Top 4 Power Tips for Blogging Success

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.

***

Karen Cioffi is a former accountant who is now a multi-award-winning author, ghostwriter, freelance writer, editor, and author-writer online platform marketing instructor. She founded and manages Writers on the Move (a marketing group), and presents online writing and marketing workshops and webinars.

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.

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4 comments blogging, blogging tips, Karen Cioffi, online class, WOW class, WOW instructor, writing strategies

Using An Elementary School Story-Telling Tool For Your Own Writing

When my daughter, Jaimie, started Grade One, she struggled in many areas. In addition to her sensory issues, she also dealt with praxis issues (which means she wasn't able to learn or follow tasks that had too many steps); she would often get 'stuck' on a specific way of doing a task and not understand how to branch out or learn it in a new way; and she struggled with verbal instruction. You can imagine how frustrating learning could be for her when she had all of these hurdles in her way.

With the help of an awesome occupational therapist (OT) and an amazing bunch of teachers, we learned tools best-suited to Jaimie's needs that have helped her bloom and grow. One of these tools was a 'Word Flower', which not only helped Jaimie with learning words and writing but also helped me with my writing! And I thought it would be something that could help all of you too.

This is is a tool that taps into visual learning, gets you branching out beyond your regular line of thinking and really gets those thinking juices flowing. I'm sure many of you have heard of different ways of doing this but I loved the concept Jaimie's teacher used.

See the flowers above? Think of an everyday word you use frequently (eg: sad) and write it in the middle. Then think of five other ways to say that word. For example, Jaimie came up with glum, sorrowful, down-in-the-dumps, unhappy and downcast for her Word Flower for 'sad'. It sounds pretty basic but, you know what? As a writer, I've found this tool useful and I write the words I come up with for my own personal thesaurus I keep beside my computer. And as an editor, it gives me a way to help an author using a specific word way too much to branch out.

Another great writing strategy is creating 'Word Choice Lists'. Jaimie's teacher created a table with headings like 'Speech Words', 'Movements' and 'Loud Sounds' with tons of words listed under each. Or, you could create a table where you have two headings 'How It's Said' and 'Words to Substitute'. Write subheadings under the 'How It's Said' column such as, 'In a happy way', 'In a sad way', 'In a tired way', etc. then list different action words you'd use to show 'sad' or 'tired' beside the subheadings.

Jaimie's teacher got the kids to create a folder where they'd glue their Word Flowers onto as well as keep their other tables I suggested above. This is the place they'd keep their journals and other writing booklets so they had easy access to their writing tools when they struggled with writing assignments. These strategies helped Jaimie's writing so much. And on top of that, it also helped her learn to expand her way of thinking and looking at how to complete an assignment.

Today, she's doing so well on her own that she doesn't even need to use her writing tools as often, which is awesome because I've claimed her folder! Who says we can't learn from kids?

Feel free to share your own writing tools and strategies. Branch out beyond the usual Thesaurus or Dictionary and get those writing juices bubbling.

Happy writing, everyone.

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4 comments Chynna Laird, how to find different words in writing, Writer's Tools, writing strategies