By Karen Cioffi
Blogging is a competitive arena. According to VP Virtuoso, in November 2013, there were 152,000,000 blogs. And, a new blog was published every half a second.
Blogging isn’t an arena you can enter into lightly, hoping for the best. If you’re blogging to be successful in your niche, it takes work. It takes dedication. It takes a plan.
Here are 4 power tips to help you move ahead of the crowd.
1. Know your audience and what they need.
Every niche has something the audience desires, needs, or wants. It’s up to you to determine what that is and give it to them.
One strategy to find out what your audience needs is to ask them in a survey or poll. You can also monitor your blog posts to see get the most views and clicks. It’s those topics that your audience is interested in.
2. Know what your focus is.
One important aspect of this tip is to keep your website and content focused on a particular niche.
As an example, my niche is inbound marketing, which includes website optimization, content marketing, social media marketing, and email marketing. All my articles, freebies, and ebooks are highly focused on that niche.
If I posted an article on baking a cake, I’d confuse my audience and diminish my authority.
3. Take action steps to blog smart.
The first step here is to set up a blogging schedule that will work for you. In other words, a schedule that you’ll be able to keep up with. Consistency matters.
Along with your schedule, you’ll need to include all the needed elements to create an informative, engaging, and shareable article. Your posts may include:
• Text
• Images
• Video
• Podcasts
• And, so on
You don’t need to include every element within one post, but you should vary your posts. And, be sure your article is packed with quality information that has at least one ‘actionable’ tip.
Power tip: It’s about quality, not quantity.
4. Engage with your readers.
Engagement is a key marketing factor. You want to create content valuable enough that readers will want to share it. This boosts your authority.
Making this factor more important, the search engines pay attention to who’s paying attention to your content. Your content’s shareability will affect your search ranking.
While there are other power tips, these are the top four that you should include in your blogging strategy.
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Karen has published 12 writing and marketing eBooks, the most recent, Article Marketing: Increase Website Traffic with Properly Formatted and Search Engine Optimized Content.
In addition to this, Karen’s website, Karen Cioffi Writing and Marketing, was named Writer’s Digest Website of the Week, June 25, 2012.
Join Karen Cioffi's upcoming online class, GET TRAFFIC TO YOUR WEBSITE WITH INBOUND MARKETING: Website Optimization, Blogging Smart, Email Marketing, and Social Media Marketing. Visit our classroom page for details and enrollment.
4 comments:
These are really good tips to think about, or to revisit to get a blog back on track.
These are great reminders, Karen! With the new WOW site rebuild, we're adding several blogs with their own focus. That way we can segment our audience to make sure we're delivering relevant content--stuff they're really interested in. Because even in the realm of writing there are so many different fields and interests and I see that as one of the things that has limited our growth.
Marcia, Glad the tips gave you some food for thought!
Angela, that's a great move. There are so many writing niches and some with vast differences. Segmenting them will prove a wise move.
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