Each week I write a couple contributing articles on Jennifer Barbee’s blog, DotComConfessions. This week I talk about how to create a successful blog.
Here’s an excerpt, for the rest, you’ll have to visit the site!
Blogging, trending in and out over the last few years is no doubt one of the most effective ways to communicate, update, and market your business. Blogging is not hard, and if done right, it can be used to grow your business and bring attention to what you are doing more than anything else. Plus, it often costs little more than blood sweat and tears.
Topic of Interest
Choosing the right topic is essential to a successful blog. What you choose to write about will, in the long run, determine who will be reading your stuff. If you are wanting to market your specific industry or destination, the topic by which you blog is obvious – the trick is writing about it from an angle that will attract the most people, you have to always ask yourself, “who is interested in this?”
If you are picking a topic from scratch, there are two schools of thought here. The first is to stay local, small, seemingly simpler to manage. Stick to topics in which you can “drive-to” for information. If you are a go-getter type of person, this may be the route for you – developing content on a regular basis may seem easier. Unless you live in a large metropolitan area, you will probably see a cap to how much traffic you’ll see going this route as your target audience is very geographically oriented. The second is to pick something that a broad amount of people have an interest in (like social marketing ;-p, or technology). The object here is to pick something that is broad ranging enough to pertain to a large and growing number of people, but still be focused enough to keep your content ideas flowing.
Consistency
Of course, what you’ll be writing about is the most important, for without that, you’ll have nothing to write about, right? But the second most important, and frankly most neglected, is consistency. Once you pick your topic, you have to write about it, and often. You’ve got to pick regular times to write, whether it be three times a week, once a week, twice a month, once a day, or whatever, and you have to stick to it tooth and nail 100% of the time. You see, if a new visitor comes to your blog, they’ll read around the home page, if they find something interesting, they’ll read that, then move directly to the archives.
If they see that you’ve had one post last week, another a few weeks ago, then four the week before that, then they might come back in a week, maybe. But, if they see that you’ve posted every day for weeks, or months even, they’ll come back again. If there is new content when they come back, then you just increased your chances of earning them as a regular drastically. Every time they come back to new information, your chances of them becoming a regular go up, until you tick them off with your content, of course – but that’s another story.
The best thing to do in the beginning is decide how much content you can get up in a week. I would recommend posting at least three times each week and on a regular schedule so that your readers have something to look forward to, then build from there. Keeping a blog consistent is the most difficult part about blogging, and the most failed aspect of a new blog. In addition, it’s easy to be discouraged if you don’t see results quickly. The point is to keep it going, consistent and the same, regardless of any success you may or may not be seeing. These things take time to get going and it can take up to six months for search engines to start returning you as a credible source of information, depending on your topic. This is a long term play, not a short term game that yields instant gratification.
Read the full article here.
