We discussed fresh content one month ago here on this blog. Google made an update to their algorythm that made a big assumption. With all of its knowledge, Google assumes that their customers want the latest content in 35% of the searches.
That’s a large number of searches and it’s important to pay attention because Google is responsible for directing a lot of people to various websites. You want your website to be in the mix when your potential customers are performing searches.
So fresh content is now important, but how do you create fresh content?
How to Write Fresh Content
There’s a great post on Problogger that has three great ways to produce fresh content.
From Why Fresh Blog Content is Now 35% More Important:
- Publish often
- Encourage comments
- Update old posts
These are great tips. I’d like to expand on the publish often suggestion.
How to Publish Often
Fresh content is difficult. The number one pain point I hear from business owners is that they don’t like to write blog posts. It seems like thinking about sitting down to write a blog post is physically and mentally painful for most folks.
People think about how their thoughts will be interpreted. Blogging puts your thoughts on trial in the eyes of everyone on the Internet. That can be scary. You want to make sure your posts are researched and thoughtful.
So if simply publishing a post once in a while is difficult, it’s even more scary to think about posting frequently to the point of having fresh content on your site all the time. Daily posts? That’s a scary proposition for most folks, but in today’s world of Google’s Freshness, which is a reflection of what people want, frequent posting is necessary.
Here are a few ways to get over the fear of publishing often.
Develop Post Formulas
Something I’ve found that works for me having the ability post daily (or more) is to have a formula for how I write posts. In the case of Country Music Life, I have a couple basic formulas for writing posts. First, I write about new country songs that are released. New songs are released all the time so it’s nice to have topics to write about. It works just like news in most industries, even in small, niche industries.
So the topics are fed to me for Country Music Life. Once I have a new song I have a basic, one or two sentence thought that I write for the opening. After that I write a few paragraphs about my thoughts on the song. Then I provide what the song is about and then finally include some general observations about the artist.
It’s the same formula for every post and it allows me to feel comfortable writing posts daily.
Test New Formats, Keep It Interesting
Here’s a contradiction for you. It’s necessary to try new blog posts formulas. I follow the same formula for Country Music Life, but I also constantly think about ways to come up with new formulas. One formula I stumbled on some time ago was writing longer posts that discussed the artist outlook for the upcoming year.
This formula was a test. It was fun and interesting for me personally. It’s easy to get bogged down in the grind of writing fresh content, but this test of a new format rejuvenated me. Now I look forward to writing these posts each year.
Keep things interesting by testing new formats.
Have Multiple Bloggers
Finally, have more than one blogger.
You can look for guest bloggers. You can have employees blog.
You aren’t Superman. It’s difficult to write blog content all the time especially if you don’t really want to do it. Find people inside your company, outside your company, or anywhere and have them write regular content for your site. If you have five people writing even one post per month…one post per month, you can have five new posts every month plus the posts you write.
In Google’s eyes, that’s fresh and it’s probably more fresh than what you’re doing now.