I spent the weekend cleaning up old profiles, and working on some new time management material. As I considered the time I spend blogging, I realized how inefficient I have become. My life can easily become filled with distractions, which can fill minutes, hours, and even days. Sitting down and focusing on a post takes discipline. I wanted to once and for all figure out how long a post should take and set aside a daily time to efficiently do it.
I wanted to truly define… what is the minimum effective post?
How many words should it have?
How many links should it include?
How many keywords need to be included
How many pictures, if any, should be attached.
Luckily for me, these questions were answered very easily by a plugin that I use called Scribe. I uploaded this post at this point and received the following recommendations…
As you can see, I have a way to go to complete this post. According to Scribe, I need 300 words minimum and I need to add at least three hyperlinks. I clicked on my keyword box and came up with three primary words…
My actual keyword density is good and the keywords are found both in the title and the text. So now I need to fill in the rest of the text and insert some hyperlinks. I also need to add alt text to the two graphics on the page so they will be seen by search engines.
So if I need 300 words minimum for effective SEO, how long will that take? I’m a rather slow typist at 25 words/minute, so if I was able to type straight through, 300 words would take a minimum of 12 minutes. If I doubled this, I could actually do a post in 24 minutes. This would give me time to insert graphics and hyperlinks.
To be able to do this properly, I would need to be prepared ahead of time. It would be helpful to have graphics and links sourced before I start, and the post setup with a basic outline. All I would need to do is fill in the text, insert the graphics, and highlight the hyperlinks.
So… here is a proposed workflow.
On the weekend before, outline 5 theme based posts, source graphics, and look up related links, quotes, and websites. Store all of this material in Evernote. Put together a weekly wrap up post with the links, outlines, and a few of the graphics, that will go live at the end of the week. Spend no more than 45 minutes on this task.
During the week, just open the outline in my blog editor, add the text, links, and graphics. Try to keep the post from 300 to 500 words. Set a writing goal of 30 to 45 minutes for each post.
Then just write and post.
Boy this sounds easy doesn’t it.
Let’s see if it actually can be done.
Next, we’ll look at how long it should take to create an effective video post.
Question: What effective procedures have you found that work for blog posting?