1 Blog about topics you care about.
Post about subjects where your expertise intersects with readership interests. It never ceases to amaze us how much more successful heartfelt blog content is. AIMCLEARBlog has had some posts which were carefully calculated to drive traffic, optimized, and did just that-drove some traffic. Other posts were late night rants about the SEM industry that touched a nerve, provoked reactions from other blogs (and social communities), and drove tens of thousands of visitors over the course of a few days resulting in links and sales.
Readers can tell when a subject truly matters to a blogger. Readers react to honest passion when it speaks to their personal mission. The crux of all marketing is aligning the true value of products with actual marketplace interests. Your blog is a product too. Buzz, inbound links, traffic, and ultimately meeting your KPIs are directly associated with readers perceiving expertise and passion in topical areas they care about.
2 No Hard Sell Tactics
The Internet is replete with mediocre or outright fake blog content and readers are skeptical. If your objective is to move units by blogging, than consider tactics that sell indirectly. What does this mean? Blog around hard core sales pitches by offering tips that demystify your product, engage potential customers in dialog by surveys or Q&A, highlight compelling case studies, show the human side, or aggregate reviews from customers. Respectfully offer pathways to conversion in the blog, like links to purchase your products or request information, but don’t jam your sales pitch down your readers’ throats.
3 Do Not Spam or Indulge in Gratuitous Keyword Stuffing.
New readers find your posts through organic search, links from other sites, or word of mouth. Email and RSS subscribers skim your content each day and click when a post which matters to their experience comes across their desktop. Try not to ever disappoint readers with posts that include contrived junk.
Intentionally blogging to certain buzz pockets works. It’s true that basing content on keyword research is absolutely the way to go. However our philosophy is to be informed but not controlled by research. Once we establish what readers are interested in, the keywords they use, and have specified demographic targets for a post then we put the research aside and write from our experience and heart.
Resources:
Blogging Tips – Hundreds of Resources for Finding Content for Your Blog
