Don’t Jerk Blog Readers Around:
5 Tips to Keep on Track

What’s the most frequent complaint I hear about blogging? Next to “I don’t have enough time,” it’s “I don’t know what to write about.”

Guess what? The two questions are related to the same problem: not enough clarity about business blog goals. Here’s how I help my clients solve this problem of clarity:

1. Define your business Ps & Q – (3Ps + 1Q):
   => What Problem do you solve?
   => Who are the People you serve?
   => What Products and services do you offer?
   => What makes you uniQue??
2. Create a course outline or a table of contents as if you were writing a book or teaching a class on this problem, i.e., your expertise
3. Make a list of keywords, categories and topics you’re qualified to write about and that must be addressed to solve the problems of your readers
4. Make an editorial calendar for each day of the week you’re going to be blogging. Make sure you cover all the topics and categories, and that your keywords are repeated frequently in posts and titles (search engine optimization).
5. Make a weekly blog schedule to include writing the content, sharing it on social sites, researching and commenting on other blogs, and formatting, editing, linking, etc.

Don’t underestimate the time it takes for all the peripheral upkeep of blogging. Maintaining a successful blog takes more time than just writing a post. And it almost always takes longer than the 30 minutes required for writing.

Do you jerk readers around?

When I’m working with my clients on their blogs, I often find their content is all over the map. Quite often, they blog about whatever crosses their radar, whatever inspires them that day. It can be an email from one of their clients or readers, or something they saw on another site, or what they’re doing that week. It’s no wonder readers get confused and stop reading.

Clarity has to appear not only in your mind, as the author of the blog, but for your readers as well. If you blog about a book you’re reading, then a movie you saw, and then about how to use your business products and services, you are jerking your readers around.

Unless you have a clearly defined plan for publishing content on your blog, you will confuse readers and lose them.

Re-read point number 2 on the list of 5 tips. When you organize your editorial calendar according to an outline or a table of contents, you’ll have a sequence of posts that makes sense for your readers. There will be an order. Brains love order.

Let’s face it, there’s a lot of information to read on the Web. Unless you make your blog content easy to remember because it’s well-organized, and it makes sense to readers, you will miss another opportunity to build relationships and convince and convert.