7 Tips To Make Your Blog More Popular

Key to marketing your business is to take advantage of all the online wonders of technology. And yes, one of these wonders is blogging. Establishing a blog on your website is one of the fastest ways to make your product or service known.
If you already have a blog and you aren’t getting the results you need, it is time to review your content and ensure it is going to attract readers, and most of all, hold their interest. A definitive blog strategy will virtually assure your success. 

Here are 7 tips to get your blog seen, read and shared.

1. Know Your Ultimate Goal

You must be able to define your ultimate goal of blogging. Your chance at success depends on having this clearly outlined. Some objectives might be:

• Promoting your business services
  
• Selling a product
  
• Establishing yourself as an expert in your field
  

Once you have your goal or goals set, you can move on with the rest of the steps of your blog strategy – designing, writing and marketing.

2. Fill Your Blog Article with Value

Entertain and enlighten. The content must contain valuable information that the reader will feel fills some gap. The subject matter should answer some question or give some how-to.  Just adding in a bunch of adjectives, or worse, straying off the topic, won’t give the reader any satisfaction. In fact, it may drive him away.
Actually, when you have an article on your blog that gives valuable information to the reader, presented in an entertaining way, your post may very well go viral. Others will want to share it with friends, neighbors, relatives and Facebook friends. For example, Digg is a popular site to find all sorts of data on just about any subject. If your blog post gets shared here, you will have more people seeing what you have to offer. Twitter is another great way your content gets shared with the general public.

3. Pull the Reader in with the Secrets of Formatting

People browsing blogs are usually looking for some particular point of interest. They may be looking for key strategies for starting a new business or how to repair their DVD player. When readers browse, using particular formatting within your article can stop them from scrolling down the page, or even from clicking out of the site.

• Use headings and subheadings that impinge. Catchy headings cause the reader to become interested and read more carefully. 
  
• Make important points stand out with bullet points or numbered lists. Nine times out of ten, someone scrolling down a page will stop to see what is so important.
  
• Short paragraphs are also vital, so they don’t get lost in a sea of text.
  

You can check out other blogs and see how the experts do it, and get some ideas that relate to your business blog strategy.

4. Use Links to Make the Content More Valuable

When you include outbound links in your blog, you are assisting the reader with bonus information. They can have more understanding and thus more satisfaction with your content when words are defined and additional information is provided. Outbound links also help with search engine results, making you easier to find on the World Wide Web.

5. Speak to the Right Audience

Before you start the content writing for this step of your blog strategy, you need to know who your target audience is. Is your product something teenagers are looking for, or are you offering services for business owners? Narrowing your target audience allows you to “speak” directly to them, in words they can understand and with concepts they can relate to.

6. Get Creative on Content

By creative, we don’t mean to write some stream of consciousness that will quickly put the reader to sleep. You can actually take topics that have been “done to death” and put a new twist on them. Take your time and work out how you can creatively communicate your message.

7. Make Sure You Have Truly Original Content

To rank high in search engine rankings, your content cannot be duplicative of other content on the Web. If you or your content writer copies and pastes text from other sites on the Internet, you will be violating copyrights or committing plagiarism. Ensure you only have original content posted.
If you follow these tips as you follow your blog strategy, people will visit your blog over and over, interested to find out what you have to say this week. Success will ultimately be yours!


by Mary Chris Hines
http://www.interactmedia.com/