As you know that we are attending BlogWorld Expo East in New York City. We had a pleasure of attending Amy Porterfield’s (@AmyPorterfield) session in which she shared why more people aren’t reading your blog. She shares how to create bite sized content that get devoured and shared. Here is a summary of his presentation:
People are social media obsessed. Why? Because it is easy to read, easy to access, immediately gratifying, entertaining, and it can make you smarter fast. We are now hard wired to take in content in bite sized pieces and we want instant gratification.
The big problem bloggers have is not enough traffic and uninteresting content. The solution to this is to steal key elements from social media and apply them to your blog. Some of these are stylistic, some are deeper content strategies.
Rule one: Instant rapport. The idea of the captive audience is dead, there is no way to build rapport. People make snap decisions, and click constantly. So start each post as a new first impression by making your first couple of sentences personal, friendly, and inviting just like you were talking to just one person. Make sure that your blog reflects you brand impeccably and that it tells your story in a way that it connects to their lives.
Rule two: Relevant. Your content needs to mean something. Get it clear who your audience is and what it means to know your audience. It is no longer okay for you just to state the obvious, you need give your audience tangible ideas that they can use to stay ahead. Give them meat by providing them with stats, research, and interviews.
Rule three: Instant gratification. Stick to one topic, a single train of thought and keep it simple. Stay off the “tangent train” and separate multiple ideas into multiple posts.
Rule four: Share-ability. 96% of content shared online is actual content (60% to published content, 36% to embedded content). Make is easy to share your stuff by providing share buttons that are easy to access. Also, make sure to provide not only the content that your audience wants, but the content your audience needs but isn’t asking for.
Rule five: The promise of more. Many blogs offer the promise of more, read more, click this, watch that, this is what users crave. Be open with people and invite them to look at more of your content. Elicit content also by asking specific questions at the end of your posts like “what are your best types for this topic?” or “what is your biggest challenge?” Invite engagement and make it easy.
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Great post. I’ve held a few brainstorming sessions for blog content ideas and one thing that came up is that a [url=http://www.queentorrent.com]great source[/url] of content for your blog would be to ask readers what they want you to cover/comment on. I haven’t yet used this approach on my blog but I know folks who have been successful at this.
You could also make your website more attractive so it doesn’t look like everything else checkout http://www.divvers.com for creative blogging you can even use your wp content on it.