Blogging Tips for Beginners
Blogging is an effective way to expand your business, attract more clients, and maintain relationships with your current clients. But, how do you make your blog visitors into loyal followers? Here are some blogging tips for beginners, but first, think about these four steps as you begin…
- Identify both your current audience and your desired target audience.
- Create original content that caters to the interests of your readers.
- Use SEO (search engine optimized) keywords to attract new readers to your work.
- Establish yourself as an authority on your topic(s).
It really boils down to posting relevant content and finding ways to remind them about you via email, social media and even ads. Let’s look at the ways you can get more loyal blog followers and keep them coming back for more.
Post More Content
You’ve most likely heard that before. But, it’s not that simple. You can’t post anything and end up with fans following you and begging for more. You have to know who your audience is, and what they need to know and post that. Content needs to be relevant and of a high quality to be effective.
- Relevant – The only way you can ensure that your content is relevant is if you do the work necessary to get to know your audience so that you can deliver the type of content they want and need.
- High Quality – While you do not have to be perfect, don’t just slap up anything. If you buy PLR (private label rights), ensure that you rewrite it and make it your own. If you outsource any writing, edit the writing and put your voice into it, and always add a watermarked image so that when it’s shared it comes back to you.
- Consistent – Finally, post consistently. You don’t have to blog every single day. You want to blog multiple times a week and provide meaningful content to your audience. Otherwise, they might get bored and stop visiting.
When you post relevant, high-quality content on a consistent basis in a variety of forms such as images, video, text and so forth your audience will be more likely to stay interested in what you have to say which will make them keep coming back, sharing and engaging with you. Plus, potentially buying something you created or promote.
Promote Your Content
Just posting content is not enough. There are more than 100 million blogs in existence. That’s worse than a needle in a haystack. In order for anyone, including your customers, to find you, you’re going to have to promote each piece of content that you post.
- Social – Whatever social media your audience uses, you need to be using. While you can’t use them all 100 percent alone, you can at least choose the top three that is most popular with your audience. If you can outsource some of your social media marketing then you can do more, but at least start with the top three. Share and engage about your blog posts to bring more traffic and create more interest in your content.
- Make it Simple to Share – Don’t make it hard on your readers to share. Get a social plugin that enables you to add share buttons at the top and bottom of your posts. Make it a point to ask your audience to “click the like and share buttons.” Make it part of your call to action.
- Get Them on Your List – In addition, put a box at the bottom of every single page to encourage your readers to sign up for your newsletter. Leadpages.net offers a really great and attractive option for “lead boxes” that you can put on your blog to help people get what they need.
You can do this easily with a few plugins, but – do not forget to engage with your audience when they comment on your shares. You don’t want communication to be only one way. You want to build relationships so that they don’t just want to read your blog due to the great information; they want to read it because they care about you.
Provide a CTA (Call to ACTION!)
A call to action (CTA) is so important if you really want to make a difference. There are different ways to create a call to action. Your CTA can include asking your audience to share, like, follow, join, sign up, buy or whatever it is that you want them to do. If you really want them to take action, clearly state what you want them to do.
- Ask for a Comment – A great way to get your audience to act and come back for more is to generate more comments to your posts. You can get people to comment more if you ask them to.
- Be the Devil’s Advocate – If you really want to get comments rocking, try being controversial. This can be risky so be mindful of the potential repercussions. Try calling out a situation that makes you mad, sad, and upset. But, try to end it on a positive note if possible.
- But a Subscribe Button after the Post – A great way to get people to subscribe for blog updates is to put a Lead Box on the bottom. You can use Leadpages.net for this. It works well and it was developed by marketers.
- Offer a Free Discovery Call – A great way to get your reader’s attention is to offer a short 15-minute discovery call. Put a sign up box below the post along with words that attract their attention and get them to want to give their email address to sign up for the call.
- Ask Them if They Want to Learn More – A really effective CTA asks your readers if they want to learn more, then using an attractive “learn more” button will entice the reader to click. On the learn more page it can either be more information or you can make it an easy one step opt-in box so that you can send them more information via email.
- Give Them a Special – If you’ve talked about specific products or pain points in the blog post and you know about a product or have created a product that will help them, make them a special offer at the bottom of the blog post.
- Offer a Freebie – Match your freebies with the topic of your blog post, and offer a download button for the freebie that relates to the blog post. Collect their email address so that you can add them to your list. If you use software like Leadpages.net, you can avoid sending to duplicate email addresses on your list, while still offering the freebie to your readers.
- Ask Them to Join Your Mailing List – Get right to the point and ask them if they want to learn more, get reminds of new posts, and so forth and ask them to sign up for your mailing list. Let them know the benefits of doing so, and you’ll get more sign ups if the sign up box is after your posts.
There are many more ways to get your audience to act on your content but you’ll need to tell them what to do. People are relatively lazy, so make it easy for them. You’ll get a better response.
Kit says
Hi Connie,
Great reminder of the things I need to be doing to grow my blog and the tips of some places to find images that I am not familiar with. That’s a great tip about Gumroad too.
I always learn valuable, actionable info from your blog. Many thanks!
Kit recently posted…Special Peek Tour of Amazon