A business blog is like a gym membership – you have everything you need at your fingertips, but without hard work and self-discipline, you can’t be successful. Well, consider this guide your personal trainer.
This guide provides tips on how to increase blog visits, turn random visitors into dedicated subscribers, and promote your blog. Some strategies for growing your blog readership, blog subscribers, and paying customers are provided below.
Publishing blog posts creates opportunities for people to find and learn about your business. If you create content that answers your target customer’s questions, you will develop a trusting relationship that makes them more likely to invest in you as a business partner or solution provider.
But, before you can start making money from your blog, you need to put in work to grow your blog readership. This is the framework we suggest for getting more readers on your blog.
You should think of your reader personas as living, breathing entities. This will help you create content that appeals to them. (Ha.)
Your reader personas may change what they read, where they work, how they educate themselves, and more over time. Market research should be conducted on a regular basis to ensure that your reader personas are kept up-to-date.
How to Measure the Value of Your Content
1. Run an NPS survey
A Net Promoter Score is a number that is used to measure the loyalty between a brand and a consumer. You can also use your blog to measure how much value it is giving to readers.
You calculate NPS by asking a simple question:
What is your opinion of our blog? Would you recommend it to a friend or colleague? (Using a 0–10 scale to answer.)
Respondents to the question are then grouped as follows:
- Promoters (score 9–10) are loyal enthusiasts who will keep buying and refer others, fueling growth
- Passives (score 7–8) are satisfied but unenthusiastic customers who are vulnerable to competitive offerings.
- Detractors (score 0–6) are unhappy customers who can damage your brand and impede growth through negative word-of-mouth.
The percentage of Promoters minus the percentage of Detractors equals the Net Promoter Score. This score can be as low as -100 if every customer is a Detractor, or as high as 100 if every customer is a Promoter.
You can learn how much your readers appreciate your content and how likely they are to share it with others by conducting an NPS survey on your blog.
2. Pay attention to the comments
There has been a lot of debate about the state of blog comments. With the rise of social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, readers have a multitude of ways to engage with your content:
- They can share a link to your post on Twitter, Facebook (or any network of their choice)
- They can interact with a post where you’ve shared a link back to the blog (favoriting a tweet, sending a reply, liking on Facebook)
- They can retweet your tweet sharing the post or share your Facebook post
- And much, much more…
There is a debate about whether blog comments are becoming less relevant or more relevant.
The fact that people are taking the time to respond directly to your post, rather than sharing or commenting on it elsewhere, could be perceived as the highest form of engagement.
3. Monitor mentions and shares
My posts on the Buffer blog tend to get a few mentions on Twitter or LinkedIn when people share them. I have started to develop a sense of how much value each post generates based on how often it is shared and how many people mention it.
I notice a spike in the number of shares and mentions a post gets when it goes above and beyond reader expectations in terms of value.
You can easily track how often your content is shared. Sharing plugins like SumoMe and Social Warfare can help improve your post’s reach by providing share counts. Additionally, tools like PostReach and Buzzsumo can help you track how often your posts are being shared on Twitter. I also like checking my mentions on Twitter after a new post goes live so that I can see how it is doing and what people are saying.
A quick tip: Promise value in your headline
The headlines of a piece of content are very important to its success. We focus on creating headlines that will make the content more likely to be seen before we publish a post. If the content behind a headline is weak, it is unlikely that anyone will see it.
We create 20-30 headlines for each post and choose the one that feels best. Or, we’ll have a quick chat and come up with a headline that stands out. Here are some extracts from a recent conversation between Leo and I:
The original headline we had was:
53 Graphic Design Terms and Definitions for Non-Designers
And the title we decided on when we hit publish is:
Your Skill As a marketer, it’s becoming increasingly important to have at least a basic understanding of design principles. Here are 53 design terms and tips to help you level up your skill.
This post has been shared a lot and has 18 comments. The headline of this text is “53 Design Terms and Tips to Level-Up.” By focusing on this headline, we are able to promise value to our readers. These tips and tricks will help them to improve their design skills, and ultimately produce better results. And also spark a discussion about the role of a marketer: Why Every Marketer in 2016 Needs to Be a (Part-Time) Designer. If I hadn’t spent time adjusting this headline, I don’t think the post would have been as successful.
What makes an idea worth writing about?
Every blog post starts as an idea, but what separates a good idea from a great one? How can you tell which ideas are worth pursuing and publishing?
Before choosing a post to write, I tend to ask myself three questions:
- Is this actionable?
- Who will amplify this?
- What makes it unique?
And I’d love to go into detail on each of the three questions below:
1. Is it actionable?
On the Buffer blog, we publish articles that our readers can use to improve their workflows and skills. We want people to be able to read a post and immediately put into action what they have learned from it.
We focus on making content actionable because we believe that if someone learns something from one of our posts they’re likely to remember us and even share the post with their network as a New York Times study found that content that is practically useful gets shared more than any other content:
2. Who will amplify it?
When creating content, always think about your target audience. Write content that appeals to them directly. Before I write a blog post, I ask myself who will share it. If I can’t think of anyone, I don’t write the post. This question usually gets me to focus on a particular aspect of marketing, or a specific job role.
3. What makes it unique?
There is a lot of content available now and if you want to be noticed, you need to create content that is different from everything else.
The uniqueness of a piece of content can vary from post to post. Sometimes it is the timing of a post that makes it unique. For example, our post on Twitter Polls was published shortly after Polls were publicly announced, and it was one of the first guides on how to use the feature.
Other ways to make your content unique include:
- Sharing your unique perspective: One of the best ways to make a piece of content unique is to create something that only you can by adding in your own perspective and point of view. As Jory McKay explains on the Crew blog: “Everything has been said before, but it’s never been said by you.”
- Going deeper on a topic that anyone else: There might be a ton of posts out there about Facebook Ads, for example, but you can create a unique post on this subject by going more in-depth than anyone else has.
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