So have you missed me? I have been spending time with my family during the November and December holidays. Having been online blogging for the past 2 years, I would like to share with new bloggers what I discover about writing online, specifically keeping your posts updated.
Advice Number 1: Professional bloggers say that if you have not posted for weeks and months, your readers will forget about you and ignore your blog. That is not true.
You are only forgotten because you have not been communicating with your readers through your blog. If you have been driving your readers to follow you on social media sites like twitter, facebook, bebo, blip.fm, youtube or any other social sites, they will find you.
You see blogging is not for everyone, but socialising is. It takes as few as 7 characters “Good day!” to 140 characters to tell your friends and readers who are following your tracks what you are doing today, what you will be doing tomorrow or what you did yesterday.
Social media is a very powerful tool. I can assure you, once you’ve reached 1000 followers on twitter, and you are still on holidays, it takes a simple reply to your friend’s entry on twitter to get them to notice you’re still alive and well. Their words, albeit digitally printed, are as warm as the first day you ‘shook’ hands with them. I urge you to socialise online even if you have nothing to say on your website. There are real people out there with real problems and purposes in life to spend a few minutes with you.
Advice Number 2: The search engine literally stops pushing your post to the first page in google, yahoo or msn. That is true if other people are using the same title or search words to kick you out of the ranking. (This has nothing to do with page rank. It is about on which page your post appears in search results.)
At post time, the latest post on childhoodspeec.com is sitting on page 2 of Google since December 18th 2009. Search word “2 golden rules” 13th out of 47,600,000 resuls.
And the post in Feb 2009 is published on page 4. Search word: “Love of silence” It has dropped 3 pages since. That’s not to bad. Furthermore, being on page 1 DOES NOT guarantee you income and better ranking. Search words vary from time to time. And the less you feel vulnerable to the works of the search engine, the easier it will be for you to create new post and title headings to keep your post updated.
Here is the truth: Browsers who really need to know the topic will search each page thoroughly and will eventually discover your post. Be specific to the topic you want to talk about and keep at it. Online presence is the way in to join the ranks of bloggers who love to write to share and help others to succeed.
Here’s wishing you and your family a Happy New Year 2010.
