or phrases) was bad enough, but to have to include them in sufficient quantities and appropriate places within our text was sometimes the last straw.
Often have I winced at optimised prose. It sticks out like a sore thumb, heavily punctuated with formulae and links to please the algorithms that dominate the search engine practices. The result is not only illegible, but excessively boring.
But now our cries of anguish have been heeded to. Google has created the Penguin to come to our aid. Relevance takes centre stage, along with the conversational style, which thrives within social networking. Writers are now able to express themselves freely with ordinary language, explore their vocabulary and use punctuation correctly. In other words, really start to write.
As I said, relevance is the key. Outgoing links that match destinations relative to the content and subject matter will result in brownie points and search engine recognition. Keywords can now be used sensitively, appropriately and with a frequency that now makes sense.
And the power of the story now shines through the mist, and this is where blogging comes to the fore. This should become a pleasure, an act of second nature, the opposite of a chore and something performed as a by-product of your everyday activities. Your blogging hat can be firmly pressed upon your brow rather than left covered in dust amongst the coats by the back door.
Blogging can now become the extension of your expression as it was meant to be. It should allow you to extend the contents of your website in a variety of ways that would appeal to a diverse number of potential customers. It will reveal the successes, stories and case studies that take up too much room elsewhere, and can be easily and enthusiastically fed to and read by hungry readers found in a myriad of social networking sites.
Now that we are freed from the tyranny of the optimised keyword, we can start to explore language again. We can research into which communication styles gain the best reaction from our customers, cunningly grooming them into understanding, liking, trusting and eventually contacting you to do business.
There is so much more potential for bloggers to really start to shine in 2013. So what are you waiting for?
About the author:
Alice Elliott, aka the Fairy Blog Mother, provides easy to understand blogging tuition and offers a design and build service for websites using WordPress. Advice and assistance is also given for website optimisation, digital marketing campaigns and content copywriting.
Ask any fiction, non-fiction writer or commercial copywriter about their journey to the top and they’ll tell you a whole raft of stories of rejection, self-doubt and the pig-headed determination they had to show to make it.
The same goes for guest blogging.
There is one thing that you must remember – just because you spent hours lovingly crafting and shaping your blog post doesn’t mean it will be instantly accepted by grateful open arms.
Common reasons for rejection
After you receive that dreaded email that says ‘thanks, but no thanks’, you have to work out why.
There are a number of common reasons for rejection, such as:
Poor spelling and grammar
Not sticking religiously to the submission guidelines
Writing about a subject that’s inappropriate for that blog
Sending an unsolicited post rather than pitching first
Writing in a style that doesn’t suit the blog
Your email landing in their inbox on a really, really bad day
OK, there’s nothing you can do about the last one, but the rest can be avoided easily enough.
Before you even start writing your pitch email with your ideas, make sure you research the blog well and read some of the previous guest posts that have been accepted.
Get a feel for their style and content to make sure yours will fit in.
Choose a subject that fits within the blog’s niche and make sure you proofread it within an inch of its life before you send it (assuming you’re asked to send in a post).
Coping with rejection
When you receive that dreaded email saying ‘nope’, it’s very tempting to sulk, file the post away in a dusty folder somewhere on your desktop and crawl away licking your wounds.
Don’t.
OK, so they didn’t like it – why didn’t they?
The first thing to do is ask for feedback (assuming they didn’t give a reason in their rejection email). Of course, no everyone will respond, but if they do, take it on board and learn from it. Plus, if they allow it, review and re-write your post in line with their comments and resubmit.
Just because they didn’t want your post doesn’t mean it should be thrown away and forgotten about. Try a different a blog and ask to guest blog for them – don’t let it go to waste.
If you want to prevent the rejection emails make sure you:
Pitch your ideas first
Show evidence that you’ve read their blog and understand what their readers want
Offer ideas that fit within the niche of the blog
Follow their guidelines to the letter
Don’t forget, the blog owner has the right to say yes or no – the content on their blog affects their reputation.
Guest blogging (posting) is a perfectly legitimate way of gaining more prominence online, but, as with most things in life, there are always people looking for a quick fix.
Most owners of good websites with high Page Rank and good amounts of traffic are inundated with requests from people looking to guest post in return for a link back to their site.
A recent post on Dailybloggr suggests that because the system is open to abuse, Google may consider changing its algorithm.
After all, as they rightly say, the mass posting of low quality content brought about the Panda update and Penguin was a result of link manipulation, so it’s not beyond the realms of our imagination to think that, before long, we could see an algorithm update that will affect guest posting.
But is it likely to happen?
Matt Cutts answers this question below:
Good guest blogs
How do you know if what you’re being offered as a guest post is any good?
A high quality post will inform the audience and benefit both the writer and publisher
Only accept high quality posts that offer something unique
Don’t accept short posts (300-500 words) especially if of low quality because it’s probably been spinned or duplicated elsewhere
The post will not be promotional and will add real value to your website and your readers
Over to you
What are your thoughts on guest posting?
If you have any tips to share, leave a comment below.
You see, although blogging appears to be a simple thing to do (and it is), it does require several elements if it is to work.
Despite what you might think, an ability to writewell, although important, isn’t the be all and end all. You see if you want to be a successful blogger there are a few traits that you must posses.
1. Determination
This one is right at the top of the list.
Without it you’ll probably not keep to your posting schedule and end up letting it drift away. Running a blog is something that has to be worked at and will only bring in the results you want if you’re determined to make it happen.
2. Patience
You won’t see instant results. Building a readership and reputation takes time, so don’t expect to set up a blog one day and have thousands of readers the next.
3. Personality
People will read your blog posts if they have personality.
Something that is dull and dry will turn of readers faster than a fast thing. But if you allow your own personality to seep through they will be able to get to know you and will find themselves immersed in your writing.
4. Consistency
This is both in terms of the quality of your posts, their subject range and frequency.
All your posts have to be of a high standard; if you let your game slip once you could risk losing readers. Also, your readers will come to your blog because you write for a certain niche, if you start adding random posts about anything and everything, your blog will lose its purpose and readers.
With regards to frequency, regular readers will get to know when you post and will be looking out for your next article, so when you decide on a posting frequency, stick to it.
5. Purpose
Every post you publish must have a purpose – usually to educate or provide your readers with great information.
A post without a purpose is a wasted one.
6. Honesty
If you add an affiliate link to a product within your post, tell your reader it’s an affiliated product.
Being open and honest about any potential earning power you may gain from your posts will show your honesty and integrity to your readers.
7. Communicative
The whole purpose of blogging is to communicate and interact with your readers. So when they comment on a post, respond to them and engage with them. Show them that there is a real person behind the blog.
As you can see becoming a blogger isn’t just about setting up a blog site and publishing any old thing. There’s a lot to think about, such as whom your audience is, what you want to achieve and what your audience want to see.
Blogging is for the long haul – if you’re prepared for that it can be very rewarding.
