6 Trusty Methods to a Successful Blog

Blogging, trending in and out over the last few years is no doubt one of the most effective ways to communicate, update, and market your business.  Blogging is not hard, and if done right, it can be used to grow your business and bring attention to what you are doing more than anything else.  Plus, it often costs little more than blood sweat and tears.

Topic of Interest

Choosing the right topic is essential to a successful blog.  What you choose to write about will, in the long run, determine who will be reading your stuff.  If you are wanting to market your specific industry or destination, the topic by which you blog is obvious – the trick is writing about it from an angle that will attract the most people, you have to always ask yourself, “who is interested in this?”

If you are picking a topic from scratch, there are two schools of thought here.  The first is to stay local, small, seemingly simpler to manage.  Stick to topics in which you can “drive-to” for information.  If you are a go-getter type of person, this may be the route for you – developing content on a regular basis may seem easier.  Unless you live in a large metropolitan area, you will probably see a cap to how much traffic you’ll see going this route as your target audience is very geographically oriented.  The second is to pick something that a broad amount of people have an interest in (like social marketing ;-p, or technology).  The object here is to pick something that is broad ranging enough to pertain to a large and growing number of people, but still be focused enough to keep your content ideas flowing.

Consistency

Of course, what you’ll be writing about is the most important, for without that, you’ll have nothing to write about, right?  But the second most important, and frankly most neglected, is consistency.  Once you pick your topic, you have to write about it, and often.  You’ve got to pick regular times to write, whether it be three times a week, once a week, twice a month, once a day, or whatever, and you have to stick to it tooth and nail 100% of the time.  You see, if a new visitor comes to your blog, they’ll read around the home page, if they find something interesting, they’ll read that, then move directly to the archives.

If they see that you’ve had one post last week, another a few weeks ago, then four the week before that, then they might come back in a week, maybe.  But, if they see that you’ve posted every day for weeks, or months even, they’ll come back again.  If there is new content when they come back, then you just increased your chances of earning them as a regular drastically.  Every time they come back to new information, your chances of them becoming a regular go up, until you tick them off with your content, of course – but that’s another story.

The best thing to do in the beginning is decide how much content you can get up in a week.  I would recommend posting at least three times each week and on a regular schedule so that your readers have something to look forward to, then build from there.  Keeping a blog consistent is the most difficult part about blogging, and the most failed aspect of a new blog.  In addition, it’s easy to be discouraged if you don’t see results quickly.  The point is to keep it going, consistent and the same, regardless of any success you may or may not be seeing.  These things take time to get going and it can take up to six months for search engines to start returning you as a credible source of information, depending on your topic.  This is a long term play, not a short term game that yields instant gratification.

Writing Style

So, this is actually a topic of much debate – how do I write, do I stay middle ground in everything, or should I take sides?  This all depends on what you are blogging about, and who you are wanting to talk to.  For example, if you are writing about topics political in nature, then I highly recommend picking a side and defending it steadfastly and intellectually.  I learned a great lesson from an episode of iCarly, where her show and the famous YouTube show “Fred” got in a big fight.  The lesson was ultimately taught by Fred with him explaining their web site traffic spikes saying, “everyone loves a good fight.” If you strike a note of passion, you spark conversation, which leads to tons of referral traffic.  Of course, remaining tactful and tasteful is of the utmost importance, the point is to stimulate good conversation, not actually “fight.”

Many choose to stay middle ground, and of course, many topics lend perfectly to that strategy.  Again, it depends largely on the topic discussed.  It is important to blend more positive than negative in with the content.  Your readers will remember 5 posts complaining about something for ever 1 post that is positive, and you’ll be known as the “negative-guy” in no time, this is not good.

Send a Regular Newsletter

I know, I know, eNewsletters are sooo 2007, but they still work.  I was in a meeting with a fellow blogger recently and I asked whether she was sending out a newsletter.  Her quick response was no, tailed by a, “you think I should?”  Um, yea!  For all of my blogs, our newsletters are the single most driving factor for traffic.  The reality is that people, now more than ever, hang on their email for everything, and you have to live up to that expectation.  But, again, consistency is the key.  You can’t send out a newsletter one week, then wait a couple weeks, then send one out a week later, then wait a month before you send one again.  This will lead to an unsubscribe-fest and credibility plunge.  Pick a day of the week, a day every other week, or day of the month and stick to it – it will take 6 months for your readers to pick up on the consistency, but when they do, they’ll look for it every time.  Once they can count on it, they’ll tell all their friends about it.  Before long, you’ll have people emailing you to have their friends put on the list.

You’ll need to subscribe to some online email deployment service like Constant Contact or iContact, but the costs of these services is nominal compared to the benefit you’ll receive (I pay $80/mo for a list of 9,400 email addresses – cheap!).  These services provide contact forms to plug into your site that will allow people to enter their email address right into your database so the management time is low.  Do give-aways to keep the newsletter subscriptions coming in and build that database – these are people that are interested in what you are talking about.

Be Sure to Track Everything

I love Wordpress for blogging, but most blogging platforms offer some pretty nifty tracking capabilities.  Of course, there’s always Google analytics as well.  For me, I use the system that comes in Wordpress AND Google analytics, they both have unique features that I use.

Tracking traffic counts is important, but one of my most favorite things to do is look at the keywords that landed people on my blogs.  This gives invaluable ideas as to what people are wanting to read about and can often provide leads to new stories.  Plus this can help you identify trends in your blog and hone your content accordingly.

Tie it all Together

Last, but not least, be sure to tie your blog together with your social network accounts.  Many blogging platforms have plugins that will post new content to your twitter account, but those that don’t certainly support RSS, which can be used to post tweets for you.  Same with Facebook – you can use RSS to post new blog posts to your status updates.  I never realized the value of this until one Sunday I was at church and a “friend” came up to me and thanked me for posting all my updates from my blog to my Facebook.  She never read my site before but now reads regularly because she got a taste of it in a medium that she was already using.  In many cases, my social network accounts are among the highest in referring sites.

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