From Whoa to Go

PluginID’s The Blogging Blueprint- A Practical Application Guide. Part 7: Content & Engaging Your Niche

I’ve learned through writing this Blogging Blueprint ebook series how important it is to know your niche, and know it well, before you start out with trying to write in it. Here I trying to attain two things: location independence and online business development but where is my attention going? To building a blog and writing about that. It is of course one element of going ‘from whoa to go’ with my success but how much of this content is beneficial to my overall audience?

The problem that exists is that the people I most want to engage aren’t active online and would not be doing any of these things themselves. My niche is a market that I want to bring online by helping to remove the daunting fear the world wide web presents. So many people use the web only for a quick google search, facebook or email and they limit themselves from the enormous potential to help improve their lives by using some simple online tools. That’s the audience I want to reach but I’m not going to find them online. I have to get inventive and start looking offline for my readers.

Once I have their attention I want to ensure they like what they see. Content is where I know that I’m only being half-arsed in my effort. Why? Simply because it takes time to find your flow, that, and I’m finding myself swept up in the momentum of myself.

Killer Content

Content is the main area that you need to focus on with your blog. Even if you don’t spend time tweaking your site for search benefits and don’t care that much about branding specifically on each social site, excellent content will still give your site a chance to succeed.

Of the comments I leave on other peoples posts that resonate with me I do see that I’m receiving clicks back to my site but these people aren’t sticking around. My content isn’t compelling them to comment, be engaged or provide feedback. Why is this?

This failure to engage my audience is because I’m not actively participating in their lives and I’m not offering up advice, like everyone else. I am writing about the trials and tribulations of what I’m experiencing and what I do to overcome them, but these things are not relevant to the individual readers who swing by for a looksee.

Once I make the move (very soon) over to my new home my style will shift to a greater awareness of what I can offer the reader and take into consideration what others are doing.

The types of content that tends to do well include:

• List Content – ‘11 Ways to’, ‘21 Reasons why’, ‘101 things that’ – you find these a lot on blogs;
• Unique content i.e. research into something that hasn’t been done or a personal challenge people are thinking of trying which you report on;
• Viral Content – something that is easy for people to share and something that they are likely to share. Humorous content tends to do well;
• Resource posts – links to products, services or items in one place that can help people’s lives.

Niche Engagement

Niche engagement, as the name suggests, means immersing yourself in all aspects of your niche in order to get targeted traffic back to your blog.

Glen offers up the following suggestions on how to engage your niche to draw attention to your blog:

• Blog Comments: not only will the author but the visitors too are likely to stop by your blog to find out more about you and this is likely to open the door to getting closer to other writers in your niche and becoming a part of a community.
• Guest Posting: “Guest posts are a great way to get both backlinks and traffic to your website which can help with direct visitors and search engine referrals. It’s best to do a guest post on a blog in your niche because that way the people that come across your site are much more likely to subscribe to your feed.”
• Forum Activity: This runs along the same lines as blog comments, if you participate others will be inclined to support you too. “The reason I state that is because forum posting is something that can seem like quite a lot of work for relatively small results, even if the results mean targeted traffic. On most forums, you can place a signature link so that whenever you make a post there is a link back to your website at the bottom. I’ve found that this works well not only for website visitors but also in terms of making relationships with other bloggers on that website.”
• Being Active on StumbleUpon: “StumbleUpon is one of my favourite websites because time and time again it is
  able to show me amazing content from my niche at the click of a button. Not only that, but StumbleUpon is known to have the ability to drive massive amounts of traffic to your website. Of course, don’t only stumble the content of certain people as StumbleUpon might pick up on this and it will look as if you are gaming the system. Vote for whatever you find interesting and if it is something of someone you’ve ‘connected’ with in the past then even better.”
• Being Real: This is pretty self-explanatory, if you’re not yourself and you don’t write about things that are important to you then people will see right through you. The same goes with using your real name (not your company name- ah, hello spam trigger!) and having an image of yourself or a recognisable avatar.

Time & Effort

The most important thing to remember is that all of this takes TIME and EFFORT.

Time is a bloody annoying concept because you can’t really do anything about it. If you are doing all the above things, like Glen suggests, that is, make an effort then over time, your community will grow and people will stick around. If you’ve been slaving away at brilliant content but not getting the attention you deserve for it then you need to start looking at what you’re giving rather than receiving.

Now hasn’t that been an interesting lesson for me to learn!

Missed the Beginning?

• Part 1: Getting the Blog Ball Rolling
• Part 2: Setting up a Hosting Service
• Part 3: WordPress & All that Jazz
• Part 4: Theme’s Are Mean
• Part 5: Website Traffic & Search Engine Optimisation
• Part 6: Spreading your Brand