You’ll have to strategize to continually appeal to your audience with your valuable content.
We’ve been hearing the phase “Content is King” for the last few years, but now everyone and their cat has a blog. It’s more challenging than ever to drive traffic with so much competition. Today I’m kicking off a two-part series on the business of blogging. In Part one, we’re focusing on how to get your blog to stand out, when everyone is blogging. Here are a few strategies that can ensure that you drive visitors to your blog, as well as get them to come back again and again for more great content.
Have a Post Promotion Plan
If you simply publish a blog post and then wait around for people to find it online, you’ll be waiting a long time. Every piece of content that you publish needs to be promoted. Social media is the best channel for doing so. You can automate shares of every new post on your blog through sharing tools like Twitterfeed, which will post a link to your newest post whenever a new one is published on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. It’s a good idea to also manually share additional updates to Twitter, since not all of your followers will catch the first share of a post. Vary the wording with the blog link to pique interest every day for the week following the post’s publication, and you’ll maximize the number of people who click to read the post from Twitter.
Have a Unique Point of View
The problem with there being so many blogs out there is that it’s difficult to cover anything new. The same topics have been written to death, so it’s an understandable challenge to find a topic that people will be interested in. Try to have a new unique perspective. Don’t be afraid to be a contrarian. Read tons of content so that you can find gaps in what others are covering. Always ask yourself: how can you present an out-of-the-ordinary view of a topic?
Vary The Types of Content You Write
Most blog posts are 400-600 words, and those serve their purpose, but you may attract more blog readers if you mix up what you post. Occasionally, write a longer post of 1,000 or more words to really cover a topic in-depth. You can also share videos and images, interview people, or write a tutorial for your product to differentiate the types of content you share. Because people all consume information differently, when you vary your blog content, you’ll appeal to a wider audience that you can hook with your informative content. Check your website analytics to see which posts are attracting the most traffic, and include similar content in future posts.
Write a Roundup of Expert Advice
Interviewing experts in your industry is a great way to attract more traffic to your blog. You can ask your social network for people to contribute tips or quotes to your post, or use Help a Reporter, which connects journalists and bloggers with expert resources. People are happy to be quoted in your article if you link back to their websites. Once you publish the post, share it with everyone you included and ask that they share the post with their contacts. This is a fabulous way to boost your blog readership.
Use High-Quality Images
Photos attract people to your blogs, and when you share a post on social media, the image will stop people as they’re scrolling through their newsfeed, so it’s important to choose high-quality images for each post. Just be aware: you can’t use just any photo you find online, because most are copyrighted. There are stock photo websites where you can pay a monthly subscription fee to have access to professional photos that will enhance each blog post. Try to find an image that best illustrates your content. If you’ve written a blog post about the holiday shopping season, for example, you could illustrate your point with a photo of a Christmas tree or holiday shoppers.
Use a Unique Blog Template
While there are free and affordable blog templates available online, there’s no reason yours has to look like anyone else’s. You can easily customize a template with colors that match your brand logo, and change the layout to fit your needs, so that, even if you’re using a popular template, it looks different than anyone else’s.
Consider what visitors to your blog will want access to. A search bar will help them quickly find content on a particular topic. Category links can direct them to multiple posts on a given topic. And having just a handful of posts appear (maybe just the first paragraph of each) on the home page of your blog will keep them from scrolling and scrolling to reach the bottom.
Simply writing content for your blog won’t be enough to help you compete against the sea of other blog posts on similar subjects. Instead, you’ll have to strategize to continually appeal to your audience with your valuable content.
In part two of the business of blogging series, we’ll talk about how to blog for money.
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