Blogging and participating in social media are two of the biggest marketing trends at the moment; in fact, most online marketing and search engine optimization gurus are essentially saying “come on in to the blogosphere!  The water’s fine!”  However, creating a successful blog or social media presence is certainly something that is easier said than done.

First of all, despite the fact that inspiration and ideas for fresh content tend to flow quickly and freely at first, after a while that well dries up and the responsibilities of running a business or your regular work day take over.  Creating an editorial calendar or posting schedule can help with content generation, or you could hire writers who understand the web or work with an SEO company that offers copywriting and blogging as one of their solutions.

You also should decide upon a realistic posting frequency - while updating constantly may be easy at the beginning, you will likely slow down over time.  Therefore, posting two or three times a week may be more realistic, and if you want to write more, do the posts ahead of time and save them for future busy days.  Obviously, this is especially good for evergreen topics like resource lists, productivity tips and advice, product reviews, best practices, how-to posts, and more.  Check out Mashable’s list of forty plus topics for corporate bloggers for more ideas.

That said, ideas are one thing - you still have to come up with a steady stream of interesting, intelligent content.  Furthermore, you need to make sure all your posts are tagged correctly, have your keywords, contain relevant internal links and external links to trusted sites, and promote it on the appropriate social media outlets (these vary greatly, depending on the topic of your post, your blog’s niche, and the industry you are involved in).

For more advice on the elements of an amazing blog, check out “What Makes for a Good Blog” by Merlin Mann at 43 Folders - we couldn’t have said it better ourselves.