I was re-watching the movie Julie & Julia the other day and it made me think about how blogging has evolved over the past 10 years and the impact that social media has had on it.
If you haven’t seen the movie, it’s about a woman named Julie Powell who was an early adapter to blogging, chronicling a yearlong project in which she attempts to cook all of Julia Child’s recipes in “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” The blog gained a major following, which resulted in a book deal and eventually a movie starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams.
A decade ago online socializing took place around blogs. But as social media channels like Facebook and Twitter grew, blogging has shown some decline particularly among younger people according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project. But blogging is still growing among those over the age of 34. For those in business it offers many advantages, some that you won’t get through the major social media sites.
Blogging offers advantages like:
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• Building a brand and image as an expert
• Improved search engine rankings
• Increased traffic to website
• Ability to share more in-depth information, beyond 140 characters
• Presents an opportunity to interact with clients or potential clients
• Helps educate clients, potential clients and key stake holders about your business and industry
• Creates a way to standout from your competition
• May help in finding new business opportunities
• Helps build your network within your industry
But how do you grow readership? Many people start blogs only to realize that they don’t have an audience. It’s important to become part of the blogging culture to build readership. Create a blog roll and link to blogs that you enjoy or the audience you are trying to gain will enjoy. Take the time to read other blogs and comment on them. Offer to do a guest posts for blogs that you think the audience might have an interest in your blog as well. You could even invite other bloggers to write a guest post for your blog.
Be sure to include keywords in your post by going through your content and selecting the main topics. Use a program like Google Adwords keyword selection tool to see popular search terms and try to find a way to include that in your content.
Share the blogs through social media and bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, Digg and Reddit. Syndicate your content through an RSS feed to automatically share it with many different places.
Find ways to share your blog posts with customers by including your blog address or even your latest blog headline with your email signature. If your company has an e-newsletter, include some of your blog content in the newsletter or some kind of teaser to get people to click over to it. If there’s a blog post that you think certain customers might benefit from, send them an e-mail and let them know about it.
Even after a decade, blogs are still very relevant today. What are some of your top tips for blogging?
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My biggest tip would be to blog regularly to keep the interest of your audience, but not so often that it starts to feel like spam.
The second would be to keep your audience in mind when writing your content. If they start to see content that is irrelevant to them, they just might un-subscribe. However, if your content is good and also relevant, they are more likely to pass it on, which builds readership.
Shorter the better. Pack the blog with interesting tidbits but don’t drag on. Converting people from 140 characters to 1942 characters, which is how long this post is, can be difficult. That is why a list of top 5 or 10 things is so helpful. They can scan the headers.
I disagree, Brad. To get any meaningful content that will showcase your expertise or help your SEO you need to be writing articles with some substance. I recommend the majority of articles are 350 – 500 words with occasional longer and shorter posts.
Marilyn – spot on about audience – write about things which will interest readers, not necessarily what you want to tell them.