This is a guest post by Michael Scottsdale from InterMedia.net.
Blogs are like journals where we could express and share our thoughts with people. But these have come a long way from its humble beginnings and have now become one of the most effective marketing strategies available.
With the growing popularity of blogs both as a medium for personal expression and marketing, getting to the top could be a daunting task even for the seasoned professional.
Blogging is a cost-effective method of promoting goods and services. Because of their personal nature, it gives you the opportunity to market products in a simpler and friendly tone. Unlike hard marketing websites, blogs offer you a subtle way of increasing your reader’s interest in a product or service.
For those having difficulties improving blog traffic, here are 4 simple tips on how you can optimize your blogs:
Great Content
“People read blogs not search engines”
It all starts with writing good content. SEO gets people to your visit your blog but content is what keeps them coming back. Writing is much simpler once we get to write about topics we generally are interested about.
Specializing in a particular topic may mean a decrease in potential visitors but they offer you a more targeted approach to traffic generation. This will leave you with a better chance of gaining an audience that is genuinely interested in your blog. If you’re planning to use your blog as a medium for selling products or a services it would be a good idea to keep these within the context of your blog.
Feedback
Blogs give us an excellent way of communicating our thoughts and effective communication is a two-way street. Provide your readers with options for giving feedback by opening your comment box or providing an email where they could throw you a message.
It gives you valuable insight into what your readers are thinking and gives you a source of possible future topics. It also makes them feel important building trust and loyalty among your readers.
Blog + SEO
For website developers and bloggers, SEO is an important consideration in optimizing a website. This is certainly essential but should not be the only focus. Everyday bloggers who may not have the technical prowess in this field maybe intimidated at first but this should not be too difficult with a little bit of research and patience. Keywords are the secret ingredients in helping your blogs get better visibility over search engines. This is perhaps the easiest of all SEO techniques and is essential for any serious blogger.
Write Regularly
Readers like you would love to visit websites that has always something fresh to offer. You wouldn’t want to buy yesterday’s newspaper or watch a show that’s been running the same episode for weeks. If you’re running out of fresh ideas why not write about personal experiences, they excellent for light reading and gives your readers an inside look into you as an author.
Putting up new content regularly spurs interest in your readers but more importantly helps you get ranked higher in search engines. Each blog post are like little votes that help you get better page ranking while keeping your readers interested in visiting your blog regularly.
Putting It All Together
Blogs are created for various reasons. Some use it as a medium for expression and others for marketing. But whatever the reason, driving traffic to the website is the ultimate objective. If you’ve been blogging for a while and don’t see the type of numbers then it might be high time you start re-evaluating your strategies.
Getting them to visit to your website is one thing but turning them to devoted readers is another thing altogether.
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hmm, nice tips. Regularity is where most bloggers fail as they get out of ideas most of the time. One must focus on this. Thanks for sharing.
I agree Garish! we see thousands of great blogs lying ideally there, which really stated well, but now the blog owners have abandoned them, i guess patience is the key as far as blogging is concerned!
Writing a Blog wiothout ltots of traffic is just like writing a bestseller book just to take it and never show it anybody!
But like I see on a good friends of mine, is high quality and enticing content copletely enough to make his blog popular! He didn´t knows anything about SEO, löink building or Social media….but it works!
Just SOme Enticing Content (It isn´t highly valuable nformation, more like oppinions!)
Wow it amazes me how great the guest bloggers are here at Smartbloggerz! this was an outstanding article on how to successfully create and maintain a blog with loyal readers. If you can get feedback on what you write thats always the best way to improve your blog as well as on a personal plane. Its all really a mix of your toolset that has to be implemented for your blogging to be successful and you structured it perfectly Michael!
Thank you Benjamin and Cally for the wonderful feedback. Much has been said about SEO but I believe that content writing will always be the heart of a website. Kudos to Sushant and the other great writers here at smartbloggerz. Always been a great source of information.
Driving traffic is indeed the ultimate strategy but you should have great content so that that traffic will become loyal visitors and will recommend your blog through word of mouth.
Hi Michael,
If the site contains great contents, then everything will follow because people or even bloggers will look after the useful and informative contents like this post you made. Thanks for sharing 🙂
Brilliant article Michael, blogging indeed is about communicating with the other readers and this is the reason I like visiting blogs. I don’t think a blog which thinks only about monetizing would survive for long. I agree that good content and SEO works are equally important but its the readers which keeps a blog alive.
I do all of these..yet somehow coz of the panda effect or coz I got a domain..my traffic fell down 50% :((
Great advice. I’ve seen major improvement with my own personal blog and several of the other sites I run now that I’m writing regularly. Feedback and engagement is increasing and I’m very pleased with how things have improved.
These may seem like simple tips, but they are very effective.
These are definitely the most important factors when it comes to blogging success. Many people think that if you just write great content, it will find its way to go viral. You need to consider SEO before you start your blog, then fill it with useful content, promote that content via every possible channel and then see what people are saying about it.