So today I’m thrilled to announce that I am part of the team of a brand new venture – HodgesNet. HodgesNet brings together a group of internet marketing professionals who can offer business owners the full range of internet marketing tools – everything from web design and SEO to email marketing, link building, blogging and affiliate marketing. I am the specialist copywriter on the team, so I will be helping businesses to get their blogging campaigns underway by writing customised articles and promoting those articles via social media. It’s a service I already offer under my own banner, but being part of the HodgesNet team raises my profile to a much wider market.

I’m really excited about the opportunity and we already have a few hot prospects lined up – so I’m looking forward to being very busy in the coming weeks and months!

So how long does blogging take? That’s one of those “piece of string” questions – because it really can take as long as you want it to take. Some people actually blog full time – they have monetised blogs and the only way they make any money is by blogging, and promoting their blog. They could easily spend several hours a day blogging.

However, for most of us, blogging is just one of many marketing tools we use. I always recommend people try to blog once a week whenever possible – more is better, of course, but one blog post a week will do the job well enough. If you’re clever, you’ll have your blog’s RSS feed linked up to a service like Twitterfeed so your social media network is automatically informed of new posts. That just leaves the actual writing and uploading of your blog post, which shouldn’t take you much more than an hour or two. (If it’s taking you more than two hours, or you can’t find the time to blog, you might be better off using an outsourced blogger.)

Which brings us on to the second question – how long should blog posts be? I try to go for about  300-500 words and I would recommend you don’t write much more than that, especially when you start blogging. We internet users have very short attention spans. If someone visits your blog for the first time and is faced with huge 1000 words+ essays, unless you grab their attention very quickly they’re not going to bother reading. Much better to keep your posts short and sweet. You can get plenty of useful information across in 300 words and if they like what you say they’re likely to come back for more. Once you’ve built up a regular audience you can start writing longer posts – but I’d still recommend you keep them below 600 words. Alternatively, put longer articles in a separate section on your website and write a short summary for your blog, with a link to the relevant article. By keeping an eye on your analytics (You do have some analytics software on your blog, don’t you?!) you’ll be able to see how many people click through to the longer article, and then you can decide whether or not it’s worth posting.

So there you go. Blogging can take as little or as much time as you want – but it should only take you an hour a week to make it effective. And blog posts can be as long or as short as you want – but often, less is more.

As for this post, it comes in at 505 words and took me about 20 minutes to write and post. Twenty minutes well spent, I think!

Blog about new products: Have you just started offering a new service or product? Blog about it! Write about the benefits to your potential customers, and then tweet about the new post or promote it on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Blog about companies you work with: We all use a variety of services to help us run our business.  Why not blog about a good experience you’ve had with another company? Not only will it increase traffic to your own site, but if you let the other business know about your post, they might blog about you in return!

Blog about relevant stories in the news: Keep an eye on relevant industry news stories and blog about them. These are easy posts to make – so long as you link back to the original article, you can copy and paste the most interesting sections and just add a comment to give your own spin to the story.

Blog in pictures or, better still, in video: Videos on YouTube receive over 2 BILLION views A DAY, and more and more businesses are seeing the benefits of promoting through video. Make a video about your business, post it on your blog and add it to Youtube . You can film a process you do online, speak to camera about an area of your business that will help others, or even find a relevant video and comment on that.Failing that, use photos relevant to your business to brighten up a post.

Blog about what you’re up to: If you’ve been working on an interesting project, or with a new client, the story can make an interesting blog article. You’ll probably want to check that your client is happy for you to talk about them, but so long as you give them a link back to their website most people won’t mind!

Blog your knowledge: We all have information about our particular industry that we can share. Give some of it away in a blog post! Try writing a “top tips” list like this one, or sharing a couple of “industry secrets”.

Blog on other people’s blogs: This one is harder to organise but try striking up friendships with other bloggers in complementary industries, offer to write on their blog – and ask them to blog for you too! “Guest blogging” is becoming very common now – it gives your blog a fresh perspective and you’ll get the guest blogger’s fans coming over to your blog to see what’s going on!

I hope these ideas will give you plenty of inspiration your own blog. Please do leave me a comment if you use any of them, and I’d love to see what you’ve written!

Thanks to Maximum Marketing for creating this!