Yes, you can learn how to write a blog post in 20 minutes. It won’t be particularly creative, but if speed is what you’re looking for, 20 minute blog posts are really easy.

However, here are a couple of far better alternatives to ‘fast’ posts:

• You can also learn how to write a blog post worth reading, but it could take 40 minutes.
• Better still, if you’re only going to blog once or twice a week, how about learning how to write a great blog post that people will want to comment on and share. That could take you an hour or more, though.

The need for speed?

The blogger whose focus is on how to write fast posts, is missing the point. After her post is written and published, it will fly or flop based on the value it delivers. People don’t care if it took her 2 minutes or 2 hours to write it. Their concern is whether the content is worthy of their valuable attention and worth sharing.

In short: Don’t aim to write 20 minute blog posts. The Internet is already full of them. Instead, aim to write useful posts. There is always a high demand for useful, valuable information. THAT’S what your readers and future readers are looking for!

A reader emailed me today with a great question. If you are interested in Content Marketing or blogging and want to know how I built my blog, you will find this really useful. So, here’s what Sally asked:

I work in SEO and notice that you don’t optimize your blog posts the way I’d expect yet you rank on page 1 of Google for some top search terms. I believe I know how you do this, but I’d love you to write a post to explain it.

Thanks Jim. ~ Sally

Business is human

I work from the mindset that business is all about people, so we need to maintain a human-based approach to business, if we want to succeed in any meaningful way.

One of the core reasons that people struggle to achieve the quality and volume of sales leads or subscribers they would like from their sites, is that they focus too little on human engagement. For them, it’s about numbers. They talk about building their ‘list‘ rather than building a community. If you read about their approach to online marketing, it sounds like they are developing a spreadsheet, rather than welcoming and nurturing human relationships.

People belong in a community, not on a spreadsheet!

Here’s the thing that so many people seem to forget, when marketing their business online. Feel free to quote me on this:

Behind every blog comment, tweet, Facebook update and avatar picture is a person. A human being. Someone worthy of recognition. Someone’s son, daughter, mother or father. Real people, worthy of being respected as such, and not treated like inventory items on someone’s marketing list.

Why do I reply to just about every comment on this blog and every tweet I see? Because it matters to me. It REALLY matters. Why? Because without the people behind the clicks, emails, comments, tweets and shares, this blog has no value.

Here’s the short answer to Sally’s question

It’s almost 4 years since I wrote my first post on Jim’s marketing Blog and from day 1, I decided to develop the blog by focusing on community building, rather than focus on heavy SEO, guest posting, link building and ‘list building’. As a result, the readers of this blog have built the blog with me.

I put content out there and if it’s good enough, the community connect with it, value it and share it. I never, ever forget that.

The upside

The upside of this approach, is that I don’t need to spend time SEOing any of my posts. So, I never see a downturn in visitor numbers, when Google change their algorithm. Also, because I have the freedom to write exclusively for humans, rather than figure out how to work certain key phrases into blog posts, it’s easy for me to publish better quality content, more frequently.

I also don’t need to do things, like write those ‘best of the week’ blog post at the weekends, just to quench Google’s thirst for keyword rich, frequently updated content. I can write posts like this, instead.

The downside

It takes a leap of faith at the beginning to go against the grain, but after that, it’s easy because you are blogging from a mindset of total freedom. Other than that, I haven’t found a downside to embracing a human focused approach to blogging and online marketing.

Ironically, I manage to achieve better results than most spreadsheet marketing guys, in the areas where they are fixated. For example, around 40 new people, and climbing, subscribe to this blog every day via email. Without offering a newsletter, I have permission to send email to thousands and thousands of great people daily, who are part of this blog’s community. That’s an enormously valuable, Permission Marketing asset; built on providing value.

Equally, by focusing only on writing content that people will find useful, my posts tend to organically attract the back-links, which Google values so highly. Then, because it’s so much quicker to write posts when you are not deliberately SEOing the content or thinking of things like ‘SEO friendly HTML title-tags’, I am able to publish more content, more often – giving Google lots of that frequently updated content I mentioned earlier.

This approach works for me, because it allows me to focus freely on producing content, which I believe you will find useful. I don’t have to waste a minute, learning about the latest and greatest ways to keep the search engines happy or figuring out how to ‘build my list’.

Google’s position

Interestingly, this is the exact approach to blogging, which Google’s Matt Cutts advocates. Google staffers have told us again and again, that they are all about helping the best content reach the top of search results.

When you think about it for a moment, this makes perfect sense. Google lives or dies based on the quality of the search results it delivers. If Google allows generic, scraped or over-SEO’d content to take over the search rankings, people will stop using their product and advertisers will go elsewhere.

