Making Your Blog – The Blog Of Choice For Your Niche
Hi Everyone,
Do you struggle with your blog strategy and creating blog content?
My Cheeky and Fun Ways To Get Inspiration For Your Blog Posts article got some great feedback so today I thought I’d expand on my strategy for making my blog interesting and the ‘web destination’ of choice for everyone looking to make money as a blogger.
Today’s video is titled Killer Blog Content but really it is more about blog strategy – rather than creative writing because the best writing in the world doesn’t amount too much if you don’t have the right strategy. My hope is to inspire you to follow some of these strategies and for you to create the Web Destination of Choice for people interested in your niche.
I thought this quote by Ben Franklin could easily be a mantra for all Bloggers:
Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing
and the following by Samuel Johnson sums up my own views on creating Blog Posts:
What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure
Too many bloggers are looking for “Easy Posts” and while some posts will be easier than others I have always found I get the biggest and best response when I put significant effort and created a post of real value and help for my readers.
Today, I wanted to share with you how I create killer content for my blog and my websites, and how you can do it too.
I am going to concentrate on four things:
Blog Pages / Posts, Interviews, Inspiration, and Guides
I shall start with Blog Pages and the first page I want to draw you attention to is My Story. The My Story Page is sort of like an About Page – only better.
In my case I have three different pages with slightly different versions of My Story:
http://www.incomediary.com/about
http://www.incomediary.com/make-money-online-my-personal-story-how-i-created-incomediary-com
http://www.incomediary.com/the-true-story-of-my-overnight-success
Now you don’t need three pages – an enhanced About Page will be fine. I evolved into 3 pages over the last 12 months – mainly in response to questions people asked me.
In my case, the My Story Page’s work really well, because they tell the story of how I started making money online – which most of my readers are interested to know this, so they may replicate / do the same.
The My Story Page is a great place to include affiliate links to products you purchased / invested in – showing your readers products that made a difference to your success while at same time giving them an opportunity to buy those products.
If you look at your Google Analytics, you’ll actually find that your “About Page” is often one of the most visited pages. So it’s pays to put some focus into how you can monetize this page
The next page is a “Contact Us” page. A lot of people have very basic contact pages with perhaps just an email address or a short form to fill in.
It is also a good idea to include things like details of your RSS Feed, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Give your readers as many ways as possible to interact with you.
You might also want to suggest things your readers might like to contact you about. For example: advertising, press, webinars, interviews and speaking engagements.
Next I suggest a “Comparison Page,” something I’ve mentioned quite a lot of times. Comparing products is great, because it’s clear to the reader which one’s better, and, of course, you an affiliate link for each product you are comparing. Actually sometimes I even include links to products I am not an affiliate for, simply because it comes across as more sincere and impartial. Sure, maybe I lose some commissions that way — but really it doesn’t matter that much if you build something else much more important with your reader – TRUST.
My Thank You page (from when people subscribe) includes links to Website Hosting Comparisons as an example.
The last page I call a “Squeeze Page“. Now more accurately this should be called the Michael Dunlop Squeeze Page because my definition of a squeeze is quite different from most other Internet Marketers.
If you look at How To Create A Profitable Blog you will get a better idea of what I mean. Sure the page is also about ‘squeezing” someones email address out of them – but can you also see how there is an opportunity for me as a blogger to earn commissions – even if the visitor did not subscribe.
Also if you tell people to go to your site and request free report (or whatever you are offering) then it doesn’t matter how easy you make it – some people are still going to fail to find how to subscribe.
But having this separate Squeeze page dedicated to people joining your list – all they need to do is go to that SPECIFIC page rather than hunt around on the site for a place to subscribe. My: How To Create A Profitable Blog solves that problem for me.
You can tweet about your squeeze page. You can promote it on Facebook, YouTube etc.
Now On To Interviews
Interviews have been very good to me. It’s the easiest way to get great content and build relationships and Authority not only with your readers but also with the people you interview.
So who shall you interview?
For me, I would find people who are making money online, with a product, and doing it all online, and interview them, such as Yanik Silver and Gary Vaynerchuk
A big benefit of interviewing BIG NAMES is of course their names alone bring you TRAFFIC. I rank first page of Google for both many of my ‘Interviewees Names + Interview’
Because people will be searching for these people online you naturally end up getting traffic. And my goal with every new visitor no matter how they find my site is to impress then so much the become a subscriber, join my mailing list, take my eCourse.
Not everyone will grant you an interview but if you present yourself well and write a decent email there is a good chance many will agree. In the end it is a numbers game – you have to accept some NO’s in order to get those YES’s. And once you have interviewed one big name it gets easier to interview other big names.
