We can refer here to promoting a site, to posting information on the forums or updating our nice blogs. It is important to kick start them with some content and try to keep up the content adding in a REGULAR way. This “regular” should be our main word in here.Having some “content writing sprees” is OK for the first days when we need to create information and post it. Afterwards we get into the so called “maintenance” phase when we need to keep up the posting rhythm and sustain the site’s growth.

This is not a recent topic for me, since in the end it’s the problem I faced more often and I have to confess to you, dear reader, that this is MY MAIN SIN. Not because I am lazy (well, I do have my “slow” days, that’s for sure), but I also have a lot of things to think about: running 24 sites of my own (from which 15 are forums), my clients’ sites plus some projects I have to work on SEO on). We should also consider I must take care of my family too, so I have to work in a weird schedule sometimes.

This affects my sites and I am the first one who has to understand that without CONSTANT effort I am losing my time.

Some time ago I wrote an article on the main site, Want to have returning visitors? Update the content often

It’s related to content mainly, but as I mentioned before we can talk about anything related to running a site. Promotion even, SEO and many other aspects. Some fast “bullet” ideas and then a short excerpt of the article.

How can we work better on our sites and use this “be consistent” guideline?

1. PLAN .. try to see what is the project in its entirety .. are we talking here about a 20000 link directory? A 100 article site? If so .. try to “schedule” this effort to be able to deliver this content in a regular way.

2. Set some deadlines .. you want to index the 20 thousand links in 20 months? That means 1000 links per month .. 33 links per day (or something similar). The same with the articles. Try to set such an approximate deadline and set some smaller goals.

3. The importance of smaller goals. This is clearly something I learnt from my martial arts classes. I wasn’t EVER able to do the splits for instance .. stiff as a pole, that’s how I always was. But I set some smaller goals. I wanted to go down till this height in 2 months .. and worked consistently and carefully to this goal. Then I wanted to go lower and in 1 year or something I was able to finally do the splits.

4. Make sure you don’t sprain any muscles .. OK .. we’re making a short reference to my Karate classes again. It is important to set that main goal and also the “sub-goals”, but try to NOT OVERWORK yourself. I was able to make the splits in 1 year because I was intelligent enough to push my body that hard as to have some sprained muscles. ALL incidents like this can cause you SET BACKS in the final goal.

Back to the site work again … it’s also important to not work yourself over a decent limit. Any such huge burnout can cause you to lose interest or just get into a writer’s block or any “accident” like this. Any such event will cause you to lose some of the advance you thought you’d get by working like a mad man. In the end working on the sites has some limits. Try to see these limits and not get a “sprained muscle” too .. in the real life that hurts a lot

5. Set the schedule so that you can keep up with it.

I think it’s one of the most important things. I am the Queen of schedules. I make some awesome ones. But the problem is that most of the time I make them when I have some time on my hands and I feel I’ll always have that time available.

There’s an old saying: “Don’t go shopping for food when you’re hungry” … same with scheduling your work on the sites. When you make that plan you have time on your hands. But try to see how does a normal day look like for you and how much time can you usually allocate to any of the tasks you’re planning. I can plan to write 20 posts in my blog. And maybe for 3 days be able to keep it up. But then I start work again and I am not sure I can do my “job”. Instead of setting this killer schedule I have to “force” myself to write 1 article per day for instance and also update my content on the other sites. In this way, with a more relaxed schedule I can have the regular content on my sites, I won’t overwork myself and I’ll be able to offer my readers a constantly updated content.

QUALITY is more important that QUANTITY. Instead of copy-pasting some news (you can do hundreds of such “articles” in a day), better write 1 SINGLE MEANINGFUL post. But try to write it.

Maybe you cannot work on that site daily. Set yourself to visit it every 2 or 3 days for instance and do what you have to do: index it in other sites/directories, update the content, make some changes.

Here is one of the most important excerpts of the article mentioned before:

Try to see how often you can update the content in your site (7 articles in a month? More? Less?). And try to deliver them at a steady rate. I used to write 2-3 articles in a day (was inspired sometimes) and then have 1 month of nothing new on the site. I doubt my article writing spree from time to time could make too much in order to help with SEO and having visitors think this is a “healthy” site. So, I discovered it’s better to have a well determined way of delivering content. I noticed that delivering 1 article every week can be better than putting 4 new articles in a day and then have a hiatus of 1 month. One article at a time makes it easier for me to promote it and visitors to notice it and read. The constant flow of information is helping them discover new things every few days and keeps the search engines pleased when seeing new content added.

Let’s try to remember that even if we’d love to spend many hours on a given project we have to schedule this work better: this way we can plan ahead, we can work in a normal rate without “killing” ourselves and we can also get our visitors accustomed to a regular development. Many won’t have anything against reading a new article on your site once a week, or seeing something new every 2 weeks. If this is the rate you are able to work at, then it’s just perfect. Remember to KEEP up the work in the schedule and they’ll just know when to come back and get some more of what you have to offer.

Filed under: Web development by ramona