Conclusion

The longer I have studied online marketing, (I started my first email newsletter in 1998), the more I see that long term success comes from producing frequent, useful, original, people-focused content.

I believe that the mindset, which says people are to be targeted and referred to like inventory items on a spreadsheet, rather than valued members of your community, is both disrespectful and totally missing the point. As I said at the beginning of this post, business is all about people. It’s people who hire you, buy from you, connect with you and recommend you.

In short: I believe there’s real value in ‘keeping it human’.

In this post, I’m going to share what is easily the single best piece of blogging advice I know.

Here it is: Drum roll please…

If you would like more great people to read your blog, start off by asking yourself the following question:

“If I already had 10,000 prospective clients reading my blog each day, how much time and money would I be prepared to invest in developing it and delivering useful content?”

When I ask people that question, they often say things like:

• Wow… with 10,000 readers each day, I’d invest as much time as I possibly could.
• The  blog would be worth a fortune, so I’d invest in a professional design. With all those readers, I wouldn’t want to look cheap.
• I’d publish posts most days and really work hard to make the content as useful as possible.

Cause and effect

After listening to their answers, I sometimes take a look at their blogs and usually find that they have not invested much time, money or energy into them. They want a highly valuable blog, but they won’t make the commitment required, until after their blog is a success.

That approach is a little like a restaurant owner saying she refuses to serve great food, until after her restaurant if full every night!

My mentor used to say that it would be crazy to walk up to an empty fireplace and expect heat. We know we need to do the work of building the fire and lighting it, before we can enjoy the warmth.

We don’t need to be geniuses to build a successful blog, but we do need to be wise enough to understand that our results will be guided by our actions.

A leap of faith

The people that already have thousands of daily readers, did the work and made the investments before our blogs became popular. We paid the price for success in advance.

That takes a huge leap of faith, but unless you show faith in your blog, you can’t expect others to.

P.S. Still not convinced? Here are 25 Reasons to write a business blog.

From as early as I can remember, I have boxed. It was a popular sport in the rough area of London where I grew up and a way for poor kids to channel their energy into something better than crime and drugs. Today, I’m a 46 year old successful business owner and I still get the gloves on a couple of times a week.

Punch bags don’t hit back

One of my trainers had a fantastic phrase he used occasionally in the gym. He used it to describe people who loved to grunt and scowl as they worked on a punch bag, but who wouldn’t get in the ring and fight. He used to call them punch bag heroes. As he said, anyone can look tough hitting a punch bag, because the bag just soaks up the punches and doesn’t throw concussive punches back at you.

Blogging and punch bag heroes

When I started blogging, I quickly figured out there were lots of blogging equivalents of punch bag heroes. I found bloggers who would refuse to give their readers the power to question them, by deleting comments that disagreed with them.

A few weeks ago, I had a big problem with spam comments to this blog. I was getting around 2,500 a day. One of the options open to me was to turn comments off. It would have saved me time and completely eliminated the problem. The reason I decided to do whatever was required, in order to leave comments enabled, was that I figured out it was a cowardly option.

Here’s why:

• Turning comments off would have refused you the right to have your say.
• It would have stopped you being able to publicly question what you read here, where the rest of the blog’s community can see it.
• It would have made me a blogging equivalent of a punch bag hero.

So, the comments are staying on here for as long as this blog exists!

Blogging or broadcasting?

It’s easy to publish anything, when you know your words will never be challenged within your own tribe, because you delete comments that disagree with you or because you refuse your readers the right to question you in public, by turning comments off. However, it takes courage to open yourself up to critics and allow people the freedom to question what you say, where you know it will be seen by your readers.

What do you think?

I believe a conversation based, accountable approach to blogging helps a person improve the quality of their work and the value of their blog.

Last year, I wrote about how Seth Godin and I were ruining our blogs. According to the experts, we do it all wrong.

There are lots of expert guides to blogging, which suggest you need to do everything a certain way, in order for your blog to succeed. The problem with these guides is that the closer you follow them, the less visible you become. They tend to focus on the same dozen or so rules, which hundreds of thousands of other bloggers follow.

It’s hard to get noticed, when you are following a massive crowd like that.

Great news: Seth Godin is still killing his blog

I was reminded of the alternative to these ‘how to’ guides, when I read a wonderful post by Seth last week. Seth mentioned a post he saw, which listed 12 things that kill blogs – at least 7 of which should, apparently be killing his blog! If you don’t already know, Seth writes the largest single author blog on the Internet. It’s very alive!

