Best Time to Start a Blog: Your Decision Guide
BLOG Traffic vs Social Traffic
Over the years I’ve had a few iterations of my business – most of which were following models which didn’t suit me.
I tried with Socials. Really, I tried. I set up Facebook pages, Facebook groups and Instagram accounts and I’d sign up to the ‘latest challenge’ and vowed to post daily for 30 days to see my group explode.
Of course they never did. All they did was bring me huge amounts of stress as I tried to figure out a popularity algorithm, stressed the fuck out myself trying to figure out what to post to drive engagement, fiddled with tools, bought templates, blah blah, shouted into the void – my carefully crafted messages disappearing off feeds within minutes – and, often never even seen in the first place.
2 years ago I got really sick and completely stopped working. Obviously the socials are long dead… but a blog I haven’t even posted on is still getting traffic daily. Let me say that again; the blog I haven’t updated in 2 years is still getting daily traffic!
When should you start your blog?
Yesterday. Yesterday is when you should’ve started – but OK, enough with the cliches – how does today sound? Really. Get a blank page and start typing.
The hardest thing about starting a blog is just getting started. I know and you know that you need to optimise for traffic, choose long-tailed keywords and answer questions your audience is asking – but… that can lead to indecision and fatigue. On Day 1 you just need to write the damned thing – imperfect though it will be.
Set up your categories and permalinks so that you feed extra SEO juice to the search algorithms and write a few hundred words around a topic of your business you feel you could speak freely about. It doesn’t need to be polished prose – in fact it’s better for search engines and SGE if you write as you speak – like a real human!
If you’re really stuck for ideas then you can ask an AI chatbot to help you come up with a few – but don’t spend too much time dithering, because the aim of the game is just to get started.
Reality Bites: This first blog isn’t going to launch you into internet stardom – but it’s going to get you started. And… over the coming weeks if you’ve not done so already, you can get yourself hooked up to Google Console so you can work out where your traffic is coming from so that you can build a strategic growth plan for your organic marketing (content marketing).
Start today and Google will still be sending customers to your website 2 years from now. 🙂
