George Brown SEO Expert

Link: http://www.all-about-training.com

Has your blog lost it’s spark?

In my workshops I insist that everyone should have a blog on their website. It increases their overall persona and persona is what most people want to buy from. Not your average Dentist, Doctor, or Lawyer, but they want to go with the expert in the field, which is part of the persona. But once you have the blog installed, it ends up being like one of the many shiny Christmas presents that you often times get. You unwrap it with excitement, you keep it for a little bit of time, and then the polish or shine starts to tarnish and you find out that it’s more of a headache than fun, and it goes in the toy chest and doesn’t get seen again.

With the concept of a number of blogs out there, one of which is to write a weekly blog, or a monthly. I find that this is a bit too far apart between installments, so I recommend that you try to do a daily blog. I was often asked by attendees if I did so and reluctantly I would normally tell them that no I just don’t have the time. The problem is, is that how can I ask someone else as busy as I am to blog and yet I cannot. So I found a solution.

Many celebrities often look at a thing called an audio blog. The audio blog is where they will basically record a message almost like a voicemail; you listen to it as an audio blog subscriber and you get to hear the true zest and gusto of the individual. This is great if you’re a celebrity. The problem is, is that if you are a tax accountant or a real estate investor, a search engine optimization expert, or are somebody sitting at their cubicle and they’re trying to listen to your blog; they can’t go back and reference it. It’s difficult to rewind, it’s hard to even look like you’re working because you have your earbuds in.

So, the alternative to both of these would be to create a transcribed blog. I thought of this the other day when I was driving along and talking to a friend of mine who is an attorney. He said that every morning while he drives in to work, he dictates to his transcriptionist what is happening on certain cases. Therefore, his drive into work was fully billable.

I think lawyers have this down, and it’s a great concept. So I found a brand new transcription company, to me, and it’s at http://www.wescribeit.com. I started looking at the idea of how to maintain a daily blog and how large it should be. So today is our first commuter blog.

The idea behind this is, that every morning I want to go ahead and use my commute time, the national census says that the average commute time in America is 38.4 minutes. That’s each way. Now with an average commute time of 38 minutes each way, if you can actually do the national average, which is speaking around 150 to 160 words per minute, that means that in that amount of time you could get out a huge amount of words. This would be around 1,500 to 3,000 words you could add. Here’s the problem: In an average blog, you only want the blog to be between 500 and 750 words. Then, also, while you are actually accumulating this blog, you have an issue with pausing and thinking about and adding more information too.

I propose a new system for you. If you wish to maintain a daily blog, and you’d like it to be between 500 and 750 words, then here is a good idea:

What you do is on Sunday morning you sit down and take a look through the newspaper to find different topics that you could blog about. You read the articles, you do a little bit of research on the Internet and you are able to come up with an easy blog system.

What I do is I walk around with a small, what looks like the old police detective notebook in my pocket. It’s only about 2 1/2, 3 inches wide by maybe 4 inches long; about the size of a business card. They cost about $0.49 at any Wal-mart. I carry this in my pocket and whenever I think of a subject that I should blog on, I pull that out and I write down just the subject header, and I’ll remember it. Then what I do is on Sunday mornings I sit down and spend about an hour to do my research. I come up with the five best topics that I would actually want to blog about.

Now what I do is I go ahead and I create that on to post-it notes. I take five post-it notes and write the general heading of each blog. Then what you do is you would actually your reference material, and I try to keep it to one piece of paper. The one piece of paper might be something like the census information that says 38.4 minutes is the average commute, but what is really neat about this is is that they also tell you that Chicagoans happen to be only at 22 minutes. On the other hand, in LA, it’s 45. When you take a look at your facts, have them at hand but you don’t need to read them.

Now your average book on tape is recorded at 150 to 160 words per minute. So how do you talk? How do you actually dictate your information? Are you going to speak at 150 words? Here is what I propose: do a test. Go ahead and record yourself for 5 minutes. Do a test transcription of that information. Now what I would recommend is is that you have between 5 and 10 minutes worth of data and you sit at your office, don’t commute on this one, and you spend 5 minutes recording the information. As you go along keep a timer going and watch, when it happens to come to about the place that 5 minutes is, put a mark there. Go ahead and tell the transcriptionist, “Please indicate 5 minutes.” Then continue on with your blog.

When you get this sent back to you via e-mail, and we’ll talk about this later, you cut, copy, and paste it into Word. Under the Tools menu, there is a word count. You open up the word count and you take a look to see how many words is from your beginning to the section where it says “5-minute mark”. You divide that by five and it’ll tell you your word count per minute.

At this point, every morning when you do the commute all you have to do is set a time limit for yourself. Don’t try to do your entire commute. What I recommend is that you start your commute once you start hitting traffic. A lot of people put on make-up, a lot of people will sing their tunes to their favorite DJ.

The easier way is to actually sit down and make yourself more of a persona. Create a 20-minute, maybe, blog. Now it’s a matter if you talk fast or if you speak slow, you want to take a look at how your regulation goes. After you get the hang of it, you’ll be able to target 500 words to 750. What I prefer to do is to work on a 750 to maybe 850 word count for my blog because when I get it in I look back and I read it over real quick. Often times I feel like I have redundant or I will add information that I wish I would have taken out.

This is going to be a daily thing. I have made a commitment to go ahead and try this out for one month; every day doing a small blog that will be able to be cut, copy, and pasted directly on to one of my blogs. So each day look forward to a commuter blog where I am able to go through and talk to you about certain ideas in the search engine optimization world or the social networking area and we’ll go ahead and have a lot of fun with this. You’ll be able to see how maintaining a blog is much easier than you would think.