Making Your Blog – The Blog Of Choice For Your Niche
Hi Everyone,
Do you struggle with your blog strategy and creating blog content?
My article got some great feedback so today I thought I’d expand on my strategy for making my blog interesting and the ‘web destination’ of choice for everyone looking to make money as a blogger.
Today’s video is titled Killer Blog Content but really it is more about blog strategy – rather than creative writing because the best writing in the world doesn’t amount too much if you don’t have the right strategy. My hope is to inspire you to follow some of these strategies and for you to create the Web Destination of Choice for people interested in your niche.
I thought this quote by Ben Franklin could easily be a mantra for all Bloggers:
Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing
and the following by Samuel Johnson sums up my own views on creating Blog Posts:
What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure
Too many bloggers are looking for “Easy Posts” and while some posts will be easier than others I have always found I get the biggest and best response when I put significant effort and created a post of real value and help for my readers.
Also, and this is just something I have worked out I must admit – consider the medium you use to communicate in your blog posts. For example after getting over my initial shyness and nervousness with creating videos I have worked out that VIDEOS are actually a better way for me to create blog posts – especially when I get them transcribed as well. It ‘flows’ much more naturally for me in speaking rather than writing – so that is something some of you may wish to consider.
Inspiration
Interviews are of course inspiring but I have found that producing Top Lists on a regular basis can also be very inspiring – and Great for Traffic.
And the more inspired people are they more likely they are to invest in your products or the products you are promoting.
Lists like: “Top 30 Bloggers,” or “Top 30 Golfers,” or “Top 30 Richest Celebrities in the World” always get attention and as I have mentioned before, one of my very first Top Lists (3 years ago) which was a Rich list of top Entrepreneurs went Global and I ended up being interviewed and mentioned myself all over the world.
I used to own a web design blog and we did spectacularly well with Top Lists such as “Top 30 Green Website Layouts.” – because people who want to do a green website layout want to know what other people have done for their green website layout. And we’ve done “Top 30 Logos,” and “Top 30 Twitter Backgrounds” etc.
More Inspiration:
Success stories – feature other peoples successes. Better still interview those successful people. “Your Story’ should be another inspiring page.
When people read my stories, about how these are all my failures before I got this site and the other site, and how I became a success. So having your stories are really important as well, and people love reading those. I actually get more comments per visitor on that than anything else across my site.
Any you will note I like to include some positive and inspirational quotes from time to time – this is all part of the INSPIRATION theme.
Ideas
Give people ideas – ideas for things to do with their business, things to discuss, new ideas, old ideas recycled
My aim with every blog post is to give my readers at least one new idea – hopefully more. And of course these IDEAS are INSPIRING.
If you follow this strategy then you will have inspired readers who follow you enthusiastically and who create Buzz for you and your Blog.
Guides
Top Tip – don’t copy anyone elses guide – go out there and create a better guide than anyone else has done.
Of course with a blog or a guide you need to carefully consider your subject.
A lot of people write a guide, because there heard something or another was a good topic, but they don’t really know exactly why they’re writing it about.
A good way to consider what you should write a guide about is to consider what questions people ask in your niche and answer them
For example when I started IncomeDiary, people were asking me, how do I make a blog? How do I make money blogging? How do I do blogging full stop? So, firstly, find out what people want, and then provide them with that solution, and obviously monetize it.
In a guide, your structure is vitally important. Make it easy to follow and better still intuitive. In my case I broke it down into a 7 Day Blogging Ecourse
The guides work really well for monetization I find. Give your readers ACTION STEPS. Usually there’s something to buy with everything. For example, you’re teaching someone how to bake a cake. There’s going to be something in that, that people don’t have this tool, or they don’t have some cookery ingredient. You can promote it. JUst about every product you can imagine has some sort of affiliate program for it these days.
Also have a way to Follow-up with your guide. For example in my case with a Blogging eCourse I know people will suffer from writers block so I have various products that I can follow up with and promote – for example Blogging to the bank by Rob Benwell.
And one other benefit of having a guide is that when you get interviewed yourself you have something to promote – ‘give away’ and grow your subscriber list with.
Finally the best thing about this structure is that everything is interlinked – for example in your Guide you may send people to Your Story or your Squeeze page or vice versa.
