I got the idea for this brain fog blogging post after spending most of one particular Saturday afternoon staring at my laptop screen with no idea of what I was doing. The idea that Brain fog blogging could be a subject for a blog post came after reading “a Spoonie” post by Counting my Spoons.
Clearly, my brain fog was especially pronounced that afternoon. I had been assessing my blogging to-do list. And, could not decide if anything on my list still had any relevance.
Why? Because I felt that my blogging career had hit the buffers.
Counting my Spoons is the blog of Julie Ryan, a lady with fibromyalgia. Her post What is a Spoonie shook me back to reality. Here was a lady struggling with a chronic illness, not unlike multiple sclerosis. Yet, she could blog with positivity and confidence.
Fibro fog is the same cognitive impairment as the MS brain fog that I am, currently, campaigning about. So, Julie is brain fog blogging without obvious difficulty. Therefore, I have absolutely no excuse for not rolling up my sleeves and getting the job done.
Writing a blog post is just a matter of typing up your thoughts and putting them into literary form. In its simplest form, a blog is about putting thoughts into writing.
But, running a professional blog has so many more elements. All of these additional elements must be accomplished with consistency. And, that is where brain fog can present an obstacle.
What is the brain fog blogging challenge?
There are many steps involved in running a professional blog:
- Keyword Research
- Article Research
- Post Structure Planning
- Writing the content
- Post Publication Promotion
Each of these steps must be accomplished in the correct order and with full attention to detail.
Keyword Research
The first, and perhaps the most important, step in the post creation process is keyword research. This step can make or break your future publishing career. The method you choose to use to promote the new blog post will determine the optimum keyword research route.
With this new blog, I have chosen Pinterest as my preferred promotion tool. The Website has very few backlinks which will make ranking on Google almost impossible. Therefore, it is natural that I should turn to Pinterest to do the keyword research.
Fortunately, Pinterest provides all the tools we need to optimise our Pins. I use a Chrome extension called KeywordsEveywhere to help narrow down keyword selection.
It would appear that I have lost the graphics that I used to display in this post. The first line showed that the query returned 794,000 results which is actually very few for a Google search. Secondly, on the right-hand side of the screen, it showed the results from Keywords Everywhere offering you related keyword phrases.
Article Research
It is quite legitimate to use Google to source your article research. However, it is not acceptable to use the articles found by Google to be the basis for your new brain fog blogging article.
If you have done your keyword research and come p with a good keyword: Type this into Google search and look at the first ten articles.
Read each article thoroughly to get a good understanding. Take plenty of notes to identify key elements to be covered.
Post structure planning
Once you have identified a number of areas to be included. Use this to come up with section headings.
However, only now can you begin to think about writing the blog post. I prefer to use Google Docs to prepare my draft copy. I find it useful to set up Google Docs so that the font face and heading sizes visually match my blog theme.
Writing the content
You can finally begin writing. Tackle this process one section at a time. I won’t dwell too much on content length as provided you meet minimum requirements, I don’t believe this is of huge importance.
Yoast SEO recommends a word count of at least 300 for a blog post. If you are not used to writing, 300 words can seem like an epic writing challenge. However, when you see a 300-word post it appears to be incredibly short. Personally, I aim for a minimum of 1,000 words.
Having written your content for each section of your article. Sit back and read it carefully. It will need to be edited. You are the proofreader. You should be scrutinising your words very carefully. For both spelling mistakes and grammatical errors.
Remember, editing your post is not the same as proofreading your blog. These are different and separate processes and, ideally, could be done by different people.
However, I am painfully aware that this post lacks quality and hasn’t been proofread by a professional proofreader. But, the aim of this post is to highlight the difficulty that blogging presents to the brain fog addled blogger.
Brain Fog Blogging without spamming
This is where all that social media audience building and engagement will reap rewards. You need to post your shiny, new blog post to Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest to give your pot a chance of being seen.
But, don’t do as I did in the early days and swamp (spam) your social media with links to your blog every day with no thought to your reader. It will turn your readers away and get you barred from the social media platform.
This type of spammy behaviour doesn’t work and will do your reputation no good at all.
There are many online tools that let you automate the promotion of your blog. But, most of them will lead you, inexorably, down the spam route.
Create a spreadsheet to keep track of when and where you publish the links to your post. This takes a bit of time that will be well spent.
Furthermore, I wrote this post after coming up with a vague idea for a post topic which seemed to hold up reasonably well for the keyword brain fog blogging.
However, that was as far as my preparation went. I sat down and started typing, checked my word count and thought all was good. But, it wasn’t good. I know how to write a blog post. I just don’t have the energy or the concentration to see it through to its full potential.
If you have read this far, I thank you for your stamina. And I resolve to make more effort in the future. I know that if I want my blog to be a success I need to discover not only what makes good articles; but what makes a killer article.
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