With over 300 million blogs on the Internet today, it’s important to focus on differentiating yours from the rest. You need a well-thought-out plan in order to build your audience and optimize your site to become its most successful.
Planning for the Future
If you don’t know why you are blogging or the niche you are going to focus your efforts on, what’s the point? Not only will you be confused about what content to cover, your audience won’t know what to expect when they get to your site.
That’s why having a plan before your blog launches is important. Start by researching an area of focus for your blog, creating an editorial content calendar and setting up your domain name, hosting and WordPress accounts. Eventually you can go live with your content and review your monetization options.
Most bloggers fail within their first few months because they didn’t plan ahead and start their blog like they started their business. It’s not just about creating content and putting it out there. It’s about serving a purpose and making sure your content is seen — which leads us into our next section.
Building an Audience for Your Blog
We already know that the core infrastructure of your blog is going to be based on the content you can create for the site. What’s even more important is how you are going to build an audience and get your content out there. It’s very likely that many of the blogs that already exist are covering the topic you’re interested in. This means you not only need to write better content, but you also need to know how to market it as well.
In Neil Patel’s blog audience guide, he discusses how to do this using strategies like:
- Building a community around your blog
- Using organic and paid search to hit your target audience
- Effectively using social media and outreach to grow your audience
At the end of the day, it’s not just about creating content. It’s about effectively promoting it. The same holds true for many of the largest business, brands and products. The best products out there aren’t necessarily “the best.” They’re often just marketed better. Create great content, promote it and build a following.
Optimizing Your Site for Future Success
Content creation and promotion are the basic foundation for any successful blog. However, it’s site optimization that allows certain ones to stand out from the crowd and rank higher in the search results. For example, if two sites have the same content, number of backlinks and niche focus but one of them loads much faster, Google is going rank the faster loading site much higher.
There are many different ways to optimize a web site or blog. In this optimization guide from IMCreator.com, you will discover seven ways to painlessly improve your site for the better with methods such as running performance and speed tests, updating links throughout your site and making more white space available on the landing page. Spending some time on the overall structure and optimization in your site is one of the best ways to invest in the success of your site and it’s growth.
If you want to compete with all of the blogs in the world today, you need to treat your blog like a real business. This include pre-planning, taking action and catering to your target audience as much as possible. The good news is that all of the necessary resources and tools you need already exist. Start thinking about the type of blog you want to create and where you want it to go. Then take action.
Zac Johnson has 20 years of experience in the online marketing and business space. You can learn more about Zac at http://zacjohnson.com and through his latest online learning course and community at http://blogging.org.
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