Hello again, my social networking friend!

How many articles must your site have before it is deemed worthy enough to be shown to the general public? Some bloggers think it’s necessary to start building traffic right after your first good article. other bloggers believe that you need a pretty large sum of content before you should start marketing it. I believe in the latter as well, although I haven’t done a very good job of holding true to that principle this time around.

I can definitely see why it’s necessary to have a collection of articles before you start directing internet browsers to a website though. A good amount of content before you start marketing your blog would be around 20 articles with 500 or more words. With only a few articles a website looks new and unprofessional, not giving readers a very good reason to come back. Whereas, a website with a plentiful supply of words and pages will have visitors leaving your website and coming back to check out the rest of your content at other times.

Of course many bloggers get impatient, and after 5 articles or so they try to get their blog out to the public. First of all, I don’t blame anyone who gets a little antsy and tells their friends about their website (as long as they don’t give away the url). You need to be able to keep your site to yourself until it’s completely ready to market. If your site is leaked to the public earlier, chances are you’ll lose potential visitors later on in the game.

Good luck Keeping Quiet

There are times when you won’t really want to take the time to write an entire article for your website. You might be in a state of exhaustion, on vacation, or just extremely uninterested in your blog’s topic for the day. When this happens you need to have a backup plan, and this article I’ve written while in a state of exhaustion will simply have to do. Well, this post isn’t physically your backup plan, but hopefully you’ll learn a method that you like from it and be able to use it in the future.

If you ever find yourself in a situation as annoying as I’m in, you’re going to need to do some planning in order to keep your blog running. Problogger has a solution for his scheduled leave of absence, and I wish I was intelligent enough to think of this earlier. By the way, congratulations to him for his new child.

I will be taking a couple of weeks off now however I’ve pre-prepared two great weeks of content here at ProBlogger for you. It will include a guest post each day from some great bloggers, a series of 10 posts from me on ‘how to let your blog go’ and a few other random posts from me that I’ve written earlier.

It’s very possible to lose subscribers and frequent readers when you don’t post for over a week. So, you should have some posts stored as drafts for whenever you go on a vacation, sporting event, grandma’s house, or etcetera. So whenever you don’t have time to sit down and think about a new blog post to write, you can simply publish an article you’ve written in the past. Whether you set up a complete series for a planned leave of absence, or you have some timeless articles you’ve just be storing for the right moment, at least one of the two is necessary.

Of course a small update about what’s going on in your life during vacation would be great content for a post as well. John Chow frequently posts about his vacations, the food he eats, or things he gets, and still maintains a very successful ‘Make Money Online‘ sort of blog. An example post can be found here. In reality that’s a pretty long post, but if you were just to post a video with a brief description you’d be fine too. In fact, images are probably the best things you could show people during a vacation, as novels generally aren’t as interesting to blog readers as short stories (with lots of pictures) are.

So, make sure you plan out some content before you go off doing something that will leave you unable to write quality posts. Whether you have pre-written content, pictures from vacation, or a video of you receiving a gift (lol), you should be in good shape!

The state I’m in now will probably deem this post worthless, and I’ll end up redoing it later, but that’s what I get for being a procrastinator.

How many people have told you that they have a great idea for a novel and are thinking of writing one when they find the time? Chances are you have run into them on more than one occasion, and they are hard to take. These are the people who ‘want to write’ but ‘can’t write’. The world is full of people who cannot write, and some even make a living at it. If you doubt that last statement, just look at television and tell me I’m wrong.
The truth is, while most people can’t write, there are some out there who can, and those are the ones you need to keep in mind when you are thinking of writing articles for your business.
If you want to write your own articles, then as long as you can define the following words, you may just be able to get away with it: noun, pronoun, adjective, verb, conjunction, proper noun, tense.
If you defined all those, and got it right, then you may have hope to write a good article, but chances are after noun and verb, you are completely lost. That is okay, you may not need to know how to write in your job, but when you want to promote your company through a press release, or through a sales pitch, then you better be able to write.

One of the biggest ways for you to lose business is to issue a sub-par article that is full of grammar errors and spelling mistakes. Even these can be simple things you may not think about like when to use ‘effect’ and ‘affect’ or ‘their’ and ‘there’. Hence, the reason you hire others to do it for you.

Those professional writers out there make their living writing things for people, taking the thoughts in your head and putting them on paper to make sure you are able to get the right point across, without embarrassing sentences like ‘Your crazy in affect if you didn’t bye this.’ If you caught the four errors in that sentence, then good on you.

The point is, if you had a car, and knew nothing about how to replace the brakes, would you do it yourself or would you pay someone professional to do it? Sure it isn’t cheap, but when you are slamming on the non-working breaks down a hill, will money be the first thing on your mind? Writing is the same way. Don’t let your company go in a tailspin because the press release or article you issued didn’t get the point across. Get things done right with a professional writer who knows how to write and can get your business on the fast track to success with their gift for the written word.

I’ve recently come to the understanding that publishing just about anything is not the right way to go about with your blog. Blog owners will agree with this statement, especially the professional bloggers that bring in hundreds of dollars each day. The downsides to publishing half-baked articles are numerous, and in order to retain your reputation, you really shouldn’t do it.

I know I’ve lost a good number of readers for the multitudes of blogs I’ve created because of my tendency to carelessly publish my uncreative posts. Bloggers all around the world and from each corner of the web have lost potential readers because of this bad habit. When you publish an article that’s not up to par, visitors that happen to make that fateful voyage to your site can only grimace in disgust and sail away. This can be extremely frustrating when you’ve worked so hard to write perfect posts, and then readers see your sloppy side on one occasion and decide that your blog just isn’t worth a read.

Some Advice For Publishing Good Articles:

1. After you write something, save it but do not publish it. An hour (or more) later you can come back and reread your potential post. If you think it’s perfect, then go ahead and publish it. If you think it’s garbage than just scrap it completely. What’s most likely to happen though, is that you’ll notice a bunch of mistakes and be able to fix them. After fixing your article you’ll think, “phew, I just saved my self from a huge loss of readers!”.
2. Don’t scramble to get a post done: Some people think that being the first person to publish an article for a viral news story is the only one that will get visitors to their blog. That fact is badoozie, and completely incorrect. Even if you’re first, and you’ve got the only post on the internet about a popular subject, people won’t read your article unless you’ve written in perfectly.
3. Peer Review: If you’ve got a good friend on the internet that you can trust won’t steal your content. You can ask him to read over your post and tell you about any mistakes he may find. Better yet, get your mom, dad, brother, wife, husband, or sister to look over your article and see what they can find (assuming they have equal or higher education than you).
4. Make sure you find your own post interesting, if you don’t then just get rid of it. Trying to post something that you don’t believe in will not help you at all. Also, make sure you know what you’re talking about, don’t try to completely BS (balonswivel?) your way through an article. Anyone who knows more than you do about the subject will discredit your article, and in time your entire site.
5. Practice: A highly redundant thing for me to say would be “practice makes perfect”. I’m going to bash that cliche statement and say that you’ll never be perfect. Nobody is, not even the professionals at Problogger, DoshDosh, or CopyBlogger. Godzilla forbid I call myself a perfect writer, I find it hard just to follow my own advice. The truth is, you’ll get better and better with practice, but reaching perfection is like trying to reach absolute zero for a chemist. It just ain’t gonna happen!

Despite how simple this advice may seem, it’s still extremely hard to follow. The more confident you get with your blogging skills, the less you’ll want to leave your posts just sitting for an hour. Even if your not confident yet, impatience can get the best of you. Try as hard as you can to follow atleast a few of these steps, and I guarantee your blog posts will come out 200% better than before.