How To Know When To Write A New Blog Post

(Reading time: 4 – 7 minutes)

WordPress is a hot topic on Google: millions of search engine results. Everyone and their mother’s brother’s uncle’s 2d cousin on their great aunt’s side seems to be a WordPress expert, and bent on telling the world about it.

Or at least, attempting to convince Google.

Such a crowded space, so much competition!

So why Yet Another Blog About WordPress?

Well, lot’s of reasons, and some of them good reasons. The most important reason being that lots of people searching for something means the market exists. It’s easy to dominate a topic where no market exists, and that’s a great way to go hungry.

There’s many more reasons… let’s dig deeper…

Entering a crowded market

No matter how crowded the market, your perspective, properly communicated is valuable.

Everyone has slightly different needs and interests. The way you explain something might be better than the way I explain it. Different authors resonate with different readers. So the more different explanations on a subject… the better served the reader.

Most articles on any subject are crap anyway. Pareto’s Law (80/20 rule) definitely holds. On “hot” search terms, it’s more like 99/1 as the spammers, scammers and black hats crush search results by gaming the search engines. (How they find time to do this is a mystery to me. Life is too short.) If you write an article that simply “doesn’t suck,” readers will be grateful!

Here’s how to know when you need to write an article:

1. Search results are non-existent, or poor, but you need more information
2. Other articles are poorly-written. Can you explain it better? If so you should.
3. Other articles are out of date or inaccurate. This applies to the WordPress Codex as well. By all means, learn to add to the Codex, but when you have long term interest in a topic, write your own article and keep it up to date.
4. Your situation is unique, nobody explains what you need to know in a way that works for you. Write up your process and share it with the world. Perhaps you want to add international language capabilities to a WordPress plugin, and all the explanations don’t work for you. Then do what I did with a little plugin I wrote to teach myself internationalization.
5. You have the overweening desire to “own” a topic. There’s a couple of topics on Website In A Weekend in the category, one on article revisions, the other on favicons.
6. You are a “learn by doing” type of person. If you’re like me, you find it hard to learn something simply by listening, watching or reading. You have to actually do it. For me, this means writing out procedures and processes, documenting my practice, even in programming, engineering. It takes more time. I like to think it means I learn something better than people that can learn by reading, listening or watching, but that’s probably just me making myself feel better. In any case, when I want to learn something, I like to write about it. For more information, read Writing to Learn — The open secret writers rarely write about.
7. You find articles having no actionable content. This is where the 80/20 rule really kicks in! Most articles have very little simple, actionable content, and consist only of facts scraped from manual pages, source code documentation, or information contained in 80% of the other articles. The worst of these are poorly modified webpages taken directly from existing and widely available documentation. Totally useless!

If any of the reasons above apply, write that blog post or page. You know you can do a better job, and readers will thank you.

Standing out from the crowd

When you write a new article on an existing topic, there are a number of things to keep in mind:

1. You won’t get much traffic initially. Existing pages, especially if they have been around a long time, will stomp you in SERPs. Don’t worry about. Write for your readers above all, and they will find you out on the long tail.
2. Write very high quality, factually accurate posts. You have the time do this, you aren’t first so you have to be best.
3. Tell a story that engages your readers.
4. Explain exactly why you needed to write the article, what problem you were trying to solve, why that problem was important to you and why it may be important to the reader, define who your audience is for the article. (when? where?)

Website In A Weekend does it better

Website In A Weekend exists because I got tired of finding crappy content about WordPress on the web. I knew I could do a better job. So I’m doing it.

My key to success is writing into the long tail, that is, writing the highest possible quality blog posts, as quickly as possible to leverage Google’s longevity ratings. I’ve heard it said about blogging “publish then polish,” and that’s what I’m doing.

Every article on Website In A Weekend is all original content. All written from scratch. Every article will be rewritten as necessary to keep up with readers demands, and to maintain accuracy with WordPress as it continues to evolve.

The first person finding something factually inaccurate anywhere, contact me for 30 minutes free consulting by Skype or chat on any topic on this entire website (offer expires October 31 2009).

Tagged as: Editorial policy, Inspiration, Writing