5 Ways To Serve Your Blog Market
When someone decides to take the plunge and a create a blog invariably a market will need to be served and nourished. Think about the sites you visit for various topics, perhaps you visit Mashable for your social media fix and when you want to read up on and or see what’s new in tech – you pay a visit to Tech Crunch. Why do you think you go to these specific sites for these specific topics? Because they know and serve their market. Decide early on what your blog will be about (its niche or topic) and then aim to serve this up on a silver platter.
Don’t be shy about it, give it your all and give “them” what they want. Them being your readers. Let’s take a look below at the various ways you can do this whether on a daily, weekly or whatever schedule you decide to have for your blogs content.
1. Fresh (Relevant) Content - the number one reason anyone would visit your blog is because of your content. If your blog is about comics, odds are in your favor that those who will frequent your site will be comic book lovers and all levels of comic book lovers. From those newly interested in the topic to those who are die hard, ardent comic book loving fiends. Of course, you can specialize further and pick a sub niche within the bigger world of comics and then your readership will be even more fragmented. It doesn’t matter really who you go after, as long as you serve them and serve them well. As for fresh relevant content, this could take many different forms including lengthy tutorial type articles, mini reviews, news, how to pieces, videos, etc.
2. Community - another good reason someone would make a pit stop at your blog is because of its community. Maybe you receive a lot of comments on articles, or maybe you have an active and mouthy Twitter account. Promote this unique and coveted aspect of your blog, because popularity begets more popularity. If you have yet to create or develop a community on your blog now is a great time to do so, create a special page on your site letting your readers know they can follow you on the various social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and or Google Plus.
Make it clear that you welcome and reward comments by adding the Comment Luv plugin for WordPress powered blogs and or reward the most comments with a monthly giveaway. Get creative and see what your readers respond to the best.
3. By Listening - how will you know what to do for your market? By listening. Look at your comment area – what types of questions are you getting on a repeated basis, what content is most popular, most visited, most shared, etc. For deeper analysis you can visit your Google Analytics account (or other stat program) and see what is popular and what barely gets a visit. Take it from there and keep doing more of what is working and less of what is not working. You can also ask your readers directly via a survey or via a special “What Do You Guys Want To Read About” blog article. Just flat out ask them.
4. Adapting - having been in the blog business since early 2007, a lot has changed since then and one thing that has really changed is this thing called social media. It didn’t really exist in 2007 and has revolutionized blogging for better or worse. One thing that you will come across as you blog and become involved with online activities is that change is a constant. Everything changes and you will either learn and adapt to accommodate these changes or you will be left behind on the digital train.
5. Managing Future Growth - this piggybacks off of tip number 4 above where we mention that you’ll need to adapt to the myriad of changes that you will encounter in your blogging journey or it will be that much harder to survive and thrive. Look to see what you can add such as a forum, a social media page on your blog where your readers can engage with you and each other, a prominent comment area and so on. If after time your blog grows to the point where you can’t keep up with the comments, the guest posting, the traffic, etc then it might be time to bring in some help. Hire someone to help you once or twice a month to keep things on track and manage the growth. This is a good problem to have, but it needs to be properly managed like anything else to see it through to success.
We hope we have inspired you to at the very least think about your blog as an entity which needs to be treated as such. Serve your blog market and it will in turn serve you with traffic, readers, sales and possibly a nice passive income in the future. You never know.
By: Missy Diaz who writes for several clients including a car hire Italy service provider.