As anyone who follows my website or subscribes to my newsletter knows, I believe in the importance of blogging for driving traffic and search engines to your site. I stress the importance of using strong keywords within your blog posts and good title and subtitle phrases. This all helps create content that is useful for your search engine optimization (SEO).
But, the problem I run into with most clients is they have the mistaken idea that “if they build it they will come.” Just starting a random blog and hoping, wishing, and praying for traffic is not a good marketing strategy. There are tons of awful blogs available online that don’t get any traffic, despite having a lot of content. You need to be proactive about driving people to your website.
When writing content for your website, you need to do it with a strategy in mind. I am going to detail a few things to take into consideration before you do your next blog posting.
Define your target audience.
It’s all well and good that you are getting traffic to your blog, but unless you are getting the right traffic, it will be pretty much useless.
Susan Chritton, in Personal Branding for Dummies, says, “One of the biggest mistakes that budding personal branders make is trying to appeal to everyone. Think about the game of darts: You have to aim in order to hit the board. (If you let your darts go without aiming them, you probably won’t be very popular.) If you hit the board, you score. And if your aim is very good and you hit the bull’s eye, even better!”
Quicksprout, a leading inbound marketing website, points out that there are three types of people that fit into your brand’s target audience:
- The person that will pay you
- The person that influences the person that pays you
- Your supporter
They go on to say, “The first person on the list, the one that pays you, is your main focus. This might be your current boss or your next boss. It might be the target customer of your current business or your next business. It could also be an investor or a bank.”
If you are a business, the person that pays you is likely your clients or customers. That is where your main focus should be.
Write about what your target audience wants to read.
This means don’t just write about any random topic you can come up with, write about what your target audience wants to know.
Do a bit of research. Look at your Google Analytics or use a tool like BuzzSumo to identify the type of content that did best among your audience. Look at your competitions posts and see what worked best for them. BuzzSumo is an excellent tool for this as well.
And, keep an eye out for trends in your niche market. BuzzSumo or Ahrefs Content Explorer are both useful tools for this. They allow you to analyze trending topics within a particular time frame. Doing this can help you stay on top of industry trends.
Write data-backed articles.
Readers are busy. They don’t have time for fluff. They want substantive content that they can consume and digest. Check out this article written by Relevance, a digital marketing and strategy agency, for a 3-step process you can follow for data-backed content creation.
Promote your blog posts across multiple channels.
Writing an article, slapping it up on your blog, and doing nothing else isn’t going to be enough. You need to cross-promote your articles across multiple channels.
Post links to the article on your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts. Send emails to your mailing list. If you don’t have one, start developing an email list now! Repurpose your content into a short video and post it and links back to your blog on YouTube.
Go the extra mile and take some steps to get your information out there to as many people as you can, so they can start sharing it with others. Don’t just post it and sit back and wait for people to stumble across your website. That tactic will lead to failure and frustration.
And, above all, don’t forget to keep blogging. If you are having trouble with blogging, be sure to read my article and view my video, How To Write A Blog Post For Beginners (And Even Experience Bloggers), for some tips.
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