If you look at the post on September 12, you’ll notice that it is a Whimsical Wednesday entry called “The Myth About Water Bugs”.

As of 5pm today, the 14th, two days later, I saw an interesting referral on my traffic stats, so did some poking around.

My blog is now ranked #42 on Google for the search term water bugs and roaches.  Out of 628,000 results.

Not bad for a real estate marketing blog, huh?

And, someone actually went past all the sites that were about insects to page four of the results to click through to my site.  Now, that makes me wonder….

Update  10-30-07 – The post is now on page 1 for another bug related search term.  Talk about long-tail results!

If you’re not aware of it yet, you should know that blogging can make a big difference in the success of your online Internet presence. 

• Writing a blog gives you the opportunity to connect with your target market in a much different way than a website
• Blogging gives you the opportunity to create keyword-rich links to your website
• If your blog is part of your website, posting consistently gives the search engines fresh content – and they just love that!

The Secret to Consistent Blogging

Well, maybe it’s not the secret, but here’s what’s working for me. 

First, I created a spreadsheet (big surprise, huh?).   Actually, all I did was create an Excel file called Blog Topics.  It has two columns:  one for the description of the topic, and one that gets an “X” in it once the post is written.  When something comes up that sounds like a good blog post, I just jot it down.  If you’re not near your computer at almost all times like I am, you may find a better way to jot things down that fits into your world.

Second, I write posts in advance.  I knew that the Wordpress blog I use had a way to edit the Post Timestamp, but I never really used it all that often.  Sometimes, I’d change the time a post was written if I was doing it at some weird time and I didn’t want anyone else to know. 

But, I can also use that function to date posts for some future day and time.  So, now when I have time to write, I can write several posts at once and the system takes care of publishing those posts at the day and time I’ve selected.  I’ve found it much easier to post to this blog on a more regular basis.

If your blog doesn’t allow you to date posts for publication in the future, it surely has a way for you to save posts without publishing them.   If you use that function, it would only take a minute to publish a previously written post on the day you want it to appear.

Commit to a Topic

Another thing that I’ve found helpful is committing to a topic – either to yourself, or to your readers.  I recently started Whimsical Wednesdays.  And, I told everyone that there would be a whimsical post every Wednesday.  That provides a great deal of motivation!

For a real estate blog, you might want to commit to a Market Update day, or a Neighborhood Highlight day that could be a weekly, bi-monthly or monthly feature of your blog.  Naturally, the more often, the better.  Either of those topics would give you plenty of opportunity to write keyword-rich content, and to add links to associated pages on your website.

If you’ve got a secret that has helped you stay consistent with posting to your blog, please share!