Continually cranking out content for your blog that is consistently fresh, engaging, and audience-building can be challenging, to say the least. And unfortunately, blogger’s block doesn’t discriminate, and it can affect everyone from the greenest writer to the one pulling in six figures.
So, what does it too create a chain of content that grows your traffic and keeps audience enthusiasm high?
Here are five tips to help you refocus your blog and succeed at creating quality, memorable posts:
1. It’s all about the reader
You know what you like to read… now forget about it. What interests you specifically isn’t worth a hill of beans as compared to what interests your readership. They’re in the driver’s seat and you’re barely a back seat navigator. Every blog post you approach has to be taken from the perspective of your reader.
You have to instinctively know the questions that the reader will ask about the industry sector you cover and you must cater to those queries by providing in-depth, unique, and compelling information.
It is also extremely important, especially for bloggers in the technical field, to give industry buzzwords and other assorted jargon a wide berth. Sure you may know exactly what “you can’t get decent bogon suppression with AFJ filters at today’s net volumes” but what chance does your non-programmer reader have at deciphering that gobbledygook?
2. A picture sells a thousand blogs
What is the reason behind the massive explosion in interest for Pinterest? The answer is fairly simple as it is that since Pinterest is essentially a blogging platform for people who don’t care to write and for readers who don’t care to read, it’s at the forefront of the new blogging world! By replacing long-winded gray blocks of type with pretty pictures, Pinterest is a vivid example of what bloggers should be striving for in building visual allure into their blogs.
Visual allure doesn’t mean changing the color of your header or background, it indicates a blog that has integrated both static and video imaging into its story telling process. There will likely never be an age when written blogging is completely extinct and only replaced by images, but all bloggers should strive to incorporate as much visual flair into their posts as they possibly can in order to further engage your readership.
3. Hawking your wares should be an ancillary, not primary focus
We’ve all witnessed the disintegration of blogs that we once treasured but have since descended down into nothing more than thinly disguised shilldom. Many bloggers start out by offering phenomenal and insightful content and as their audiences grow, they shift their focus almost entirely to improving their monetization.
So a blog which was once chock-full of great information is now doing little more than pushing the blogger’s latest paid ebook, online paid course, or selling tickets to their national seminar tour. Although a certain level of ancillary marketing is expected from bloggers who have to pay the rent somehow, when the entire blog turns into a sales pitch, you can be certain your readers will pitch your blog… right into the trash.
4. 95.5% of the world’s population is not American
Sure, you were born in Nebraska, went to college in Michigan, and raised a family in Texas… but that doesn’t mean that the perspective reflected in your blog should end at Portland, Maine on one side and Portland, Oregon on the other.
The vast majority of blogging topics are of equal interest to readers in Portland, Canada; Portland, England; Portland, Australia; and every other port on the high seas. With the rise in international blogging, your readers outside of the USA may be finding your Americancentrism disturbing and detracting from the value of your content. Either neutralize your geographical references or make a solid effort to cover events outside the USA.
5. Write well
Far too many bloggers write like uneducated dolts. Set yourself aside from the lowbrow, inept, and artless by cultivating a high standard of spelling, grammar, and overall mastery of the English language. You can accomplish this by double-checking your writing, but you should also use the Internet to learn tricks to help you write cleaner and faster.
Efficient and effective blogging isn’t a fantasy, you can achieve it today by applying these top five key strategies. The rewards for succeeding are steady traffic, plenty of comments, and lots of incoming links.
Hal Licino is a successful author, award-winning freelance writer, and frequent contributor to a blog hosted by Benchmark Email, an email marketing service for small businesses. He also writes a weekly column for Daily Blog Tips.