Don’t choke on your milk here, but today alone people published 2 million blog posts. That’s right. If you’re thinking of starting a blog, you have to compete with 2 million other people every day.
This is why you absolutely can’t just write a personal blog and hope someone will read it. Sure, someone might read it (likely your mother), but you’ll never drive traffic and you’re certainly not going to make any money.
What you need is a solid grasp of what people want and how to get them to care about what you know or have. Below you’ll learn exactly how to get them to care.
1. Who is Your Audience?
There are two common problems among new bloggers. They either turn their blog into a journal or they write “for the whole world.”
The journalers think people want to “share in their adventures.” This particular blog format only works for people actually having interesting adventures. If you’re a company selling traffic cones, there is no adventure in making traffic cones.
Your audience doesn’t care.
The “for the whole world” bloggers just aren’t specific enough. They generalize and write fluff nobody will read anyway. Then they wonder why nobody is reading their fluff.
To write for an audience, you must have useful information and specific information. It must be relevant to your audience and address their problems.
2. Promote Nothing
If you’re hoping to drive people away, then by all means, write one long product description and ask your audience to buy said product at the end. Then write another version next week. Do that over and over again without ceasing.
You’ll guarantee a low spot on any Google ranking.
Unless you’ve written a product review article or a gift guide, your readers aren’t there for advertisements. They’re there looking for answers to life’s problems.
Unless buying a construction safety harness is going to solve their problems, you’d better not write a post about how great and useful that safety harness you sell could be.
3. Learn How Google Sees Your Blog
Google is getting scary good at making machines able to “read” your blog like a human would. And some extremely smart people have figured out how to stay ahead of the Google bot.
This is called Search Engine Optimization. While we don’t have time to go into detail here, you should know a few things before we go on.
Keywords Are Still Relevant
While you don’t necessarily need to use a specific keyword strategy if your social media game is strong, keyword SEO could lubricate the wheels. If you rank for a specific high traffic keyword, not only will your traffic soar, but your audience will grow.
Do your research. There are plenty of basic tools out there to help you find easy-to-rank-for long-tail keywords.
It’s Easier Than You Think
Essentially, writing a blog post everyone will read is simple. Give your audience what they want. Write it well (use the Hemmingway editor if you have to). Optimize for search. And publish!
After you’ve done this, and if your social media game is on fleek, you’ll see people flock to your content.