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.