Your blog should operate much like a resort. You want a place to which people love to come; you want loyal visitors; and you want those loyal customers to share what you offer and to recommend others to you.
So how do you get the traffic that a top resort gets? Take these 5 steps, and if you cannot take any step on your own, hire someone who can!
#1 Be Professional
This means your blog looks professional. Don’t fill the posts with advertising, and all kinds of “glitz.” Images and relevant videos are fine, but you don’t want to distract or “turn off” readers – they’ll back out quickly. Remember, too, that your blog will be read on desktops, laptops, tablets, and smart phones. Keep that in mind and stop crowding too much stuff on a post page. Use space on the side to promote other recent posts in which visitors may have an interest.
#2 SEO Efforts
Use a good platform like WordPress, because it will do a lot of this SEO stuff for you – WordPress will “grade” each post and make suggestions to improve SEO rankings. You want search engines to easily crawl through and evaluate your content. And consider using search engine plug-ins (e.g. Infinite SEO or All-in One SEO Pack) which will help you optimize your titles and meta descriptions.
#3 Pick Your Topics Carefully
- Let’s say you are a flooring retailer. You want to attract do-it-yourselfers with good posts on home repair maintenance, and remodeling. If you make your topics to simple, you will turn off more skilled/experienced “DIY-ers;” if you make it to complex, you will turn off the beginners. Find the medium or post two at the same time – one for the beginner and one for the veteran.
- Find popular or trendy topics. You can use Google Trends if you are unsure.
- Research and use keywords and phrases that are the most popular in your business niche.
#4 Quality, Quality, Quality
Blogs that give new information, provide an education, or solve a problem are the best and therefore the most read. They are also the blogs that readers share on social media and recommend to others! Use great images to break up the text; have a catchy title; use good grammar; watch your vocabulary – if your “crowd” is highly intellectual or highly skilled, then your vocabulary should match that of those readers; however, in all other instances, use vocabulary and sentence structure that a proficient 8th grader would use. WordPress will actually evaluate this for you!
Another aspect of quality is consistency. Get a schedule of posting that you can live with but at least once a week to start. You can gradually increase the number, but if your readers come to expect two a week, you had better be certain that they get that! If you can’t be consistent, hire someone to do it!
#5 Methods for Interaction
You need to develop relationships with your readers. Have a comment section, check it daily, and respond to reader comments. Invite others (on social media) to read and comment on your posts; make it really easy for your readers to share your posts with visible buttons for Facebook, Twitter, etc.; Have a way for readers to subscribe to your blogs, so they get them via RSS feed.
Your blog needs to be a place people love to visit; they should feel welcome; they should feel better or smarter from reading your posts; and they should have a relationship with you!
