Great content is the new king!
Blogging or creating quality content takes a lot of effort and time to generate something meaningful. You can blog out of passion, out of frustration, out of a genuine need to solve a problem and even you can blog with the intention to make money. For small businesses, blogging is a great way to attract leads, prospective customers and to educate your customers. Great content is still valuable and readers are still looking for that killer content that can inform, educate and entertain. Be good at what you do and you will get attention.
Focus on your niche
People make a decision to blog or write about something and contribute to the content on the internet, but that remains a dream for a long time and they keep procrastinating and never get to do it. If you are yet to begin a blog, I hope by the time you complete reading this you will make the conscious effort to start your own blog. If you already have a blog, you are not left out. Passion can take your farther than your skill.
Share great content always
Content is ultimately where your ongoing focus needs to be, with all of the other elements essentially being there in place to support and market what you write about. This is of course the key part which needs to have your ongoing focus. When you get the content right, your target audience will pay attention.
What problem are you solving
You can proudly say you have good content if somebody’s problem is being solved or when a prospective customer is being educated and informed. The niche you choose will determine the type of content you can serve. You can decide to focus on timeless content that will not seize to attract users and readers for a very long time. Content that focused on howtos, tools, tips, tricks can continue to attract traffic for a very long time.
Focus on magnetic headlines
Your good content must also be supported by magnetic headlines. You should take time to craft your post title. You may have very good content, but if your title as found on search engines, other blogs, or directories does not speak for itself, you will find it difficult to attract the kind of traffic you expect. Attractive headlines are also good for rss directories and web spiders. The title gets circulated through social networks, social media sites and social news sites.
Kiss (Keep it simple and short)
Keep it simple and catchy. Be careful of the kind of categories you select for your posts or articles. The common thing bloggers do is to show their categories to make it easy for readers to identify and fish out information with minimal effort. Your readers may immediately leave or stay based on the type of categories and headlines they see when they first visit your blog.
How to gather content
Professional bloggers publish an average of 5 posts a week. Now that is average. Those who have made it a full time publish more. And the important thing is that they are all CONSISTENT. One of the sins of professional blogging is INCONSISTENCCY.
Professional blogs like Problogger, Copyblogger, John Chow, Income Dairy and Shoemoney publish a lot of content. Some of them encourage guest posting. They publish post submitted by other bloggers and in return the guest bloggers receive traffic through link backs.If you cannot be that consistent, invite others to submit posts. But it’s difficult to receive posts from others if your blog is not credit worthy in a particular niche or you don’t drive a lot of traffic to your blog.
Get inspired
One thing you can do is to follow the big guns in your industry, stay connected to their feeds and be inspired. Educate yourself on new stuff in your niche. You could use netvibes to stay updated with news from your niche.
Google loves original great content. And it is also good for search engine optimization. Find the right writing format you are comfortable with which can be consistent over time. Examples of writing formats includes : headlines, list, images and short paragraphs. Stick with the type that will allow you to post constantly.
Great content is the new king!