The last couple of Whiteboard Fridays, and many of the recent YOUmoz posts, have been about blogging. Rand is doing a capital job of explaining how to increase your blog visibility and move into the next league, and it’s all coming down to the same foundational point – great content. But today I want to look at it from my own perspective, which is way back there at the beginning. The SEOmoz recent blog coverage pushed me to start my own Japanese Jujitsu blog last week and see what all the fuss was about.

Off I went to Mr Wordpress and, after brushing up on my SQL, installed it on my server. I then spent the next few days in SEO mode, addressing duplicate content, meta data, and the general mess of heading tags that comes pre-loaded. I plugged it into Google Analytics and nodded sagely at the colourful pie-charts and graphs. At this point I was quite happy with myself, and so I sat down with a plate of jaffa cakes and started writing some static pages about the history of Jujitsu and the obligatory disclaimer. Well done, me! The first actual post was easy since it’s a subject that’s been on my mind for a while: why we lose motivation – after this, however, my mind turned to jelly and no amount of jaffa intake could get me in the zone. I barely forced out another post about the order of belt colours before grinding to a halt. Nothing, nada, zilch.

And so it is with great cheekiness that I humbly come before the mozzers to ask three things…

What I need, thinks me, is a publication schedule – a forecast of future posts some months ahead of my users, like a Gantt chart of interviews, research articles, and other such content. A huge back catalog of material would have been rather useful, but in lieu of this I guess I’ll have to bring discipline and order to the creative fuzz of writing quality content. Does anyone employ a blog post schedule, and would they care to share their methods with the rest of us? For example, how long does an interview article actually take from concept to post?

The other point of this post is that from recent personal experience I believe there’s a barrier to successful blogging long before the stage at which you’re trying to move into the next league. It may be that the already established players have forgotten this, but sites like SEOmoz have a wealth of experience about the early days of their blog that I’d love to hear about, not least of all so that I can work out if I’m wasting my time.

Finally, I’d appreciate any feedback about what I’ve achieved so far on my Jujitsu blog, especially pointers about content with regards to the latest Whiteboard Friday advice. Excuse the plug, but it kind of needs a link if you're going to have a look.