Being a blogger and constantly writing articles, posting videos, doing podcasts can be a full time job and there are numerous people out there in the world who make considerable amounts of money from their blogging online. This is a guide for those people who really haven’t got the time to spend hours on end writing, can’t be bothered dedicating time each day writing or filming or even thinking up things to write about, and then needing to find the time to sit down and actually write the blog out. These are our top tips for being a lazy blogger yet still ensuring you have lots of content on your blog. Remember – content equals traffic and traffic equals business.
- Invest in a digital dictation machine, preferably Olympus DSS.
This may seem a little bit antiquated, but the beauty of the Olympus DSS range of dictation machines is that you can get a lapel microphone, attach it to your clothes, press record on your dictation device and off you go. The difference between this and Iphone or other form of smart phone is that you have total control whatever you’re doing and you do not need to look at the screen of your digital dictation machine, which can be in your pocket or somewhere close by.
- Dictate your blogs whilst you are driving.
This has to be the laziest and most idlest way of blogging. If you have a commute everyday that involves sitting in your car without anybody else there then if you have a digital dictation machine you can simply attach your lapel microphone, click record on your device and off you go. Coming up with topics to dictate or to blog about is another matter entirely, but this is by far the easiest and laziest way of getting a blog with lots of entries in very quickly.
- Search on Google for topics to write about.
The second hardest thing about blogging after committing yourself to finding the time to sit down and type out an entry each day (which you don’t have to do if you follow our lazy guide), is to think up things that you can blog about. If you read through blogs that are already on the internet you will notice something pretty quickly, which is that the vast majority are full of absolute drivel and you wouldn’t dream of reading more than a few words of the blog. Some of those that are not utter drivel are full of advertising and promotions for the company the blogger is being paid or commissioned to write about. Most of the stuff is just pure nonsense or unreadable.
However, the good stuff tends to be articles written, or guides written that you actually want to read or are going to be of help, and bloggers have not just thought these up on the spur of the moment and written about them. Very often they have been to a source of questions that has given them the idea to write about the subject, and then provided an article all about it which has then been picked up by Google.
This is such an easy way to keep a blog going that you could be blogging from now until the day you die and you would never run out of things to blog about.
So how does this work?
All you need to do is go on to Google, think of a question close to the subject matter of your blog, so for example we run a blog about business advice called wisebusinessadvice.com. If I want to think up a new subject to blog about I can simply type in a question into Google. So let’s try “why is Sage Accounting software so bad?”. Chances are if I type this into Google then Google will also come up and produce a list of similar questions that other users have entered and give you these as alterative options. Very often these won’t be necessarily linked to why Sage Accounting is so bad but will also be linked to why Xero Accounting is so good or why you need an accountants or what information does an accountant need, or how much does an accountant charge. All of these questions can then be printed out, added to a list and then when you do your daily commute to work and you’re blogging, you simply blog about one of those questions. If you blog about one of these questions then chances are Google will like you very much because you are answering questions they already know about and users are already asking questions along the same lines as, and therefore it is information that users have Googled to find out.
- Don’t beat yourself up if you can’t think of anything to write about.
Don’t worry if you can’t produce any articles on a particular day. I’ve been blogging for over 15 years and I go through phases of months at a time when I cannot think of anything that I want to write about, and neither do I want to talk into my dictaphone because I’m too tired or just can’t be bothered. However using our technique above – extracting questions from Google – we have taken out quite a bit of the stress of blogging, which is to come up with questions or subjects that you want to blog about.
- If you start blogging, make sure you try to keep adding blog entries every day or every few days wherever possible. For some reason Google really likes this because it shows that you are current and topical, even if what you are entering you dictated a year ago. The more content you get onto your website, the more chance you have of getting picked up for something. It is highly likely that the subject matter or the topic you get picked up for will be something completely different to the subject matter you expected. Many years ago I dictated an article on converting USA degree grades into UK degree classifications, and thought nothing more of it until I noticed from our traffic reports that quite a large chunk of our traffic was coming from people visiting that one page. This was simply an article I’d written on the spur of the moment because a lawyer had asked us about it and had no relevance really to our line of business or work, or anything that was possibly going to generate us any money. Similarly I have written some absolutely fantastic articles (if I don’t say so myself) that have been completely ignored by Google and any users of Google, much to my great annoyance.
To be a lazy blogger you need to do some work, but really the key is to make sure you have regular car journeys when no-one else is with you, invest in a dictation machine and print off lists of questions from Google that you are able to churn out articles for. If you do these things then your life as a blogger will get a whole lot easier than if you force yourself to sit down at a computer everyday and write something.
For details of a transcription service able to take your files and turn them into word documents ready to be posted to your blog, simply visit www.tptranscription.co.uk.
