A lot of people in the mainstream view blogging as a really easy activity. The reason is because of the stereotype of a blogger as someone who rolls out of bed at noon and sits in front of their computer with pajamas on.
In reality, blogging is actually very hard to do well. Whether you're blogging to promote a business or as a primary source of income, it takes quite a bit of discipline to do well. Because developing an audience requires you to deliver content on an ongoing basis, you have to consistently come up with good ideas. If you're having trouble writing, the pressure is still on for you to deliver.
Regularly delivering quality content will help you build an audience who's excited to see what you're going to publish next. However, if you're publishing 2, 3 or 4 posts a week, this adds up to between 100 and 200 a year. Since your audience is always looking forward to your next post, what happens to all that old content?
Some people argue that because blogs only feature the latest posts that have been published, they're actually a waste of content and very inefficient. While it is true that the standard blogging format does have this weakness, that doesn't mean that your posts have to be irrelevant after a few weeks.
If you want to get the most mileage out of every post you publish, there's just one thing you need to do to make this happen:
Create Resource Pages
After you've been blogging for a few months, you will have likely covered some topics throughout multiple posts. While your first post on a topic may have just been an introduction to it, there's a good chance you'll dive deeper into it with subsequent posts.
Once you've written 3 to 5 posts on a topic, you're going to have a very nice guide to it. The only problem is all the information is spread out among multiple posts. Luckily, there is a very easy way to solve this issue.
While you've probably noticed this trend on quite a few blogs, Derek from Social Triggers has explained his strategy in detail. As you can see from his Building an Email List 101 page, all Derek did was pull together three links to posts where he had covered the basics of building an email list.
He then wrote a few paragraphs of introductory copy, and put all of this on a nicely formatted WordPress page. When you visit the page, you'll notice that it looks quite a bit like a landing page. If you've read any of his posts, you shouldn't be surprised to learn that this wasn't an accident.
After he pulled together this simple but valuable page, he sent it out to his email list. From there, his subscribers tweeted it out to others. Then when new visitors discovered this page, they are presented with a signup box for his email newsletter. Because of the quality of the page, Derek has stated that he's seen great results from it converting new visitors into subscribers.
Have you tried adding one or more resource pages to your blog?