Blog Post Marketing: 3 Important Ingredients of Successful Blogging

Blogging is still one of the most effective methods you can employ to grow your business online. However, given the growth rate at which blogging is being adopted, not everybody that does it gets the desired results. If you’re wondering why your blog posts are not gaining enough traction with your readers, it might mean it’s lacking some important ingredients.

In this article, I will go over some very important ingredients of a blog post. By having these ingredients at the back of your mind whenever you’re writing a blog post, you will see more success with your blogging efforts.

Here they are.

Ingredient #1. The Audience

Blogging without having your readers who are the audience your blog post should be targeted at is like speaking to yourself. Your readership is how you drive engagement from your content and get to motivate them to take action based on what your blog post is discussing.

What aspect of the audience should your blog post cater to?

Take for instance, asking yourself what your audience wants from the blog post? And how you can provide answers to those questions in the blog post you’re creating? The following are just some ways to incorporate your audience into your blog posts for better blogging success.

• Understand their needs/wants: blogging without knowing what the needs of the reader whom your blog post is targeted at is at the best an ineffective way to communicate to them. For instance, in this blog post I already identified that most people that would be reading this are interested in how to make their blog posts more successful. That is identifying their needs.
• Provide answers: your blog posts should answer the questions that your readers want answers to. This can be in form of tips, advice or stories. Yes, stories can also help your readers get answers to their needs. It’s from the answers that your blog post offers that your readers would identify solutions to those needs.
• Be Practical: your readers want practical tips that they can implement right away. They don’t need another blog post that is sharing tips they cannot use.

Ingredient #2. Keywords/SEO

Catering to Google is just as important as catering to your audience. But it’s not more important.

When writing your blog posts, identify what keywords you want to rank the post for in Google. Once you’ve identified what keywords you want your blog posts to rank for, then include these keywords within the content, the tags, the meta descriptions and in the title of your article.

Successful blogging will also rely on SEO to keep more readers coming to it, and how optimized the post is will determine whether search engines will keep sending you traffic or not.

When you’re optimizing your blog posts for search, try looking into the following ares:

• Long tail keywords: focusing on long tail keywords over more popular keywords will help you rank your blog posts faster.
• Links: when writing new blog posts, ensure you’re linking to your old blog posts in the new one to give the old one a feel of freshness. Also, it significantly helps your SEO if your older posts receive more links from freshly written blog posts.
• Images: images are very important in your blog posts. According to findings, Googles ranks articles that includes at least one image over articles without any image at all.

Ingredient #3. Marketing

Your blogging effort should not just end  with creating and publishing the blog post. Marketing your blog post should also be factored into it. If you’re writing a blog post that is going to be successful, you should be willing to invest enough time to make sure the blog post is seen.

Some of the areas you can use to market your blog post includes sharing it with others on social media. However, when you’re marketing your blog post, be wise to make sure you’re only sharing it with those that are going to be interested in reading your blog post. This means your blog posts should only be marketed to relevant audience.

What methods should be considered when you want to market your blog post? Try the following.

• Social media: I already mentioned that sharing your blog posts with your followers on social media sites is one of the ways to drive traffic to it. Using sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest to market your article will help you attract views to it.
• Guest posting: you can also use guest posts to market your actual blog posts. When you guest post on other blogs, including relevant links from your blog in the guest article will help your blog posts become more successful.
• Outreach: you can also use outreach methods to drive success to your blog posts. If your blog posts, for instance, mentions an authority in your field you can reach out to them and encourage them to share it with their followers. You could even be lucky to get someone to link back to it.

Conclusion

Blogging effectively can help your business gain more grounds. By focusing on successful blogging habits, you can drive more results from your blog posts.

Let me know in the comments if you have any blog post marketing tips you would love to share with me.

Image Credit: Sean McEntee (Flickr.com CC)