Make the most out of your time and blog more often

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, marketers, managers, journalists, general public.

One thing I’ve learned from years of blogging is that a blogging process saves time and headaches. My approach uses creative momentum at the beginning to blow through tasks that require linear thinking.

Above you’ll find a 6-minute video demonstration of exactly what I do, step-by-step, for each blog post:

Make an Outline – Assuming you’ve selected useful topic to write about, all you need at the beginning is a basic framework to support the copy. I use MindMiester to map out an outline.

Dictate Copy – I use the built in speech translator in my Macbook Pro to write copy. Begin with a brain dump, and then edit what you’ve written.

Edit the Copy – Eliminate as much copy as possible without eliminating your voice. Write like you speak, but keep it short and sweet.

Transfer the Copy – Copy the content from your plain text editor, and copy it in your blogging software. Most people use WordPress.

Tweak SEO – It’s my belief that when you write content that’s highly specific and useful to your audience, the SEO takes care of itself. That said, here are a few bonus tips on ranking higher in search.

Add Tags and Categories – Next, select the appropriate categories and tags for your blog post. Categories should represent the larger topics within your blog, and tags should represent specific elements that are within various categories.

Add Images – Images are honey, your readers are bees. They should trigger readers on an emotional level to stick around and read more.

Add links – Depending upon your goals, you might link to internal pages, or link to external pages. For example if you’re trying to promote an event, you might write a series of blog posts linking to the registration page.

Schedule the Post – Finally, schedule the blog post for a morning within the next day or two (bonus points if you know what time is best for your community).

The post Time-saving tips to write more blog posts (with video) appeared first on Socialbrite.

Create blog posts that speak to an individual, not an audience

Regardless of how many people visit your website, there’s one person you need to be paying attention to:

The person reading your blog post or Facebook update right now.

I know what you’re thinking. “We get thousands of visits per day on our website – surely more than one person is reading our content at any given moment.”

This is true, but people don’t gather around a laptop to view your website.

Back when television was our main media source, it was not uncommon for people to participate in consuming its content in groups: Families, roommates, parties.

But consuming Web content is a personal activity we participate in as individuals. And this is why social media conversations should be considered as essentially being one to one.

Making content personal

Content is more effective when it’s perceived as “written for me.” Try these tips:

• Try writing your posts or updates in the second person (“you” instead of “I” or “we”).
• Think of someone you already know and write to them – as if you’re writing a personal email to them.
• Write to that person and that person only – don’t worry about alienating people.
• Write with a human, conversational tone – the way you would talk if they were sitting right in front of you.
• Try using Dragon speech-to-text tools to achieve this conversational tone.
• Read what you’ve written out loud. See how it sounds when you hear it.
• Keep practicing. Learning to break the rules of writing might take time.

What else would you add?

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