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Everybody wants to be heard, but it can be challenging to get people to listen. For bloggers, this can be a nightmare if you are wanting to get your content out into the world and start building up an extensive portfolio of knowledge. The world of blogging has become oversaturated, with everyone and their dog seemingly creating content and publishing it in online. It is just the minority that is heard.
If you are a blogger, whether it be text or video, how are you able to ensure that your content rises to the top? How can you ensure that people will click on your links over the one thousand or so other blogs with exactly the same subject matter?
It can be difficult to find a niche that sets you apart from others. The phrase ‘one in a million’ doesn’t seem so unique when there are seven and a half billion of us in the world, and so it is only natural to find at least one person that shares similar interests and experiences to you.
ENGAGE
The key to any blogging success is to engage the reader early on. This is the first thing that writing students learn about when crafting their first novel or short story. If the initial interaction from outside doesn’t inspire interest, then it is unlikely that anything else will.
For this reason, it is vital to have an eye-catching website. In the past, launching a website was a tricky and sometimes expensive process, but in recent years it has become possible for anybody to have their own website.
Website builders allow users to forego employing web developers and programmers and instead give you all the power right there at the tips of your fingers. The process is simple, straightforward and will leave your readers’ feeling that you know what you’re doing. It’s a cliche that first impressions matter, but it’s a cliche for a reason.
KNOW YOURSELF AND YOUR AUDIENCE
Knowing both why you are writing and who you are writing for will give your blog posts more of a purpose. It can be all too convenient just to throw whatever you feel like it onto a webpage and click publish if it makes sense to you. But for your readers, particularly new readers, this can bring about confusion, along with feelings that perhaps this is not the right place to be looking.
To tackle these sorts of problems, settle on your niche early on. If this is is a bit of a struggle, consider what it is you are passionate about. While your passion may not be what you decide to blog about eventually, it can be a good start to figuring out how you want to present yourself online.
Like most new hobbies, these things take time. It will be a while before everything is fine-tuned the way you want it, so consider these early days practice; a learning curve of sorts. You might be enormously passionate about a new TV show, but if there isn’t enough to write about, then you will soon run into some problems.
Furthermore, these early posts will allow you to get to know your audience. This is especially true if you have a commenting feature on your website, where readers can voice their likes and dislikes, as well as adding suggestions for future blog posts. This will give an immediate idea of the type of audience you are attracting and allow you to cultivate your content to suit that.
SAY SOMETHING
Of course, that isn’t to say you should let your audience dictate your content. Hopefully, many of them will have similar interests to you, and so much of what is written and suggested will keep in line with the vision you have in mind.
One of the major mistakes of many bloggers is blogging for the sake of blogging. There are simply too many people writing the same sort of thing over and over and over again that in the end it just looks like one blog has stolen from another and so on along with a long chain of content.
If you want to stand out, you need to discuss topics and ideas that haven’t been covered extensively. This might be hard, but for a professional blogger, creating compelling content is what you do. Nobody wants to read what has already been written before, and rehashing the same old knowledge will do nothing but put readers off and drive them away.
BE SOCIABLE
It is not enough to simply have a blog. For new bloggers, you might wonder how exactly anyone else will find it. This is where the joys of social media come in. Back in the day, all there we had was MySpace, a very early Facebook and forums if you wanted to promote your web content.
But now, the world of social media has changed. There are so many different platforms for you to promote yourself that it would take up too much room to list them all. The obvious ones, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram are a great place to start as you more than likely already have a solid following of friends, family, and strangers that will be intrigued by any promotion you post.
From here, you can begin to build a user base. Friends will tell other friends, strangers will tell other strangers, and after a while, you will soon see more traffic, more likes, and more shares than you’ll know what to do with. Once this is established, it is up to you to keep hold of these readers.
COLLABORATE
Even in a world as competitive as blogging, it still pays to collaborate with other bloggers to further promote your brand. Working with like-minded people through giveaways, co-authoring posts, and guest appearances will unveil you to a brand new audience.
These collaborations can be with friends who also blog, as well as bloggers who you’ve been reading for some time and already admire. Sharing content can lead to a broader audience base and hopefully propel your blog towards more and more visitors as the chain of collaboration stretches.
By choosing to work alongside established bloggers, you will not only be getting more views but also be able to learn from those who already have experience in working towards more readers. This kind of advice can be invaluable if you want to spread your brand further than just a few friends on the internet and can give you the opportunity to make a name for yourself in the blogging world.
It can be a difficult start to your blogging career. All those previous worries about not having anything interesting to say will soon seem to become a reality once you find that there is little to no traffic on your blog. During this time, it is essential not to get discouraged and keep pushing on. But also, you need to take a look at what sort of content you are posting, as simple words on a webpage are not enough. There needs to be a level of engagement for the reader. Topics like ‘Winter Style Ideas’, or ‘Quick and Cutesy DIY Projects’ have been done to death.
Instead, go further out there. Find something that people aren’t talking about and just write. It may be complicated at first to find something unique in a world where a new blog post is seemingly made every five seconds, but once that first post is out you will find yourself flush with inspiration. Who knows, perhaps the very idea of looking for interesting content can inspire a blog post in the future.
