Lily Herman is a New York-based writer and editor. In recent months, her work has been featured in Teen Vogue, Glamour, Refinery29, Cosmopolitan, TIME, Newsweek, Fast Company, and Mashable. You can check out her website, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Blogging has become an essential part of PR and marketing pros' repertoire. HubSpot reported that 60 percent of marketers consider crafting blog posts their top inbound marketing priority. The focus makes sense, as WordPress reported that more than 409 million people view 23.3 billion pages each month.
Let's not pussyfoot around it. Blogging is a lot of work. Hard work. Generate new blog post ideas. Write weekly content. Promote posts via social media and email. At times, we all wonder whether our blogging efforts are paying off. Do we need to keep plugging away? Write more? Promote more?
Sometimes, when I tell people that I blog for a living, they roll their eyes. "That's so easy," they say. "You get a paycheck for sitting on the internet all day and writing. A monkey could do your job!" That's when I roll my eyes.
The word blog can be intimidating for people who are not professional writers. I remember my first blog post taking seven hours to write. It wasn't because I was writing an epic 30,000-word blog post. It was because I was moving at a snail's pace. Every few sentences, I would stop to re-write or edit.
You have an idea. You produce a great article and hit the publish button. Is that enough? The answer to that question is most definitely NO. It's not enough to simply publish content and wait for the traffic to find it. You need to push it out and get the traffic coming in your direction.
As I gear up to teach another semester of Digital Communications Strategy and Social Media at the University of Toronto, I think about our students and how they will react to the course requirement to publish online. Some are thrilled at the idea, others a little nervous.
With so many amazing arts, heritage and creative blogs out there already, how do you make yours stand out? How do you get people returning for more, and how do you increase visitor numbers and build a loyal following?
Blogging in itself is not passive. It takes a lot of constant work, writing and relationship building in order to create a successful blog. Although a blog isn't passive in nature, it's one of the best platforms for launching other passive income opportunities.
I've heard blogging referred to a couple of times recently as a mixture between an art and a science. If this is true (and I think it is), there's no 'right way' to approach blogging if you want to be successful.