Daily blog posting is a proven, practical way to build your personal branding success…no matter how busy you are.
If you’re starting to build your personal brand, or you want to jump start a stalled personal brand, daily blog posting can make a big difference in a short amount of time.
And, it’s not as much work as you expect, especially if you prepare the way by setting up a daily blogging plan like the one I describe below.
Daily blog posting is an especially personal branding tool if you use RSS feeds to link your blog to your Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media pages. Each time you update your blog, you’re simultaneously updating your social media presence everywhere.
Benefits of daily blog posting
Daily blog posting offers numerous long-term and short-term benefits. These include:
- New prospects. Assuming your blog posts are search engine optimized for your keywords and phrases, each blog post will increase your search engine visibility and attract new prospects to your blog.
- Repeat visits. In addition to reinforcing your personal brand as an expert in your field, each new post attracts repeat visits from your core prospects and clients.
- Social media. Each new posts creates fresh “news” that you can announce in social media like Twitter, inviting others to comment on your latest posts.
- Fresh content. Daily blog posting is one of the best ways you can turn your expertise and ideas into information that you can recycle, re-purpose, and reformat in dozens of ways. Each time you turn an idea into writing, you’re creating equity you can build upon for years.
- Easier writing. As I’ve written about before, see Why Do Small Business Owners Often Dislike Writing, writing is usually approached from a perspective of avoidance or last-minute deadline point of view–with all the enthusiasm of a visit to a dentist for a root canal. Purposeful daily writing, however, can be a catalyst for change, providing a structure for writing improvement, so writing will become easier for you.
Creating a structure for daily blogging success
The starting point for building your personal brand with daily blog posts is to create a system, or a structure, for your daily blog posts. The structure makes it possible.
Without a plan or a structure, it’s impossible to build your personal brand with daily blog posts.
You simply can’t be constantly re-inventing the wheel with each post, trying to come up with a fresh, relevant topic from scratch. Instead, each of your weekday blog posts has to fit into a predetermined “big picture.”
Once you come up with a plan, or structure, you’ll find it easier and easier to prepare fresh blog posts each weekday!
Choosing topics for your daily blog posts
It was relatively easy for me to create daily blog posts for Published and Profitable because my website was based on a 4-step process: Plan, Write, Promote, and Profit.
This provided me with the structure I needed for my daily blog posts:
- Monday. Each Monday I prepared a short blog post about planning a book as a personal branding and income-generating tool.
- Tuesday. Every Tuesday, I focused on a different aspect of getting a book written as efficiently as possible.
- Wednesday. My Wednesday topic addressed a topic related to book marketing, creating a launch plan for a book, and maintaining interest in an already-published book.
- Thursday. Every Thursday, I discussed an aspect of profiting from a book….not, particularly, profiting from book sales, but ways to profit from the opportunities to promote my coaching, consulting, speaking, and information products.
What if you don’t have a 4-step plan?
If you don’t already have a defined 4-step process you’re using as the core of your personal brand-building, you could substitute:
- Monday = The Basics for Beginners. Each Monday, you could define a term that’s important in your field that newcomers might not be aware of.
- Tuesday = Current Topics. Every Tuesday, provide a summary of current events in your field, including upcoming events (conventions, trade shows), current challenges, new trends, and trending topics in your field on Twitter.
- Wednesday = Problems and Solutions. On Wednesdays, you could create a case study blog describing a client’s problem, the solution you provided, and the benefits the clients enjoyed. This, of course, provides a way for you to promote your expertise from an editorial, as opposed to a brag-and-boast, perspective.
- Thursday = Book reviews. Your Thursday blog posts could be devoted to “The Well-read (enter an insider term for others in your field)”, and you could review a different book or online resource that others in your field should know about. Books could range from classics in your field to the latest books.
Or, you could simply go through the alphabet, letter by letter, writing about different topics beginning with A, then B, then C, until you’ve covered the alphabet… then start all over again.
The key daily blogging success is choosing a topic you can break down into bite-sized building blocks that you can address, one day at a time.
Once you have the framework for your daily blog posts, you’re well on your way to success.
What about Friday blog posts?
In my case, I reserved my Friday blog posts for promoting upcoming events (like free book coaching calls), reviews of other books of interest to authors, and inviting other writing experts to contribute guest posts.
In your case….you can choose another specific topic, or you, too, could use Friday’s as your Wild Card or “miscellaneous” day. Perhaps, like Mindjet, you could create a curated Super Happy Fun Friday Link Time feature!
Tips for finding the time
Here are some tips for finding the time to prepare 5 daily blog posts a week:
- Create the daily posting habit. Find a time that works for you, and build it into your daily schedule. Get in the habit of blogging at the same time each day. I’m a night owl, for example, so part of my solution was preparing my daily blog posts after the rest of my family had gone to sleep. You may prepare to work on your blog in the morning.
- Adopt a short post approach. Adopting a “big picture” strategy for your blog posts reduces the need to “tell everything” in each post. The more you adopt a “building block” approach to your blog posts, the easier it will be to prepare a continuing stream of short, focused, self-contained posts.
- Choose topics ahead of time. Knowing blog posting schedule, I would devote time each weekend to choosing topics for the upcoming week. Just knowing that, on Tuesday, for example, I’m going to write about Creating a Table of Contents, my brain would begin thinking about ideas to include.
- Work on more than one post at a time. Often, the hardest part of writing is getting started. Often, on a Saturday or Sunday, I’d prepare the first draft of multiple posts. That way, I had a head start on more than one post. Outline your posts ahead of time.
Finally, don’t feel you’re always going to have to daily blog posts forever! Once you’ve accomplished your initial personal branding goal–which may be to attract a certain number of new newsletter subscribers or created enough content for a book or ebook–you may want to cut back your blogging frequency. On the other hand, you may discover you like the challenge and fast-turnaround of daily blog posting. What are your thoughts? Do you think daily blog posting would help your personal branding success? Share your comments, below!
Author:
Roger C. Parker offers advice, assistance, and success strategies for building your personal brand. Download his free 99 Questions to Ask Before You Start to Write workbook or ask him a question.
