3 Tenets of Blog Success from a Professional Coach
These tips are really important, core principles for the 5 Tenets of Blog Success from a professional coach. Though not everything there is to know about professional blogging is listed below , if you at least get these tips down pat, you will be farther ahead than most people who blog .
1. Mindset Tips: Take Care of Your Readers
– Bloggers give great content . Marketers take . No one ever returns to a blog again after feeling “dirty” after the first visit. If you want to blog, make sure you are aware of your surroundings and that bloggers are successful only to the degree that they are useful, entertaining, though-provoking, controversial, or funny.
– Pro bloggers who make money are highly respected. That respect is earned through content and by what other respected people say about them. Open up a blog and try to veil the fact that your only goal is to sell people something and see how well you do. It will be depressing when you realize you’ve completely missed the point. It’s not about slapping up a blog, puking some “content” on a daily basis, loading it with seizure-inducing ads, and sitting back to wait for the armored truck to pull up in front of your house with your pot o’ gold.
– Become the expert of your market niche. Even if you are not yet the true voice of that niche. Create the content people are screaming for and keep your ads and other sales down as much as possible for the first 3 months or so. Build credibility, respect and awe first, then begin to gently cash in on the following you’ve built. Tastefully. Respectfully. Look for ways to HELP your followers through affiliate offers. If your recommendations truly help them, they will come back for more as long as your #1 goal is to recommend things that work for them.
– Look for a professional coach to work with you. Someone knowledgeable in helping you to get a blog started.
2. Content Creation Tips
– Research the hell out of your market. I mean spend considerable time doing nothing more than just learning who’s who and what’s what in your market. Have fun. Allow yourself to surf just like your target market surfs when looking for information in your niche. See what you can find and record it.- Set up a feed reader to subscribe to the big blogs and other sites who have the perfect readers for your blog.
– Comment like mad – but do so based on what blogs are getting the lots of comments out there. Bookmark the posts the big bloggers make in your niche that get a lot of comments. (Over 50 comments is a lot) Then figure out how you can do similar content on your blog, but with a different take. Don’t just rip off titles and ideas from others. Innovate and come up with something better than the original.
– Figure out what might be good “linkbait” in your niche based on what you’ve found that gets massive attention for other bloggers. Massive attention is high rankings in the engines and tons and tons of comments and trackbacks. How can you top it?-How can you spin off of it to make something new, better, more interesting or useful? Or disagree with it and back up your argument. (But don’t expect any links from the guy or gal you shame with your well-written piece on why they were so wrong!)
– Become the most informed person in your niche, or at least more informed than 95% of the others in your niche. Be able to talk about anything related to your niche for days on end. You can only do this by chewing through the latest news in your feed
reader regularly and staying on top of your niche.
3. Increasing Traffic Tips
– Read the Authority Black Book. Apply it.
– Make the world aware of your great content through social marketing and networking with expert bloggers in your niche.
– Get gigs on other expert blogs. Write guest posts for whomever will accept them. Work you way up until you are writing guest posts for the biggest blogs in your niche.
– Comment like mad . But make your comments thoughtful and better than any of the other comments above yours so your comments stand out and people click over to your blog to see what makes you so smart, intriguing, funny, controversial, or otherwise interesting.
– Get interviewed by a BlogTalkRadio.com station: you will find several you might offer your voice to in your niche.
– Start a podcast as part of your blog. Interview movers and shakers in your niche. It is easier to get an interview with a big blogger than it is to do pretty much anything else. If your guest speaker thinks you are going to help them increase their exposure with your podcast, they will take the time to be on it. If not now, stick to it and keep asking them once a month until they cave in.
– Promote your podcast relentlessly in iTunes and all the podcast directories on the web.
– Make sure your main keyword is near the beginning or IS the beginning of the title of your posts. Then incorporate your keyword(s) into the first paragraph (ideally the first sentence) of your posts for best search engine love.
– If you want to rank you have to have links. Do you have a great post you want ranked #1 for a killer keyword phrase? You have to have links pointing to that post from all over your niche “neighborhood.” Alert other bloggers to your killer post. Some will link to it. Do the social thing and announce your new killer post on Twitter, Facebook and others to get “picked up” and linked to by other bloggers and sites.
(The only drawback to finding everything on your own is that someone is probably starting a blog in your niche right now with guidance from a life coach like me and moving much, much faster than you toward success.)
