Blogging Advice

Eben Pagan has some of the best productivity/time management content for small business owners especially those that do their work on the internet. Here’s a recent video he did. It has a lot of great advice. I don’t usually take notes while consuming content, but Eben’s video had such great content that I found myself pausing the video at important points and taking notes.

Here are the concepts I found useful.

Don’t Multitask; Instead, Focus

The best work schedule is filled with short work bursts of concentrated focus of about one hour. Studies have shown that this time period is about how long we are capable of staying focused on a task without needing a break or experiencing degradation in our ability to focus.

Multitasking is very bad for productivity. Very bad. Multitasking lowers your IQ more than marijuana! Therefore, we need work environments that keep distractions and interruptions at a minimum.

Avoiding multitasking means doing one thing and one thing only.  Adhering to this rule is very important since it’s so easy to get distracted while working online.

We have to learn how control our “monkey mind”. This terms refers to the times when our brain stops focusing and gets distracted with thoughts unrelated to the task at hand. Having short work periods of about one hour helps, but we still have to be disciplined to continually refocus our mind when it wanders.

Breaks are Good

Our bodies have a natural rhythm. We will have energy for about 90-120 minutes and then we’ll hit a lull. Anticipate this lull and don’t fight it.  It’s your body telling you to take a break.  Taking a short 10 minute break away from work to let the body rejuvenate itself. If you avoid these breaks, you’ll overwork and damage your body.

Overwork leads to missing out on the big picture. We lose who we are and why we got into the business world in the first place.

Set Yourself Up With a Great First Hour

The first hour of your day is the most important hour of the day. You yourself are the biggest leverage point in your business, so use that hour to take care of yourself. Focus on making yourself strong physically, mentally, and emotionally.

Eben’s sample first hour goes something like this:

1. Drink one liter of water
2. Exercise for 20-30 minutes
3. Meditate for 5-10 minutes
4. Eat a healthy meal
5. Read for 5-10 minutes

Along with improving your productivity, this first hour will help you produce better work.  If you’re taking care of yourself, you’ll take care of your customers and business partners better.

Again, here’s the video. Check it out and let me know what you think.

About a week ago, a business blogger came to me wondering why she wasn’t getting more traffic. She had just started her blog three months ago. She said she checked out a successful blog in her industry and was publishing posts similar to the posts on that blog.

I checked out the successful blog she was talking about. It was a three year old blog with mostly short posts. The posts were usually less than 100 words and included one picture.

I told her this blog gets a lot of traffic not so much because of its content but because it got started earlier when there wasn’t a lot of competition in the “blogosphere”, or blogging world. Sure, the content wasn’t low quality but today you need to have higher quality content to generate a lot of traffic.

Today, the posts that attract links and traffic are usually longer posts. When I say “longer posts”, I mean content that is at least 400 words. And oftentimes the longer, the better.

Longer posts get more links because they have higher perceived value. The successful blogs less than two years old all seem to have long posts as the bulk of their content.

Still, many bloggers are trying to build an audience with short posts. This trend allows allows bloggers who write longer, more in-depth posts to stand out from the crowd and earn the attention of more readers. There is much more competition today in the blogosphere. Anything that allows you to differentiate your blog should be considered.

Also, long posts are usually more unique than short posts. Short posts tend to just be commentary of an interesting link. These type of posts are not very unique. They are easy to emulate and many people are already publishing these short, commentary link posts.

Even if your style is to write short posts, I would at least try mixing in a longer post 1-3 times a month.

How long is your average post?

Andy has a simple but effective tip for business bloggers. He writes:

Sign your blog posts with your name, not your credit union’s name.

He’s writing for credit unions since that’s the industry he covers, but any online business would do well to follow his tip.

Basically, he’s reiterating one of the fundamentals to blogging and social media: be a real person not an impersonal, faceless company. It only makes sense to use your name if you’re going to use a personal channel like blogging.

Also, use your name in your other social media interactions like forums and social voting sites. You gain a little bit of friendship by sharing your name. And anyone that feels like they know you will be more likely to visit your blog.

For more social media tips, check out his whole blog post: Joining the Conversation, Being the Conversation.

One thing many business bloggers don’t realize at first is the amount of time blogging can take. While blogging has many great benefits for businesses, it still takes time and hard work to get a blog of the ground. Fortunately, there are some tricks you can do to be more productive with your blogging. The most effective tip I’ve found is writing multiple posts in one sitting. I got this from Ahmed Bilal, who’s had success blogging in the soccer industry.

My last three posts were published on January 11, 13, and 15. I actually wrote those posts on January 10. I would’ve written one or two more posts that day but I had a couple NFL football games to watch. It took me four hours to write all three posts. This saved me two hours because it usually takes me about two hours to write a post if I write them one at a time on different days.

Why was I able to be more productive?

Answer: the momentum factor.

Ahmed writes:

…once your writing juices get flowing, it’s easier for you to write that second and third article…

Let’s face it. It can take some time to get into the writing mood. Or to put in another way, it takes time to break through writer’s block and “get into the flow”. But once you’ve reached that point, the words flow more easily and you write more efficiently.

The trick is leveraging this flow of inspiration by continuing to write that second, third, or even fourth post.

I like what John C. Maxwell says:

The whole idea of motivation is a trap. Forget motivation. Just do it. Exercise, lose weight, test your blood sugar, or whatever. Do it without motivation. And then, guess what? After you start doing the thing, that’s when the motivation comes and makes it easy for you to keep on doing it.

We often don’t have the motivation to write blog posts. However, motivation seems to build as we gain momentum in the writing process. Why not leverage that motivation and write as many blog posts as you can while you’re motivated?

Don’t quit too early. Don’t quit while you’re in the flow. Keep writing.