Now once people have agreed to an interview you have to ask the right questions. For me personally these days I prefer to do my interviewing over SKYPE and record the conversation. I also nearly always have the Interview Transcribed by CastingWords.com. The advantage of this is that I have lots of text / copy for the search engines to index and I find it incredibly good for search engine optimisation. You will note I do the same with Videos.
Now A Tip About Asking Questions
Now this might just be me but I have found my interviews go better if I don’t over think the questions and just plan one or two questions in advance. You see if you are asking the questions you have pre-planned I find you spend less time listening to the answers and more time planning the next question. However, if you are listening to your interviewee then the next question always follows quite naturally I find. (I expect a lot of professional interviewers would not agree with that – but that is what I have found)
The whole point of the interview is you can roll from question to the next question smoothly. So if they’re talking about one thing, you can elaborate on it. Make sure you’re engaging the interviewee with all the things that are necessary.
In addition to doing videos via Skype and audio you can of course also do it by email (that is how I started) of via Video as I have done several times, such as when I flew to New York to interview Gary Vaynerchuk.
Very Important:
When you publish the interview make sure to use a good Title – one that will get peoples attention and also one that is good for the search engines. I used to start every interview and call it “Interview with Name of Guru,” but we found that most people when searching for interviews actually searched ‘Name Of Guru – Interview’ – for example ‘Yanik Silver Interview’.
An example of a good interview title for myself would be:
“Michael Dunlop Interview / How to Make Six Figures Blogging,”
Inspiration
Interviews are of course inspiring but I have found that producing Top Lists on a regular basis can also be very inspiring – and Great for Traffic.
And the more inspired people are they more likely they are to invest in your products or the products you are promoting.
Lists like: “Top 30 Bloggers,” or “Top 30 Golfers,” or “Top 30 Richest Celebrities in the World” always get attention and as I have mentioned before, one of my very first Top Lists (3 years ago) which was a Rich List Of Top Young Entrepreneurs went Global and I ended up being interviewed and mentioned myself all over the world.
Indeed it was that Top List that got me interviewed by a Brazilian Newspaper
I used to own a web design blog and we did spectacularly well with Top Lists such as “Top 30 Green Website Layouts.” – because people who want to do a green website layout want to know what other people have done for their green website layout. And we’ve done “Top 30 Logos,” and “Top 30 Twitter Backgrounds” etc.
More Inspiration:
Success stories – feature other peoples successes. Better still interview those successful people. “Your Story’ should be another inspiring page.
When people read my stories, about how these are all my failures before I got this site and the other site, and how I became a success. So having your stories are really important as well, and people love reading those. I actually get more comments per visitor on that than anything else across my site.
Any you will note I like to include some positive and inspirational quotes from time to time – this is all part of the INSPIRATION theme.
Ideas
Give people ideas – ideas for things to do with their business, things to discuss, new ideas, old ideas recycled
My aim with every blog post is to give my readers at least one new idea – hopefully more. And of course these IDEAS are INSPIRING.
If you follow this strategy then you will have inspired readers who follow you enthusiastically and who create Buzz for you and your Blog.
Guides
Top Tip – don’t copy anyone elses guide – go out there and create a better guide than anyone else has done.
Of course with a blog or a guide you need to carefully consider your subject.
A lot of people write a guide, because there heard something or another was a good topic, but they don’t really know exactly why they’re writing it about.
A good way to consider what you should write a guide about is to consider what questions people ask in your niche and answer them
For example when I started IncomeDiary, people were asking me, how do I make a blog? How do I make money blogging? How do I do blogging full stop? So, firstly, find out what people want, and then provide them with that solution, and obviously monetize it.
In a guide, your structure is vitally important. Make it easy to follow and better still intuitive. In my case I broke it down into a 7 Day Blogging eCourse
The guides work really well for monetization I find. Give your readers ACTION STEPS. Usually there’s something to buy with everything. For example, you’re teaching someone how to bake a cake. There’s going to be something in that, that people don’t have this tool, or they don’t have some cookery ingredient. You can promote it. JUst about every product you can imagine has some sort of affiliate program for it these days.
Also have a way to Follow-up with your guide. For example in my case with a Blogging eCourse I know people will suffer from writers block so I have various products that I can follow up with and promote – for example Web Domination by Nick Tart.
And one other benefit of having a guide is that when you get interviewed yourself you have something to promote – ‘give away’ and grow your subscriber list with.
Finally the best thing about this structure is that everything is interlinked – for example in your Guide you may send people to Your Story or your Squeeze page or vice versa.
All the time your visitors are in your loop rather than a competitors loop you have a far better chance of making a sale
I hope this has helped – as always if you have any questions please comment below or Contact Me about My Blog Mastermind
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Also make sure to check out:
Cheeky and Fun Ways To Get Inspiration For Your Blog Posts