Content May Be King, But He’s Got A Family
Posted by C.Call on March 29, 2009
If a blog is written on the internet with no one around to view it, does it still make a noise?
No. Unlike the tree conundrum, this one we know for sure.
We hear it on every blog-improvement site: content is king. If you provide useful information, the masses of internet junkies will flock to you in droves. That is only half the truth.
Posting a blog goes beyond what you can write.
If you want to drive people to your website you need to have four key elements besides content. Here they are:
Links to other sites: You may be the next Shakespeare, but even good old William was not able to fulfill all of his readers desires. Blogging is about community. Post a list of other sites that you find helpful to creating your blog and the odds are that other people will find it useful also. Worried about people leaving your site and only viewing the sites you link to? Naw, don’t be worried. You gave them the information that they were looking for, whether it was on one of your pages or not. The next time they need inspiration, motivation, or an answer to a question they will come right back to the blog that gave them the answers the first time: your blog.
RSS Subscriptions: This is my favorite. Everymorning I pour a cup of coffee, sit down at my laptop, and check out the ten blogs that I have subscribed to. I may only glance at the headlines or I might read the whole article – either way those blogs get attention. Is your blog worthy of getting a daily look by people surfing the web? Do you even give them the option?
Attractive Headlines: To get traffic, you need to grab people’s attention. And when that is not enough you have to physically grab people’s attention! What do I mean by “physically?” You need to make it personal to them. If you’re reading this, I achieved by goal in a post title that drew your interest. But if you want to really draw in readers, here is a headline worth analyzing. Bring it into the physical realm. If they don’t read your post something is going to happen in their life. Either they be better off because of reading it, or worse off because they didn’t read it. But don’t let the headline be as bland as a college student trying to prepare the thanksgiving day dinner.
Freshness: Take a deep breath, and exhale. Alright, now that we are finished with that, lets talk about what you are going to bring to the table that no one else has brought. It’s a tough question as there are over seven billion people in the world and over 300,000 domain names being registered everday. How do you bring uniqueness to a crowd like that?! Easy. Be yourself. Just present your subject in a way that you feel it, NOT in the way you learned it. The difference: if you present it as you learned it you will be giving readers the same thing they can get from another guy. But if you present the subject in a mannor relevant to you, it will be unique and fresh. Don’t write a blog that copies another blog, or a have a site that does the same thing as another site. Instead, look to what that topic means to you and where you want to go with it. That’s how you’ll drive people to your site and keep them coming back for more.
What do you think? Anyother close relatives in the content family that I missed? Feel free to leave a comment and tell others about it!
