Yeah, yeah. By this point, it’ll seem like you’ve already made blogging a habit. Three months and feverish blog post idea collection, blog post writing, and SEO optimizing and mastering might have you believing that.
You’re close, I’ll give you that. But… you’re not there yet, young blogging grasshopper. You must continue your training. (And really, when do any of us stop learning?)
As we learned last month, Month #3 of our how to start a blog challenge, it actually takes a minimum of 66 hours for a habit to form, and potentially as long as eight months. So continue to build your blogging Rome we shall. After all, you’re a quarter of the way through already. Don’t abandon your essential foundational building blocks in favor of the next shiny marketing tactic of the hour. Blogging works.
You may have already started to see the benefits of your labor, if you’re tracking the Google Analytics metrics from each of your blog posts as you set up in Month #1. To see how you’re doing on an individual post level, check out this post we published about leveraging Google Webmaster Tools to see what you’re starting to rank for.
Need some inspiration? Take this BlogMutt example. We identified a keyword we were unranked for: “outsourced blog writing“. We added that topic to our running list of blog ideas, and only four months and four blog posts later catered to that keyword, we now turn up as #2 on search engine results. That’s all it takes—designating a topic/keyword that you don’t have any content on that you’d like to bolster your SEO juice for, and attack, attack, attack!
1. Write four blog posts. Yes, four. Then, publish them.
You’re not new at this anymore. You know how long it’s been taking you to write a blog post. Schedule in one more writing block than last month. One post per week is the recognized minimum for how often you should be blogging for your business, so writing one post/week gets you neatly to that goal.
Need some tips on how to mix up or expedite your blog-writing process?
(Don’t worry, we realize there’s a critical point when you couldn’t possibly write any more posts per week, even if you have prioritized blogging in your marketing strategy. You still have plenty of other tasks to get accomplished and are busy as it is—we absolutely are sensitive to that. You won’t get to the end of these 12 months and be writing 30 posts per month, fear not!)
2. Jot down 10 more future blog topics.
Hopefully by now you can take some pride in your list of 30+ blog topic ideas you’ve been curating over the past months.
This month, try to come up with a single idea each day for 10 days. Don’t touch your old ideas! Like a misunderstood kid, they might prove their brilliance given some time to blossom.
Need more ways to get ideas? Subscribe to our blog, where we come out with at least a post weekly that can give you fresh blog ideas. Our latest: “How An Old Movie Can Help You Pick Blog Topics.”
Bonus: Assign keywords that you can target with each of these blog post ideas. With a clear sense of your SEO goals going in even before the drafting phase, the whole optimization process pre- and post-publish will become LOADS easier.
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Good luck, and see you back next month for the fifth installment.
May your blogging this month be like this:
(Want a preview of the rest of the months? Or just a printable checklist to keep you honest? Download or print the full guide here.)
