In this final installment of building a professional blog, we will delve into the other sides of blogging. While creating content is pivotal to driving traffic to your website and having a winning strategy, coming up with creative and engaging ideas can be taxing. Beyond creativity, there must be a strategy in place to help place you above your competition, help you continuously drive organic traffic while maintaining a loyal following to build a community around your brand and more importantly converting this audience by way of monetisation. This article will outline the best practices for doing all that ensuring that your professional blog has a logical map to success. We will discuss:
- 5 Steps to Increasing your Blogging Output in 30 days
- Tactics to ensuring your Content beats out the competition
- 2 Strategies for Generating Traffic
- Building a Community around your Blog
- Keys to Monetisation Success
On to the goods.
Table of Contents
5 Steps to Increasing your Blogging Output in 30 Days
1. Idea Generation
Creatives do not have an endless supply of ideas and creativity but when we are on fire ideas can flow like a mighty rushing river. When this happens you need to take advantage and write your ideas down. Writing things down on paper helps you to make them a reality. Whenever you have a new idea write it down. You can even schedule this my setting time a part in your day to do a Brain Dump.
Random sparks of creativity can come at any time and when they do you should be prepared to write them down to preserve them. To do this either carry a small notebook with you or download a note-taking app on your mobile device.
According to a research study writing ideas down helps us to remember as opposed to failing to write it down and forgetting.
Get into the habit of doing a brain dump of ideas daily. You can garner inspiration from anywhere. You can even look at what’s trending and get ideas there. The key is to write them down daily and you will never worry about running out of blog fodder.
2. Start with a Story
Now that you’ve gotten into the practice of writing down your ideas and have a treasure trove waiting to be fleshed out it’s time to flex your storytelling muscle.
We’re not talking about the type of storytelling fiction writers employ but you need to take your audience from point A to point B in a logical but enthralling way. Your writing needs to captivate your viewers and engage them in a real way.
3. Develop and easy to follow Outline in all of your Blog Posts
We discussed this briefly in Part 1 of this two-part series. But it’s worth reiterating because it is essential to creating a quality blog post.
Choose an idea from the list you created. Before you begin writing your blog post you should draft a logical outline that follows the beginning, middle and end known as the Introduction, body and conclusion. Separate your outline and keep it organised. For the body of your blog posts organise your subheadings and write the key points for each.
Good advice for getting your writing juices flowing is to first write your introduction and then your conclusion. This helps you to have a starting point that sets the tune and helps you know where you’re going. Consider your outline as your guide while you’re writing.
4. Read other great bloggers
The greatest authors always say that if you want to be a great writer you have to read often and widely. So if you want your blog writing to be top-notch, then you must read extensively. That includes critically acclaimed blogs in your industry, outside of it and books by great authors.
Reader helps you to write better. Think of it as becoming a better writer via osmosis. You begin to glean better skills by seeing how the titans of writing do it.
Apart from that, you should read books like Elements of Style and others to that help you improve your craft as a writer.
5. Find Relevant Questions and Start Answering them
Practice makes perfect. So writing consistently is the best way to become better at your craft. It also helps you to become more efficient at your craft. Search for relevant questions that your audience have within your industry and start using your expertise to answer them.
You can turn these answers into great fodder for your blog while flexing your writing muscle. In the early stages of your blog, focus on posts that answer the pressing questions your audience has. Blog posts that address and solve problems in an engaging way help to boost your credibility with your intended audience while converting them into a loyal fan base.
Need help finding the best questions within your industry? Go to Quora and do a search. Practice answering questions right on the site and then use this as an idea generation tool as well.
Tactics that ensure you slay your Competition and outshine them
Tactic 1: Use Ranking.name
One of the best ways to see what’s hot and trending is by using Ranking.name to search keywords in your industry.
By inserting the best keywords in your industry you can garner a search result showing all the articles based on how popular they are and use it to your advantage. This is also a great place to get ideas and outshine your direct competition by writing an even better piece with a different spin.
Another cool feature of Ranking.name is that you can type a URL directly to your competitor and keep tabs on their keywords.
The tactic is seeing what your intended audience likes to consume and then using the knowledge to give them even more of what they want at a higher quality.
Tactic 2: Audit your Blog Posts by Asking these Questions
After you’ve written, edited and optimised that blog post it is time to ask yourself pertinent questions before hitting that publishing button.
- Have you written a blog post that outshines and is more actionable than that of the competition? Cross check. If not then it’s time to get back to the drawing board.
- Have you provided a fresh outlook and perspective on the same topic versus your competition? If not then back to the drawing board.
- Is your content shareable across Social Media Platforms? If not get to optimising it for Social Media.
- Did you come up with a variety of headlines before choosing the best one?
Once your post has passed your own inquisition that it’s time to hit publish and promote it.
Generate Traffic with these 2 Strategies
At this stage in the game, your blogging skills are top notch and you’re on your way to creating engaging content. Now it’s time to lay the bait to draw in your prey. That’s right there are some strategies you need to employ in order to drive continuous traffic to your blog.
While there is no shortcut and this does take time, creating shiny content is one part of the work and promotion is another.
Strategy 1: Boost your Post on Social Media
Use Facebook to your advantage to get your blog content right in front of your audience. This is where your marketing budget comes in. In order to truly get your blog content seen you’re going to have to spend some money.
Once you’ve published your post to your Facebook page you want to boost it to be seen by your chosen demographic and countries. Pick the geographic locations where you know your target audience is located. A tip is to boost for two weeks to save money per click.
Doing this on a consistent basis will grow your traffic exponentially with organic traffic from Facebook.
Strategy 2: Use Google Ads
SEO is a great way to draw organic traffic to your website but using Google Ads will drive even more traffic to your blog. Google has a vast network and will place your ads everywhere their user’s login. That’s Gmail, YouTube, Google Search and so much more.
Build a Community around your Blog
Now that you’ve done the grunt work of driving a constant stream of traffic to your site you need to build your community. The best way to do this is buying giving your audience a call-to-action to subscribe to your Mailing List.
Building your mailing list is an absolute must. Emailing Marketing is a powerful way to build a loyal community around your blog. Tactics you can use to get your readers to subscribe involves giving them something for free that they need that helps solve a problem that makes them ready to give you their contact information. For example, when you write a blog post that solves a problem add a call-to-action at the bottom with a freebie opt-in like a free pdf, checklist or any tool you can leverage. This is another piece of content you have to create but make sure it is compelling and has great utility.
The Keys to Monetisation Success
You’ve learned how to generate tons of ideas that will last you through your content marketing schedule, create compelling content for your audience with your industry-leading expertise, promote that content to drive traffic to your website, and turn that traffic into a loyal community. Now let’s talk about money before wrapping this guide up.
ROI is the name of the game here. That means Return on Investment. You’ve invested your blood, sweat, tears, creative juices and money into building a blogging empire now it’s time to double even triple all you’ve poured in.
If your business is product driven or service oriented, then you can build your blog to convert the readers to purchase more products from you. For more on blog Monetisation, read this extensive guide.
Other ideas:
- Use Webinars as a way to offer something free to your users and then convert them to pay for a product or service.
- Use Sales Funnels
- Affiliate Marketing
Now go forth and create content that fuels your business’ success.
