Archives for September 2017

How To Start Your First Workers Comp Article

Your first Workers Comp article may seem like such a laborious task.  After you write your first article, you will find the next is much easier and the third workers comp article flows to the screen almost like magic.

The Top 10 Concerns are listed below with the answers to these questions or concerns later in the article.

The usual concerns over posting your first article are:

1.    I am not an expert in insurance or workers comp
2.    There are experts more knowledgeable about this subject
3.    I do not have a subject
4.   Where will I publish it?
5.   Will anyone ever read it?
6.   Will the search engines rank it highly?
7.   What publishing software should I use and why?
8.   Blogging will use up too much of my time
9.   How do I make money at publishing articles?
10.   What if I make a mistake on a certain Workers Comp subject?

After publishing over 2,000 articles over 10 years, these are my assessments of the difficulties of writing your first article.   (See above)

1.  One does not have to necessarily be an expert in Workers Compensation to publish an article. If you research your subject and use backlinks to refer to the articles that you researched, you do not have to be an expert.   Hundreds of workers comp articles are published weekly by non-experts.
2. Take one small aspect of Workers Comp and write an article covering the subject. I guarantee you there exists no expert that understands all the facets of Work Comp.  Many blogs including some in workers comp are ghost written by other authors.
3. Read three of four articles or at least their first few paragraphs. This will furnish you with a few ideas.   The more articles you read, the more likely you will publish a great article.   Feel free to search this blog for any subject.  Just use the search box at the top right of any blog page.
4. Publishing your article is one of the easy ones. If you go to wordpress.org and download the free WordPress software, you are on your way.   Thousands of apps exist  in WordPress to help you in your quest.    My favorite is wpbeginner.com.   They do a nice job of helping blog publishers get their website off the group.    You can purchase a website address such as yourname.com if it is available.   Websites are ridiculously cheap.
5. Your articles may not be read at the very first. You may have to publish a few before you will have them read.   One great thing about publishing articles is that if one article is well-read, then your website visitors will look at the other articles you have published in the past.
6. The search engines are unto themselves. The idea is to at a minimum be noticed by the search engines.   Also, remember that websites such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn can be looked at as search engines.
7. See #4 above for the answer to this one. WordPress seems to be the hot publisher right now and Google mentions them often as a great way to publish articles.
8. You may use quite a bit of time when you first write blog articles. Keeping the number of words at 300 -500 should not demand too much of your time. 
9. Making money at blog publishing is the only one out of this Top 10 Concerns for which I cannot provide a good answer. I have always provided the articles for free.   The effort has paid off for me as it will you if you do not look for dollar signs as a reason to publish a few articles a month.
10. All bloggers make mistakes. Keeping your articles in your area of knowledge or researching the subject fully with footnotes/backlinks will usually avoid this situation. 

The main accomplishment of any blogger is that first well-written article posting to your own blog inside of your own website.  Once that occurs, you are off and running on publishing articles.   

My last thought on this subject suggests that one be kind with what they publish in any workers comp article.  The subject can be one of many controversies – your blog should not be one of them.