So You Want to Run a Successful Blog?
Blogs, formally known as web logs have totally transformed over the past few years from personal logs, as marketers quickly realized the advertising potential of them, into serious marketing tools for almost anything online. Blogs help making relationships much easier than marketing websites and people more easily develop relationships which builds trust and therefore makes sales easier to achieve.
Once created there are lots of options for monetizing the blog and lots of templates available to match whatever theme your blog is about. It’s also easy to create links from it to your business website or even link the two together via RSS. If you think a blog is the way forward for you then here are a few tips on how to get the most from your blog.
1, Your audience. You are writing your blog post for your audience to read, so don’t forget that what you write is of interest to them. They have searched for through a keyword, or keyword phrase, and arrived at your blog. So, make sure they are happy with what they find and even interested enough to look a little further into your blog, and maybe visit your website.
2, Text sends you to sleep. Large areas of pure text are like a sleeping draft to most visitors and they’ll be ‘overfaced’ thinking “I’ll never get to the end of this!” and most likely they’ll click away you’ll have lost your visitor. Place relevant pictures amongst your text to break it up a little. This adds extra interest for the visitor and you’re like to keep them engaged longer.
3, Always remember that your objective is to attract visitors who are interested in your subject matter. If your blog is themed on fishing then don’t just dump a post on there about sports cars. You want to attract visitors based on keyword searches and need to make sure your content is always relevant and on topic. You are trying to build relationships with your visitors to get their trust hoping to get to the next level when they will buy a product or service from you so keep them interested and coming back to your blog.
4, Keep things simple. The art of good communication is to keep things simple. Keep away from the technical jargon unless absolutely necessary and try to keep the sentences short and to the point.
5, Always enable the ‘Comments’ feature in your blogs. This is your chance to interact with your visitors and find out what they think of your posts and what they’d like to hear more of. This is vital for the good running of a blog. For safety’s sake you should set it so all comments have to be approved before being published. This will stop your blog being polluted with lots of spam comments.
Always make sure that you have a definite plan of action before even starting your blog. You need to be committed to entering fresh content on regular occasions. There is nothing worse than a stale blog so make sure you have a regular schedule and stick to it. Visitors soon realize when you’re not updating regularly and hard won visitors you don’t want to lose. Don’t for get to answer comments that need to be answered as well. Your visitors who provide comments also supply their email address so this is a great tool for building your list as well.
