For those of you that don't follow the PropertyADD Twitter account, yesterday I posted a link to a Hubspot webinar on how a good blogging process can be compared to a factory production line. That link also has slides for people who'd rather not watch the hour long webinar.
The headline news for me (and our experience with The Modern Estate Agent backs this up) was that 90% of companies who blog daily have won business directly as a result of doing so.
However, one of the challenges facing any blogger, journalist or author is writer's block. That feeling that yesterday you had lots of good ideas, but today, nothing. There's no two ways about it, blogging can be hard work.
In 17 blogging tips for estate agents last month, I mentioned how valuable I find keeping a swipe file of ideas for future topics. Right now, I have over 200 ideas for articles in my swipe file, which is a great resource to fall back on when time is short or inspiration dries up.
In the webinar above, Jeffrey Henning takes this idea further and shows you how you can turn your swipe file into a conveyor belt - a blog factory:
- Research (sources of ideas)
- Blogs you subscribe to
- Google alerts
- News stories and events
- Interesting or debateable statistics
- Questions from customers
- Conversations you've had
- Your own previous blog posts
- Warehouse (part-finished ideas for blogs)
- Use themes you would like to write about to group ideas
- Headlines or keywords you want to target
- Bullet points for a topics
- Links
- Paragraphs or snippets of content
- Images to go alongside the articles
- Assembly (putting it all together)
- Turning notes into posts
- Combining ideas together
- Using topical stories to give posts an interesting slant
The number of past posts I've written on blogging is a good illustration of how important I feel it is to business. This approach can help you to keep it up and reap the benefits. The more you post, the more visitors you generate..
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