Seth summed it up brilliantly in his post: ‘One way to work the system is to work the system. The other way is to refuse to work it.’

It’s all about choice

We can either become extremely good at following the rules and hope to out-perform the thousands of others using the same approach or we can refuse to work within those rules. It’s a matter of choice. Neither option comes with a guarantee, however, in my experience, it’s easier to stand out, by standing out.

When it comes to commercial blogging, sometimes you just need to do the work.

Once your blog has been correctly configured, write the best content you can, as often as you can and make it as easy for people to share as you can. Put your work where the right people will see it, social networking sites are great for this.

Then, keep on doing the work.

The software alone is not enough

I often see people who seem to spend more time changing the design of their blog and the plugins they use, than they spend blogging and improving their writing.

The thing is, it’s the quality of our content and the regularity with which we show up with great content, which makes the difference. This is why you can have blogs like ZenHabits or Seth Godin’s blog, which are extremely plain looking and get hundreds of thousands of visitors a month, and blogs that use the latest glossy WordPress theme, which very few people read. Leo and Seth write great content, regularly.

For those who want a bigger, targeted readership for their blogs, there are 2 areas I recommend you focus on.

1. Show up regularly

If people respond well when you write, (i.e they share your posts, link to them and talk about them), but you don’t write very often, increase the frequency of your blogging. Here’s how to write great content every day. The big secret to being able to produce useful content on a regular basis, is to do it. The more you write, the easier it becomes.

2. Show us what you know and what you think

If you write regularly, but people tend not to respond when you write, I suggest you take a look at what you write. People love to read and share blog posts, which offer them some kind of value, either because it makes them think, makes them act or makes them laugh out loud. The best thing you can do is be yourself, rather than try and copy what others are doing. One of the reasons you have not seen me writing about Pinterest or SOPA, is that thousands, maybe millions are already doing that. I can’t add value there. It would be a me too post.

Turn up regularly and do the work. Show us what you know and what you think. Give us a reason to keep coming back for more, to share your work with our friends, and that’s exactly what we will do.

I saw a joke on Google+ yesterday. It simply said:

How to start an argument online

1. State an opinion.
2. Wait.

There’s some truth in this

Many small business owners lack visibility online, because they fear being challenged for expressing their own opinions. So, they will like, retweet, +1 and stumble what others say and ensure their own messages are as uncontentious as possible. Whilst this approach does almost eliminate confrontation, it also robs you of the visibility you need, in order to succeed.

• Your marketplace listens to you, when you have a message worthy of their valuable attention.
• They follow you, when you lead. Not when you simply nod along like everyone else at the back.

Business should be challenging

Yes, you will get challenged, if you have the courage to share what you think and it happens to go against the grain. If you believe in the value of your opinion, you should welcome people to test what you say. In many cases, you will learn something about the strength of your own view point. In others, you will learn how to make your point more clearly. I have learned a great deal from people, who have caused me to dig deep and question my own opinions.

Looking through their lens

So, what about those people who just seem intent on arguing, when you confidently express your opinion? A quick look at what you have said, through their lens, will usually show you (in seconds) why they are arguing with you. Looking through their lens, is a phrase used to describe looking at what you said, from their perspective, so you can identify their motives.

Here’s what I commonly find, when I look through the lens of someone intent on arguing rather than discussing a viewpoint:

Vested interests: They have a vested interest in the opposing view. I saw a recent post by a guy who said that traditional networking groups were becoming less relevant, as more people connected with others on services like LinkedIn and Facebook etc. He was attacked by a lady who said online networking was of zero value, zero use and that he was in denial. After clicking through the link on her comment, I saw she ran several offline networking groups. Her business model needs that guy to be wrong.

Trolls: You are dealing with a troll. Trolls are going to troll, it’s what they do. Welcome to the Internet. It’s your call, but if they are only looking to insult you, there’s little value publishing their abuse or responding to their jibes on social networks. Seriously, you would not allow someone to do that to you in public and you shouldn’t online either. If someone’s just being a bastard, there’s no room for that in my business and I’m guessing the same is true for your business, too.

They want your juice: They want to gain your attention or the attention of your readers / followers. Some people seem to believe that it’s an effective marketing technique, to argue with people in their profession on social networks and on their competitors blogs. This is pretty rare and tends to happen more when you have a large readership or online following and a reputation for publishing comments that disagree with you.

In summary

I’ve written thousands of blog posts and only ever needed to delete a handful of trollish comments. Others who challenge my views, often open up the conversation and that’s how I evaluate their input: As an asset.

It’s your marketing and your decision, but it’s extremely hard to attract the attention of your prospective clients or earn their respect, if you’re simply nodding along with the masses.