Cracking the Blogosphere

I constantly come across click bait-y headlines like “10 Must Have Tools to Level Up Your Blog,” “17 Things You Should Do To Every Blog Post Before and After You Hit Publish,” “8 Things That Hurt Your Blog,” “The Single Best Way To Get More Blog Traffic (For Free),” or “How I Tripled My Blog Traffic and Earned ‘X Amount of $$$’ In Only One Month.” Yes, these are all real articles.

You know maintaining a blog is something your business needs to do. A blog increases traffic to your website, builds authority, serves as expert positioning, and is a great platform to engage with customers. But blogging can be painful as not all of us are born writers. It’s also time consuming and often doesn’t generate a whole lot of traffic. What with every other person online making claims of being a ‘marketing guru’ or ‘blog expert’ it can be difficult to know where to start and who to trust when researching blog tips. Obviously you have to weed through a lot of duds before reading anything of substance or remotely insightful. But when you do find a nugget of gold, it can be truly helpful in, in this case, creating a successful blog.

Here are a few things that have stood out to me over the course of time and research:

1. Be friendly, SEO-friendly that is: Make your content optimized for search engines.
2. Be where your audience already is: Participate on the blogs, forums, websites, social media communities where content and conversations about your topics are being shared.
3. Target your content to an audience: Consider who is most likely to share – to help spread your work. Active and engaged readers are the best audiences. Don’t forget to keep your buyer personas in mind!
4. Share all content on social media: If you’re writing blog content and not distributing it on Facebook, Twitter, and more then what’s even the point?
5. Utilize analytics: Set up a tracking system and study the results.
6. Include images: Consumers like pretty pictures. Just be sure to link back to the source of the photo, illustration, or infographic.
7. Do keyword research: A big part of showing up in search engines is targeting the phrases that your personas are already searching for. Try out Google Keyword Planner, it’s great.
8. Reference your own past blogs: Use inbound links to generate interest in older entires. Also link out to other reliable resources.
9. Use your email connections: Without spamming your entire address book, use email to promote your blog. Add a link to your email signature!
10. Finally, be consistent, be be consistent: Consistency is crucial to any blog success. You don’t have to post every day but create a schedule and stick with it.

The below infographic by Who Is Hosting This almost reads like a blog post itself because it packs a lot of information into the graphic. (OMG is that why it’s called an infographic?! Just kidding, guys, I knew that.) Take the time to read through it in its entirety and let me know if you’ve fallen for any of the hype.