Many people struggle with blogging, some of our clients included. We have shared this knowledge with many of our clients and now we are sharing it with you. The question, “How do I create a successful blog?”, seems to come up over and over again. Below are some very helpful tips on how to create engaging and valuable blog posts that will help your websites SEO and community. We hope you find them to be helpful. If you find that you are overwhelmed, we can schedule a time to meet and discuss some of our services that can provide a solution for your blog posting needs.
Top 10 Tips For Successful Blogging
- Be passionate about the topic: The most important aspect of successful blogging is passion. If you are passionate about the topic you will be able to create more genuine content from a unique perspective that has more value than someone rewriting submissions from Wikipedia. Passion translates into learning which translates into knowledge. If you are passionate about the topic you are more likely to read, learn and regurgitate information with an interesting spin while presenting new ideas to the conversation.
- Ask questions: Engage your audience. Asking them questions will get you more comments and more social interactions. Many people will also have similar questions so by discussing those questions you will optimize your blog posts for the questions they are searching to answer. For instance in this blog post we asked ,”How do I create a successful blog?”, which is a question many of our clients have asked us. By asking these types of questions you make it easier for readers to find answers to their own questions. There are services such as Quora, Topsy, Ask, Yahoo Answers that will allow you to find out what kind of questions people are asking. Using these tools will allow you to write about the answers people are most interested in. If you have a question yourself, do some research and then write about it. Chances are someone else will have the same question. Another great way to convey information that people want to learn about is through “top 10” posts. This post that you are currently reading is a great example of a top 10 post. Other examples are “Top 10 Reasons To Hire A Divorce Lawyer”, “Ten Survival Tips For A Zombie Apocalypse”, and “10 Ways Laughter Improves Health”.
- Answer Questions: Make sure you answer the questions you ask. Open ended questions are great for inspiring discussion, but you want to provide value to your readers. Answering the questions you ask is one way to do that. If its an opinion piece or if there are possibly other answers to the question it is a good idea to ask for others to participate. These 10 rules for successful blogging are not the end all to success. If you have ideas of your own, please feel free to participate and post a comment with your suggestion. See what I did there?
- Post Regularly: This can be difficult, especially with the busy schedule of a business owner. Also it can be very easy to run out of things to write about. When you aren’t inspired it’s not always a good idea to write. If your posts are boring and uninformative, people may stop reading, visiting your website and your traffic could take a big hit. But not posting regularly can cause the same effect. It is a good idea to compile a large list of ideas so when you are not inspired you can choose from one of the list items and write something of value that you came up with when you were inspired. If you get inspired you can put off writing your scheduled post and do something new and interesting. Topics will trend in your industry as well so it’s good to post whats hot at the time that its hot. Don’t wait for a topic to get cold to post about it. I suggest creating a flexible schedule that allows for posting multiple times per week. Many blogs are not able to post daily, and that’s fine. Many content management systems and blogging platforms offer post scheduling so you can write everything on one day and schedule it to be posted throughout the week or month.
- Include Pictures: This might seem like a no-brainer, but you would be surprised how many times I see blog posts with no images. Even if there is just one image, its better than none. People like pretty pictures. It’s not much more complex then that. Videos are also great for the same reason.
- Keep It Relevant: One problem that many bloggers have is keeping their personal life out of blog posts. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t write about yourself, you should. Just don’t let your blog become a story about your life instead of being about your business or industry. Having personal insight and real life examples is good, just don’t make it too personal that someone might feel uncomfortable reading the most intimate details about your life on your business website.
- Be Current: Keeping up on trending topics can help you to get a lot of new visitors to your site and hopefully get more business. Google Alerts and RSS Feeds from a selection of relevant websites can help you stay up to date on current information to be used in blog posting. Some industries will have more breakthroughs than others however, and if your industry has little in the way of advancements don’t fret. As long as you write about topics that are currently relevant, even if the environment hasn’t changed a great deal, it will still be important to users right now. A good example of this is with construction. There might not be a lot of new ways to install windows coming out every week, but there is information out there that can be valuable to people looking to get new windows.
- Be Fun: If you have readers that visit your blog frequently, make your blog posts fun. At Total Market Exposure we like to joke around a little bit in our blog posts because a little humor goes a long way. There are other ways to make your blog posts fun. Polls, videos, and comics are all great ways to make your blog posts more fun.
- Link Back: If you participate on social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Pinterest, etc. then you should definitely link back to your posts. This has a great positive effect on SEO but it will also direct users to your website which can turn into regular visitors, customers and clients.
- Incorporate Share Buttons: Allowing visitors to easily share the post on popular social networks and social bookmarking sites can greatly increase your readership and your SEO. Depending on whether or not you are using a content management system or blogging platform will determine the difficulty of implementing something like this. Often a plugin, add-on, or extension can do most of the legwork for you.
Thanks for reading, we hope you found this to be helpful and informative. For more information about blog posting, do it yourself SEO and other helpful marketing information visit our blog. If you are located in the Portland, Oregon area, contact us to learn more about our Portland SEO services and the benefits to hiring a local company.
Tags: Blogging, Online Marketing, SEO, Web Design