Building a Better Blog Challenge - Update on 3 Tasks
It has been very challenging to stay up-to-date with the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Challenge. Our 
real estate business has been quite busy as well as working on a major update in our Real Estate Career (more to come later !). Even with that, we have been doing pretty good and are learning a great deal ! This post will provide a brief overview of some of the latest tasks as well as our action steps.
Set Up "Alerts" to Monitor What is Happening in Your Niche
Each day, I receive an email from Googlealerting me to any articles or blogs that have my name in it or my wife Stephanie's. Often times, I see updates from other Chris Somers but every once in awhile we are included in an article and it is great to see. After doing this task, I added a few more alerts such as our blog domain address "Philadelphia Real Estate Voice" and "Northern Liberties Real Estate" which is one of our local areas. The benefits that these alerts can provide are ideas for posts, awareness of breaking news, networking as well as reputation management. It has provided me to be on the cusp of new articles and blog posts with those relative keywords. Some people also do this with Twitter's Monitter which is a very cool tool as well !
If you have not set up any Google alerts for yourself, it is very useful and very easy !
Sometimes coming up with fresh content is difficult. This task was an exercise to have fresh content ideas waiting for you to blog about later ! The task was to write down your last 5 blog posts and then to analyze the post as well as the comments on that post and come up with ideas to extend the post, explore the opposite point of view, taking a "news" post and writing an opinion piece on it. Sometimes people will do this with a series of blog posts. This task was not too difficult for me as my mind is always racing and thinking about blog posts. As a result, I have a number of blog posts that are just ready to be written ! Some that already have as a result of this task were extensions of prior posts. They are as follows:
Can Sugarhouse be like Harrah's Chester Casino and Racetrack ?
From Blogging to Speaking on a Philadelphia Real Estate Expert Panel ?
This is a great task to do as it will always keep fresh blog posts either in your head or even better, on paper just waiting for you to dive in !
Develop an Editorial Calendar for Your Blog
Once you have all these great new blog posts to write about, Darren suggests to develop a weekly editorial calendar to help you manage them. For example, it will provide organization and planning in terms of how many posts you want to write per week, setting up a schedule for them for each day (or whatever is best for your schedule) and planning a strategy in terms of what types of posts to write per blogging day.
The benefit of this task is that you will have a week's worth of post ideas ready for you ! We love the idea of this task and do know that it will be helpful, but sometimes our days are just too busy selling real estate that it is hard to plan to that much detail. Also, certain topics are more defined on a specific day more than others, as I might have more inspiration on a blog post based on an experience that day.
Will provide various updates on other tasks in the upcoming days and weeks !
Whate are some of your updates with your blog ?
Other Related Posts:
What Forums are you Participating in ?
Are you Connecting with Your Readers ?
Are You Blogging for Business ?
Have you read some of these top Bloggers ?
Promoting Your Blog - Day 3 of the Build a Better Blog Challenge
5 Ways to Recommend Price Reductions to Sellers
Day 1 of Build a Better Blog - Elevator Pitch
I am really excited to be doing this 31 day challenge (see Matt Stigliano's post - 31 Days to Build a Better Blog - Who's in ?). It is not too late to be a part of it. You can join the Active Rain Group "Build a Better Blog" today. Or subscribe to our blog to follow along ! Is just a click away !
Click here to receive our Blog updates via email !
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