Last week I talked about the four phases of Warm up your readers and turn them into enthusiastic fans. Well, today I’m going to show you how to break through this first phase: the word about your blog.
As a teenager, you may have thought about a boy or a girl and thought: You don’t even know that I exist. Well, creating a new blog can feel just as bad and no one seems to be reading it. In fact, it can be even worse since Google Analytics confirms your suspicions without any sign of sympathy.
The problem is that with more than a billion registered websites on the World Wide Web, the likelihood that someone will come across your new blog is pretty slim. Even if you know about your blog, the number of visitors can be relatively small. In a good month, the Digital Photography School has four or five million visitors. However, when you think about how many digital camera owners there are in the world, this is actually a relatively small percentage.
How do we get all these people to surf the Internet to view your blog? Well, here are four things you should try.
1. Write guest posts for other blogs
Why did companies spend a fortune on submitting their commercials at half-time in the Super Bowl? Because it gives them access to tens of millions of viewers. You didn’t create this audience. They only used it to get their message across.
And you can do something similar with guest blogging.
I wrote my first guest post in 2002 before guest posts were a thing. Another blogger read one of my posts and sent me an email asking if he could interview me on his blog. The email contained half a dozen questions and he asked if I could answer every question in 400 to 500 words.
My first reaction was not very positive. I thought, What? Would you like me to write two and a half thousand words for your blog?
But then I started thinking about it differently. That is a lot of work. But this guy has been blogging for a year and has a decent audience. Okay, let’s do it and see how it works.
I put a lot of time and energy into this post and ended up writing 3,500 words to answer his questions.
The day after the interview was published on his website, my readership increased more than tenfold and I immediately recognized the importance of creating content for other websites and other people.
There are many more ways to do this now. Think about the top five ways your ideal reader wants to spend their time (or the top five people they want to spend time with). These could be your top 5:
- Blogs
- Forums
- Facebook groups / pages
- LinkedIn groups
- Podcasts
- Television programs
- Newspapers
- Magazines
- Books
- Authors
- Events
- Influencer (Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, etc.)
Now that you know where they are and what they like to talk about, create some guest content for them.
Of course, you can’t just post a post on someone else’s blog. You need to build a relationship with these bloggers and then find out if they accept guest content. However, in most blogs you can add a comment. Here you can add some guest content.
I once wrote 400 words to answer a question I saw on another blog. It was practically a guest post in itself. But I know that 400 words are read not only by the person who asked the question, but also by hundreds of others (at least potentially).
Leaving a comment in a forum or Facebook group is another way to create guest content.
So, as you work through the roughly 50 places your ideal readers are, you’re looking for ways to create guest content, whether you’re posting a blog post, being interviewed in a podcast, or just being helpful in the comment section .
2. Create shared content
If you’ve been blogging for a while, you know what shared content is all about. Just take a look at Google Analytics and see the content that is shared more often and draw new attention to your website.
The content that is often shared at the Digital Photography School includes:
- Mythical pots
- Debates (people seem to like to share them to justify their opinions)
- Research surveys (and the results)
- cheat sheet
- Posts with infographics
- Long form posts
- Beginners guide
- Posts written with a bit of humor.
BuzzSumo is a great resource for finding shared content. Enter a domain name (for your website or that of someone else), click the button and you will find out which content has been shared the most. It also shows you on which social networks the individual content was shared and how often it was shared.
When analyzing your own blog, look for topics and topics that are shared frequently. Also note the format (list, questions and answers, summary) and the medium (video, podcast, infographic).
But as nice as it is to share content, don’t go overboard and try to turn around everyone Content that you create in something that people share. Yes, it feels great to get this sudden surge in traffic. However, keep in mind that getting people to look at your content is only the first step. You still need to interest, connect and engage these people (which I will talk about in the next few weeks).
3. Reuse your best content
One lesson I have learned over the years is that if content has been shared frequently in one form, it is likely that it will be shared again in another form.
In 2002 I wrote a post for ProBlogger called Can You Really Make Money Blogging? [7 Things I Know About Making Money From Blogging]. This post was really good and appeared in my BuzzSumo report as one of my most shared content.
So I asked myself: Where else could I share this content?
First of all, I use it in a lecture that I have given several times at various conferences. I then took the slides from this lecture, tweaked them a little so they wouldn’t rely on my voice, and posted them on SlideShare. The slides (which were linked to the website) were viewed around 5,000 times
Later I made a video out of the same slides, added music and posted it on YouTube. (I may have posted it on Vimeo too). The videos (which were linked back to the website) were viewed approximately 6,000 times.
After optimizing the post to avoid duplicate content, I put it on medium where it received another 2,000 views. And finally, I used it in episode 32 of the ProBlogger podcast, which had over 20,000 downloads.
If you have content that works well in a form, consider how you can reuse it. In addition to the forms I use, you can also:
- Create an infographic or cheat sheet
- Pitch it to a newspaper or magazine
- Ask a podcaster to use it as the basis for an interview.
4. Search engine optimization
The last thing I want to talk about in this post is search engine optimization. And don’t just think of Google.
I once wrote a post in the Digital Photography School about a Leica camera that I owned. The post was a bleak failure and hardly got any views. So I decided to reuse it. With the same content, I stood in front of a video camera, recorded how I talked (and showed) about my little Leica camera, and posted it on YouTube.
The video has now been viewed more than 60,000 times.
YouTube is also a search engine. And when people search YouTube for this camera name, my video appears.
Another search engine you may not think of is the App Store. Jarrod Robinson from PE Geek (a blog for sports teachers) has created an app that summarizes content from his blog and podcast and also promotes his workshops and member pages.
The app receives thousands of downloads every month. And every time they post a new blog post, everyone who downloaded the app gets a push notification. The App Store has given it a whole new readership.
When you think of search engine optimization, think about where people are looking for information. These can be Google, YouTube, iTunes, the App Store, Google Play or a variety of other places.
Now remember, this is about the process of preventing your readers from being unaware of going from cold to your blog, your brand, and you, and dealing with dinner. We talked about that today. The eyeball is just the first step.
So there you have it: four ways to learn more about your blog. And next week I’m going to tell you how you can go the next level to warm up your readers and make them enthusiastic fans: interested in what you say.
In the meantime, let us know what you are doing to get your blog known. Do you write guest posts? Are you sharing or reusing your content? Let us know in the comments.
Credit: David Ragusa