Thanks to Mom Masterminds, my rocking sponsor, I’m here at Blissdom ‘09 and ready to share some tips from the first session of today.
This session was moderated by Tanis Miller with panelists Tsh Oxenreider, Amy Clark and Meredith Pelham
The topic?
“Content/Readership – Building your Readership and Providing Amazing Content”
These moms had awesome advice for women just starting out and those who want to get more readers. Some of my favorite nuggets:
- - Be sure to buy your domain name! Don’t host your blog on a .blogspot or .wordpress subdomain. Not only does hosting your blog on your own domain present a more professional image but also someone else may snatch up your name before you do.
- - Define success for yourself. Is success getting tons of comments? Mega traffic stats? Ad revenue? Ok, so you want everyone in the world on your blog but what for? What does success look like to you? Keep your goals clear in mind.
- - Who do you want to attract? Keep your target audience firmly in mind and write for them.
- - What kind of blogger are you? Some of the panelists had more informative/magazine type of blogs, but one was firmly a mom blogger who wrote (quite candidly!) about her life. She is more of a “memoir” blogger or a “diarist”. Different people are comfortable with different levels of transparency.
- - Be succinct. Respect your readers time – this was a common refrain. While I personally value “epic” posts from time to time because of their value as traffic bait with search engines, its also a great idea to post quick bites of info that your readers can quickly digest and get back to their lives.
- Another tip that would fall under this heading is to write a “Q&A” post in which the content is in the comments. Ask your readers a question and allow them to leave comments and be the experts for a change! This is great for establishing goodwill with your readers. (As an example, Alice Seba does this each Tuesday on her blog with Tough Question Tuesday.)
- - Edit! Some of the bloggers mentioned that they spend more time editing than writing. Distill your message down as much as you can and really cull out the fluff. Again – some of this depends on your style of blog, but generally most blog readers are busy and want the meat of the info to be quickly and easily digested.
- - Write evergreen content. If your reader is finding you through a search engine, some of your content may not make sense to them if everything is time sensitive. Timeless content is a great traffic generation tool.
- - Keep SEO in mind. This is where we Mom Masterminds members have a huge advantage since we all know SEO! Keep search engines in mind when you write for your blog. For example, name the graphics that you add to your blog keyword friendly names (another point not mentioned but certainly worthy is to add ALT tags to your images) since Google indexes these.
- - Use your time wisely. Some of the bloggers on the panel said they only blog certain days of the week, or only on weekends. They write lots of posts and schedule them to publish on their blogs so they can maximize the time they spend with their families. This is a great tip for us busy moms!
- - Republish! Republish some of your great content. For instance, create posts that list and link to all the posts you’ve done on a particular topic.
- - Get help creating content. Whether it’s inviting guest bloggers or hiring them, get some help with your blog. Figure out what and whom you want and create a page on your blog describing how guest bloggers or columnists can submit their work to you.
- - Keep your reader in mind when you write. Be helpful to your reader.
- - Blog for you, not for them. Stop worry about what they think and blog for the pleasure of it.
Ok, ok, I know those last two contradicted each other!
There really are no rules. It goes back to figuring out what kind of blogger you are. We’re all making this up as we go along!
Also, I’ll end on this point. One of the panelists said that she worked very hard getting readers and content to her blog for the first 18 months or so. I think this is quite common. With blogging or any other internet business, the hard work is on the front end.
So hang in there, and get busy writing and creating great content!
