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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Top 10 Search Terms:
• 4 pillars of success
Content is by far the most important factor of a successful blog but the second most important is networking with other successful bloggers on your niche, in that way you can get a lot of traffic if other blogs write about or if bloggers share your content with their followers
I just have a question. One of the four pillars for successful blogging that you stated is “Feedback” But I’ve seen blogs and websites who are successful, established and ranked well on the SERPs yet they don’t have options in their articles for a feedback or comment. Is it possible to be successful without the “feedback pillar”?
Consistency is huge in my opinion. I am positive all of us have in it us to write that one great article, but can you do it on a consistent basis? If you can consistently write quality content you are well on your way to have a successful blog!
-Jean
The biggest mistake a blogger can make is to pay more attention to SEO and forget about content. Let’s take one strategy of SEO, blog commenting. Well, you will be commenting on the same blogs for a period of time. And this means the same visitors. Well, if they check your blog more than once and see that you have the same content all the time, they will never come back again. And this means that you’ve lost those visitors forever.
Thank you for this great article. 🙂
That’s so true. I’ve seen some people just fill their blogs with keywords and try to get as many visitors as possible. It works for them but usually the visitors just come in once. You should try to build a user-base that continues to visit to read your new content.
I actually love what you quoted up there. Find it striking since more and more web marketers tend to get concern more on the robots than the humAN readers. To think that robots have this greater concern to give the best quality of searchers to his masters– who happens to be human readers.
I agree with Jean. The hardest part of blogging for me is being consistent with posting new content. I’ve always been a bit, um, ADD, so I have a calendar appointment set for 1 hour twice a week for “research” and “writing”.
Hopefully that helps my productivity 🙂
Cheers,
Brent
15 or 20 years ago where if you post great content then people will come. Now a days, there’s so much competition that you need to promote it with SEO, have great contents, reply to comments and so on. How quickly time have change.
You are so right loc, nothing is possible these days without promotion. Even if the content and stuff is really good and a must read still you need to promote it by many ways. Not only that , your work doesn’t end with writing and posting you need to accept comments reply to those comments etc… then only you can receive success.
Hello Michael
I believe consistency is most important… Most of bloggers fails because of lack of consistency…. But if you dream of having a career with your blog, It’s important to have passion. You can’t stick to anything until you are not passionate about that thing..I will put that #5 & #6
BTW thanks for putting this tips altogether
Nice tips Michael,
I think you have rightly titled the post as pillars of successful blogging. Really Good Content, Interaction, SEO and regular writing are quite important to keep a blog alive as well as successful. If a blogger ignores any of these pillars then the blog certainly will be facing failure.