Strategic Blogging: The Missing Link in Building Blog Audience
What’s the most commonly told formula to building blog audience?
Blog Audience = Superb Content + Promotion
In other words, create great content and promote it to reach as many readers as possible. People will come, see your content, link to it. You’ll start getting search engine traffic too. The combination of those will build your audience. Sounds great, but there is a missing link.
But first, let’s define what a successful blog is.
What’s a Successful Blog?
Unique and useful contents are the building blocks of a successful blog. However, let’s first define the term “successful” in this context. Most people think a successful blog is either one or all of the following:
- Has high traffic.
- Has loyal audiences and followers.
- Makes the blogger a living.
- Is talked about in the blogosphere.
- Has great rankings in Alexa and/or Compete.
Believe me, while everyone would say it should be all of the above, s/he usually doesn’t think it that way when looking at a blog. I mean, when I see a blog with high Alexa rank, I automatically think it is successful, even though the blogger may not make money with it.
Perhaps a better definition of a successful blog would be one that is already or on the right track to reach the outcomes or goals the blogger has set in mind or on paper.
Simple but thoughtful.
What’s Wrong with the Above Formula?
If traffic is the only measurement for success, the above formula may work very well. Building high traffic blog may involve:
- Creating flagship content in a hot topic.
- Promote in social media.
Assuming that you already have a strong profile in the social media, you may get others to review your content and vote accordingly, even if your blog doesn’t have significant traffic yet. As they say, rinse and repeat.
The problem may not be obvious yet, but let’s examine what happen after this.
Social media visitors come to your blog. They like what they see, so the next natural step is to subscribe to get updates from your blog via RSS feed or email.
Without an outcome and strategic plan, readers may occasionally get random content that is unrelated to the topic they are interested in. If you do this too often, and they don’t expect this, they will lose interest and unsubscribe sooner rather than later.
The Missing Variable in the Formula
Based on the definition of a successful blog (see previous section) the missing piece is in focus.
The simple illustration above describes it best. You want to create focused contents, each of them aims for the same outcome.
That may sound common sense, but certainly it is not common practice.
A photography blog might be featured on a social media site, so she decided to share her experience and techniques to achieve it. The instructions were practical, the readers liked it and hoped to be able to duplicate her success. The problem is, the traffic consisted of people who only care about social media, and probably a part of them were also interested in photography.
This example may be extreme, but it illustrates the point very well. The lack of focused content may hurt sometimes. Their subscribers would be confused about the shift in the topic. Web publishers who syndicate content would be more disappointed.
So, the new formula may become…
Blog Audience = Focused and Superb Content + Promotion
How to Apply the New Formula to Your Blog
Strategic blogging to build your audience involves preliminary steps before starting a blog and writing the first content. If you have already owned a blog, you can use the following steps to get back on track and go in the right direction.
- Identify your outcomes — what you want to achieve with the blog. The best way to illustrate this is through an example. If you want to dine out, you need to know where you want to go, who you want to ask to go with you, what you are going to eat, etc. Strategic blogging involves setting your goals, or otherwise it doesn’t matter which path you take.
- Create an action plan. To continue with the example above, how you are going to get there? Do you need to call the restaurant to reserve a table? Perhaps you should ask a friend if she could go with you. A plan is strategic actions you need to take to fulfill the outcomes. In this case, it may be content ideas, topics, partnership plans to produce contents and other points.
- Integrate your plan into your schedule. Based on your action management system, you may want to include the actions in the plan on your todo list. The method you use can be different but you need to take necessary steps to move your blog closer to the goals.
Examples for Different Uses of a Blog
The following are examples of different strategic plan for creating content for different uses of a blog:
- Business blog to build authority status in an industry. Create well-researched content around a tightly related topic. Get involved in discussions with other bloggers, perhaps extending the discussion to your blog. Offer useful and unique commentaries for news. Help others and use them as case studies (with permission, of course).
- Make money blogging by selling ad space. Produce concise but unique contents and combine them occasionally with in-depth posts to keep page views high without sacrificing quality. Seek options for multiple income streams, such as writing reviews for recommended affiliate products, etc.
- Creating a forum for prospective customers. Offer a wide range of topics related to the niche, but also dig deep to demonstrate expertise. Create in-depth, practical and comprehensive content to sell as one or more products.
A blog marketing and promotion plan may include publishing e-newsletter to complement the blog for people who prefer to get very regular content, social media, linkbaiting and others.
It is not possible to produce content that will satisfy everyone. Perhaps you are targeting two different niches but they are still closely related to each other. For instance, rather than building a blog for WordPress and another one for Blogger, and yet another different blog for Movable Type, I choose to mix them up.
Blogging related content should be applicable to all blog platform users. A few irrelevant blog posts may not be too disturbing. Moreover, I am considering to split the content feed in this blog into multiple individual feeds (or combinations of them) for each blog platform user.
Return to Blog Content — How to Write Great Content and Where to Get Them.
Return to Blog Tips for a Better Blog — Blog Building University.
