5 Strategies for Maintaining Fresh Blog Content

The writer and their bloc are ever at war with each other as the writer tries to maintain a flow of good content despite stalls in creativity, newsworthy topics, or insightful takes on situations.

Today’s trends in SEO with Google Author ranks and a consumer base that is looking for more and more specific content mean that quality content is at a premium for bloggers. Maintaining readers means giving them something to hold their attention before they dart away to another site.

However, the Internet is providing more and more aids for the blogger in fueling creativity and providing content while old standby methods for writers in the pre-interweb world can also offer some assistance. Here are five strategies for keeping your blog fresh with good content.

1). Be an informed expert in the topics your blog handles

Find the major blogs, writers, and news sources on your blog’s topics and dutifully follow their sites and Twitter accounts. For a blogger, it’s actually important to budget time on something that may not be directly tied to a post in order to stay informed and an expert on your chosen fields.

Now, when trends or stories come up, you have already been informing yourself and developing opinions and takes that will be interesting to your readers.

You may also keep a document open in which you jot down the major news and trending stories of the day as well as some of your thoughts on each. When it comes to writing time you now have an outline and template for the various topics and takes you might explore on your own blog.

2). Involve your readership

Besides having the effect of improving your blog’s community, doing a feature such as a mailbag, Q and A, or an interview will provide fun, interactive content where someone else can be the driving creative force.

You can get a better sense through articles like this of what your readership is interested in while easily producing a blog post that won’t require a lot of creativity or work on your own part.

It’ll be important that you are following step number one and are filled with a wealth of knowledge that may not necessarily have appeared in blog posts but can easily be applied in response to a reader’s question or asking an interview question.

3). Stash articles and projects in your personal queue

Is there a major story or trend developing within your blog’s sphere of topics? It may be a major topic that you could research and slowly tackle with a multi-part series of articles on your blog.

After all, one thing your blog can uniquely offer a reader is a developed and articulated theory or explanation of an event or trend they find interesting. If you release a series of articles tackling a topic in pieces you also create intrigue and reason for readers to come back or other websites to link your work as word gets around that you are taking the time to tackle something with a lot of depth.

Similarly, there may be articles that are not time-sensitive that you have the time and inclination to write on at any time. There will be “rainy days” on which you either don’t have time or content to put up on your site. If you take the opportunity to write up and stash articles when you have time and ideas you can have a store of content to use on occasions when there isn’t any exciting news or content to share with your readers.

In some instances you might combine these ideas, slowly stashing a long, developing series on a major theme that can be released at your own discretion in accordance with your own needs.

4). Bring aboard guest posters or writers

If you have the money and resources, you may be interested to hire a writer that can provide a fresh take on situations and help bear the burden of maintaining the site with fresh content.

In lieu of that option, you can bring aboard writers that will write guest posts on your site in order to promote their own sites, author ranks, or brand. Typically the offer of a platform for them to write for an established audience or install links is payment enough for the free content they can provide for your site.

5). Give yourself an assignment to cover or track for your readership

Let’s say that you are writing a blog that focuses on local government issues, and there’s a major initiative in someone’s campaign that may be initiated in the local government.

You could devote an article once a week to tracking the progress of the idea, the developing responses to the idea, etc. Every blog topic is likely to have developing stories that can provide constant writing fodder for the blogger.

What’s more, you can pull in readers that are interested in that story and appreciate your frequent and regular check-ins on its development.

Keep an eye out for stories that can be tracked long-term and determine if you can make a regular habit out of checking in on them and providing yourself with content.

The easy access the Internet provides for the blogger to obtain information and news allows for strategies that can keep a blog filled to the brink with content and content ideas if the writer is organized enough to deploy these resources. Do the work of organizing news and ideas so that you can have informed insights and then your readers will be eager to rely on you to do the same for them.

Author Bio: IanB writes for 1 Business Guide, where you can read up on business news stories.