Ever wish you had your own personal blogging advisor? Someone who could help answer those timeless questions of how often to post and what on earth to post about? Via the Zemanta blog, I recently learned of blog coaches, which is just that. A blog coach works with bloggers, typically business owners, to help develop a strategy for their blog that most benefits their business.

While you and I likely won’t be needing or hiring a personal blogging coach, the information available about them is really helpful. Lori Crock’s guest post on Zemanta about what she does as a blog coach raises some excellent questions for bloggers of all types:

Coming up with Ideas – developing new ideas can be more difficult than you think. I work with clients to come up with ideas that are easy for them to write about from their immediate business and life experience, challenges, lessons learned and analysis of new ideas, tools and best practices.

What is the Posting Schedule? – how often to blog? This depends on the blogger. Once a week is great, Twice a week is better, but often unrealistic for a small business. Every two weeks works and is better than no blogging at all. SEO (via Google) improves significantly with a weekly post.

Long-term Blogging Strategy – a coach can help you look at the long-term picture with blogging and planning. Many bloggers stop blogging at the 1 or 2-year mark, so a coach can help you with some innovative strategies to keep it fresh and interesting for you with ideas about vlogging, photo blogs, interviews, methods of writing for compelling brief posts, ways to repackage other content for your blog and much more.

Check out the full article here.

If you were a blog coach, what would you ask your client and how would you help them to strategize? Think of it as taking some time to think about how to be your own blog coach. If you’d like to learn more about blog coaches and other tips you can incorporate into your own site, you may be interested in taking a look at Crock’s blog on blog coaching, Written Impact.

What do you think of blog coaches? Would you ever try it? Or do you think it’s trying too hard?

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  3. Hi Erica. I need to ask Scott’s permission to use something; is there a way to contact him? Or perhaps he could email me.

    Regards.

    Linda

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  4. I’ve been writing my blog for 5 years with regular posts — at least 4-5x per week. Now, I’m getting fatigued and needing more ideas specific to my topic, which is Oaxaca, Mexico. Thanks for this coaching suggestion. I’m “all over it.”

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  5. What a grreat idea. I’m just uploading WordPress too my host today and hopefully starting a blog this month. It’s scary when you’re not a writter and let’s say “a woman of a certain age.” But I wanted to reach out to the world and my friends who are very intimidated about the web.

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  8. I’d be interested in having a blogging coach – or, at least, some advice. I’m getting the traffic. But I get very few comments. What’s the best way to engage readers to do so?

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  9. Yes, I find the majority of blog posts too long, and find myself guilty of the same. I’m learning to do what Elmore Leonard said: “I try to leave out the parts people skip.”

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  10. I had not heard of Zemanta until now, looks like a lot of good advice there and not just for businesses too. If I had to do it over again I might have considered hiring someone to guide me through some of the technical steps involved in setting up a blog. I guess I’m glad that I figured it out for myself, but it took way too long!

    Other than that my wife does a good job coming up with subjects for me to write about!

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      1. Thanks for that link! Anything new about blogging is always helpful. There’s a lot to learn, and it mostly turns out to be fairly intuitive.

        Technical questions I used to have were with my blog host, and they turned out to be extremely helpful as well.

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  13. I’ve just recently started my first blog — thanks for offering your helpful suggestions!

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