Every website on the Internet contains some type of content which is aimed at attracting visitors. The motivations of website owners for enticing visitors to their site can range from sharing opinions, passions or life experiences, to converting visitors into customers or subscribers.
Whatever your motives are for building your blog, there are certain questions you should ask yourself regarding your content in order to determine whether you’re maximizing the potential of your blog’s success.
Listed below are what I believe to be the 3 most important questions you should be asking yourself regarding the content of your blog:
1. Does your content provide value, or an informative or educational benefit?
If your blog is not offering people something interesting, informative or of value which will save them time, or money or perhaps a solution to a problem, then the chances are that you will struggle to gain readership. So if you already have a blog which is getting hardly any visitors then maybe you should do a quick analysis or inventory of your content to see how you can make it more useful. There are many things you can do to provide such value to your readership.For example:
o You can save your readers the time of extensive research by aggregating and filtering information from the web regarding a particular topic or product review. For example, you could take the time to summarize or critique something using your own fresh perspective or you could collate a list of the best websites offering a particular service.
o You could create an instructional video showing people how to do something. For example you may have become an expert at installing or customizing a complicated piece of software and you could use Camtasia or other screen recording package to record the instructions.
o You could create a digital product. For example you could write an ebook or piece of software which solves a problem or enables somebody to do their job more easily.
o You could schedule a webinar where you invite an expert to speak about a particular topic of interest to your readers.
2. Does your content build trust?
As you probably know, Google is always tweaking their search engine algorithms in order to improve the relevancy of the search results for their users, eg, the Panda update was the latest algorithm update.Google’s ultimate aim is to provide trustworthy search results which will maximize a person’s chances of finding the answer they were seeking in the minimum amount of time possible. Google does this by promoting websites further up the search rankings which are most relevant for a particular search phrase and demoting those which are least relevant.So you could arguably say that Google’s search engine is a sort of trust meter of websites. The higher up your site ranks in the search results, the more trust Google has in your site to deliver the relevant information for a particular keyword.
Since Google isn’t perfect there are times when people are able to trick its algorithms into promoting a crappy site, but rest assured that the Google engineers are always improving their product and it is increasingly becoming harder to game the system so-to-speak.So how do you gain trust from your visitors AND Google?
When your blog starts to attract followers you have essentially created an audience which more than likely value your work in some way or they at least find your site interesting enough to keep coming back regularly. These followers can be a precious form of indirect marketing for your blog.If you’ve read any of Seth Godin’s books, you might be familiar with the term “ideavirus”. In short an “ideavirus” is a powerful mechanism of marketing where an idea or piece of information is spread by the users themselves organically and much faster than traditional marketing methods. That is, somebody who likes your product or blog post feels compelled to tell their like-minded friends about it and just like an influenza virus the information spreads dramatically.This usually has the positive effect of attracting a larger like-minded or targeted audience to your site simply through the association between your readers and their friends.A couple of easy things you can do to increase the likelihood of your blogpost or article spreading like an “ideavirus” are:
Whatever your motives are for building your blog, there are certain questions you should ask yourself regarding your content in order to determine whether you’re maximizing the potential of your blog’s success.
Listed below are what I believe to be the 3 most important questions you should be asking yourself regarding the content of your blog:
1. Does your content provide value, or an informative or educational benefit?
If your blog is not offering people something interesting, informative or of value which will save them time, or money or perhaps a solution to a problem, then the chances are that you will struggle to gain readership. So if you already have a blog which is getting hardly any visitors then maybe you should do a quick analysis or inventory of your content to see how you can make it more useful. There are many things you can do to provide such value to your readership.For example:
o You can save your readers the time of extensive research by aggregating and filtering information from the web regarding a particular topic or product review. For example, you could take the time to summarize or critique something using your own fresh perspective or you could collate a list of the best websites offering a particular service.
o You could create an instructional video showing people how to do something. For example you may have become an expert at installing or customizing a complicated piece of software and you could use Camtasia or other screen recording package to record the instructions.
o You could create a digital product. For example you could write an ebook or piece of software which solves a problem or enables somebody to do their job more easily.
o You could schedule a webinar where you invite an expert to speak about a particular topic of interest to your readers.
2. Does your content build trust?
As you probably know, Google is always tweaking their search engine algorithms in order to improve the relevancy of the search results for their users, eg, the Panda update was the latest algorithm update.Google’s ultimate aim is to provide trustworthy search results which will maximize a person’s chances of finding the answer they were seeking in the minimum amount of time possible. Google does this by promoting websites further up the search rankings which are most relevant for a particular search phrase and demoting those which are least relevant.So you could arguably say that Google’s search engine is a sort of trust meter of websites. The higher up your site ranks in the search results, the more trust Google has in your site to deliver the relevant information for a particular keyword.
Since Google isn’t perfect there are times when people are able to trick its algorithms into promoting a crappy site, but rest assured that the Google engineers are always improving their product and it is increasingly becoming harder to game the system so-to-speak.So how do you gain trust from your visitors AND Google?
- You should start by producing content which is unique and of value to readers (see bullet 1). When people see that your blog is consistently producing articles or products which are of high quality and informative or useful, then you will eventually become an authority on a particular subject and people will trust you enough to keep coming back.
- To gain the trust of Google you must first unreservedly do the step mentioned above, ie, produce original quality content. Secondly you can try to maximize your chances of the Google search engine crawlers identifying your content as relevant for particular keywords by doing the appropriate onsite and offsite SEO.
When your blog starts to attract followers you have essentially created an audience which more than likely value your work in some way or they at least find your site interesting enough to keep coming back regularly. These followers can be a precious form of indirect marketing for your blog.If you’ve read any of Seth Godin’s books, you might be familiar with the term “ideavirus”. In short an “ideavirus” is a powerful mechanism of marketing where an idea or piece of information is spread by the users themselves organically and much faster than traditional marketing methods. That is, somebody who likes your product or blog post feels compelled to tell their like-minded friends about it and just like an influenza virus the information spreads dramatically.This usually has the positive effect of attracting a larger like-minded or targeted audience to your site simply through the association between your readers and their friends.A couple of easy things you can do to increase the likelihood of your blogpost or article spreading like an “ideavirus” are:
- give your readers the opportunity to subscribe to your posts or newsletter via email
- offer your readers the option to subscribe to an RSS feed.
- Write an ebook and give it away for free to your readers and encourage them to pass it on to their friends if they wish.
