Every good blogger knows that their blog/s must be updated frequently. Daily is a good rule. Twice or three times a day is even better. That makes me a bad blogger, doesn’t it? There’s always room for improvement, and there’s never enough hours in a day, and I’m full of excuses, so I think I will just stop now.
Back to the updating issue. I cut my post about Squidoo a little (ok, a lot) short, and I want to revisit the last point I made in that post. It was about content. Did you read Seth Godin’s e-book? Remember the three u’s? Unique, useful and updated. Let’s talk about that a little more…
How can you be UNIQUE? Well, start by being yourself, for one. Doesn’t sound that hard, does it? Problem is, as internet marketers, we let our heads get full of numbers. Numbers about how many people are searching for a particular item. Numbers of how many potential competitors we’ll have to beat down to get a good ranking on Google. Number of backlinks we will need to win the search engine wars. Numbers we will have on our commission checks when we succeed in beating down our competitors.
These numbers get in the way, and we make bad decisions. We promote items we know nothing about. We cluelessly blog about something we have never touched, or tried, or seen. We have to look somewhere other than ourselves for ideas and inspiration. No wonder we’re not unique!
Yes, I’m guilty of it too. And guess what, it’s hard to change old habits. As I’m writing this, one part of me is thinking I should take my own words to heart. Another part of me is, well, thinking I’m full of crap – that the things that make me who I am are just too “average”, and guess that - I don’t like the numbers for “average”.
Next point - USEFUL. What have you added to your site/s or blog/s in the past week that was “useful”? Think about it.
If what we write, or say, or do, or create, is useful, then guess what – first-time visitors will become regular visitors, and regular visitors will become referrers, and soon it won’t matter if we rank on the first or fiftieth page of Google for our keywords, because we will have steady traffic either way. However, one thing usually leads to another, and Google and their “I’ll-go-rithms” will reward us for being useful.
Of course, just as it is a struggle to be unique, it’s just as much of a struggle to be useful. Put the two together, and you have yourself a challenge.
On to the final point – UPDATED. This should be the easiest of the three u’s. If you have only one blog or one site, it probably is no problem. But honestly, who only has just one site! If the water feels warm and you’re in the mood to swim, you’re going to jump in. It’s only natural…
It doesn’t help when you constantly hear from all directions that you must “diversify!”. That you can’t just stick with one thing, because what happens if the demand dries up, or the site is deindexed, or the affiliate program you promote keels over dead. So we diversify. We spread ourselves too thin. And yes, we forget to update.
