New kids on the blog
We’ve all seen blogs fail. Businesses launch blogs with good intentions but don’t always follow through and put forth the effort necessary to make them sustainable.
If you’re wanting to launch a blog but aren’t confident in your ability to be successful, you aren’t alone. This is a common fear, but one that can easily be overcome with the right understanding of what it takes to be successful.
The driving factors in success
No two companies define success the same way, but most would agree that a successful blog is one that engages readers and pushes them towards your brand and/or products. With that being said, here are a handful of driving factors behind a successful blog.
1. Research your audience
Everything starts with audience research.
You need to know everything you possibly can about your readers.
This means demographic information, likes and dislikes, hobbies, political beliefs, purchase habits, etc.
Depending on how much information you currently have on your customers, this may be as simple as digging through data. If you don’t have much information, then you’ll have to do some digging. Good sources for consumer insights include social media, website analytics, and basic demographic information.
2. Write for your audience
The primary reason why you need to spend so much time researching your customers is that you have to craft your entire content writing and publishing strategy around who your audience is. Otherwise, you’re wasting your time.
“You have to know what you’re going to blog about,” successful entrepreneur and blogger Neil Patel notes. “It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of hosting and WordPress themes and color schemes, but that’s not the most important part. The most important part is your subject matter. What are you going to blog about?”
3. Focus on consistency and quality
When a business blog fails, one of the primary causes seems to be an emphasis on quantity over quantity. In an internet landscape where millions of words of content are pumped out on a daily basis, it’s easy to get this relationship backwards.
Instead of focusing on the number of posts you’re publishing, spend your energy emphasizing consistency and quality.
This means posting high-quality, authoritative content on a regular and predictable basis.
4. Find good writers
While you may have time to write one or two blog posts per week, you certainly don’t have time for more. This is troubling since you’re going to need to consistently produce high-quality content.
The answer is to find and hire good writers who you believe properly align with your brand’s style and voice. It’ll take a lot of trial and error to find a good one, but once you do – don’t let them go.
5. Spend time with titles
“It’s one thing to write great content, but it’s another thing to get it read and ranked — which is where nailing the title comes in,” says Corey Wainwright of HubSpot. “Titles are what sell the content. They represent it in search engines, in email, and on social media. It’s no surprise, then, that one of the most common questions we get is around crafting titles.”
If it takes you an hour to write a blog post, you should be spending 20 or 30 minutes brainstorming good titles.
This is just a rule of thumb, but it goes to show how important the headline is in today’s era.
Start with a strong foundation
It all starts with a strong foundation. If you can get your blog launched in the right manner, then everything else will fall into place.
Blogging is never easy, but it’s always rewarding.
Make sure you’re doing yourself justice by focusing on the factors that commonly drive success.
#NewKidOnTheBlog
