Here are a few tips to keep your blog active:
1.    Set aside a specific time dedicated to writing blog posts and stick to it. Decide if you want to blog everyday, twice a week or maybe just new posts on Wednesdays. Once you decide, stay consistent and live up to the expectations you set.
2.    Provide interesting content that visitors and subscribers will find to be valuable. Start a list of potential blog topics and add to it as you come across information online and/or questions that will be relevant to your visitors. Check out current events, popular blogs or news articles and add your perspective if you are stuck for an idea. If you keep a list, this will cut down your brainstorming time when you realize you need to post.
3.    Invite guest bloggers. If you are stuck for content or want to provide other points of view, ask an industry leader, friend or client to submit a topic for a blog post and feature their writing. This will add variety to your posts and peak interest.
4.    Be careful with self-promotion. Although your blog is a way to self-promote, visitors want more than just a business plug or a reiteration of something else on your site. It is acceptable to mention contact details in a post, but be aware of adding a pitch and call to action unless it flows and fits with the content.
5.   If you find that you want to feature a blog, but tried to maintain and hit a few roadblocks, you can always ask someone to help or hire someone to alleviate some of the responsibilities.

Blogging is a great way to provide information and open your platform to feedback so you should not pass on using the outlet because you need help, seek the answers and get writing.

A client of ours, Atlanta Car Accident Attorney James Murphy are wondering why they’re not ranking as well for their blog posts as they are for their practice area pages. From her e-mail:
 
Type “school bus accident dublin ga” in the Google search bar.  We should be the 5th result or so.  When clicking on the link, however, our car accident practice area page appears….

(then) type “parking deck Sandy Springs” in Google.  We should be the first result, and Google sends visitors to the correct blog (post).

At Foster Web Marketing, clients in similar practice areas who are not in the same area (and don’t compete) link to and from each other. But the pages that they link to are the practice area pages and home page, resulting in more inbound links and higher “link juice” of the practice area pages than of the other pages.

That being said, the practice area pages ranking higher than the blog post pages are not uncommon, and goes to show the power of building links to individual pages (ESPECIALLY blog posts).

So then you ask, why does a blog post rank for the second keyword phrase, but not the first? The answer: competitiveness.

Who are people going to blog/talk about or report more, a school bus accident in Georgia that sends 29 kids to the hospital, or a parking deck collapsing (which, from what I can find, resulted in no injuries). While there’s no clear-cut answer, it would appear that the school bus crashing resulting in injuries is the more competitive topic/keyword phrase, because there is simply more more authoritative sources out there covering the story.

Proof: type in “school bus accident dublin” and you’ll see that there are triple the amount of search results, and more news stories out there than the second keyword phrase about the parking deck.

So, how do you overcome this?

Build links to the actual blog post. The search results above you are ranking because they have built more authority, meaning that particular page has built more links (both off-site as well as internal linking on-site…. if a news website has 100,000 pages, with a link on every page to this particular blog post, while the quality of those inbound links might not be that great… guess what… that’s a lot of links) than your blog post.

Taking the time to create the content of your blog post is only the first step… promoting and building links to it is a whole new level.

Check out the first post of this blog, ways to promote your attorney blog, and coming tomorrow: ways to promote and build links to individual blog posts.