Blogging is not a set-it-and-forget-it kind of racket. It requires direction, discipline, and the drive to constantly improve. Sometimes, it’s about the peripheral features of your blog, but most of the time, it’s about keeping your content fresh.
Whether you’ve had a successful week churning out posts, or you feel like you’re about to hit a slump, try applying these pearls of wisdom and you might get some interesting results:
According to Chris Garrett, you should always keep in mind these 5 most powerful words when it comes to promoting anything:
What’s In It For Me?
Always put yourself in the shoes of your audience because they will be asking that question. Keeping WIIFM in mind means figuring out how your blog can appeal to the people you want to reach.
Reading your blog needs to be a rewarding experience for both the regular readers and first-time visitors. You need to demonstrate this through all aspects of your blog, from the design to the functionality to the content.
Once your audience understands why they should be reading your blog, you must move on to what you want them to do on your blog. You need to be able to communicate to the benefits of bookmarking, subscribing, linking, and returning to your blog.
What are the more specific calls to action you wish to achieve on your blog? It could be a Digg or a Stumble. It could be a click on an affiliate link or any other advertisement. It could be directly buying your product. As you become more specific with the expectations you have of your audience, you must communicate them more clearly.
Connecting with your audience is an essential feature of successful blogs. And being mindful of WIIFM at all times is the way to do it.
How does a blog move from good to better to best? By constant improvement. At regular intervals you must take a break from writing blog posts and give an objective assessment of your blog. Figure out the strengths and weaknesses of your blog, then figure out how you can increase the former and lessen the latter.
There are several different ways to look at your blog, and these are the most important ones:
The best blogs gives their readers useful and unique information. Often, this comes in the form of a top-of-class resource.
Quality resources vary across niches, but you know a quality resource when you see one. For example, take a look at Brian Clark’s 10 Step Copywriting Tutorial. It’s what everyone turns to when they want to master copywriting for the web.
Or, take Darren Rowse’s Blogging For Beginners. It’s the ultimate resource of new bloggers. When blogging firms hire new bloggers, they always send them over to Darren’s resource.
The goal of EatonWeb was to create an algorithm that would automatically filter the best blogs in any category to the top of that category . We figured that we could add value to the web as a directory that listed the best blogs first. Isn’t that what directories are for in the first place? To be reliable guides to the best of the web?
While we still have a ways to go before we’ve populated our directory to the point of satisfaction, there are a few categories where we feel that you can get a clear glimpse at the success of our algorithm and it’s automatic ranking of sites.
