5 Habits of Successful Bloggers: How to Dominate Your Niche
When it comes to blogging the best advice I ever got was this… Don’t be a “bloggers”, be a publisher. You can read more about that here. This point of view has helped me avoid falling into the trap of trying to make every post perfect. I focus on publishing regularly and creating valuable content. This article shows what works for me when it comes to publishing regularly and getting results with whatever limited time I have available.
These are my top five tips (in order of importance) for becoming successful at blogging:
Habit #1 – Use an editorial calendar
A lot of bloggers struggle with what to write about. One tip that is always given is to write about what you know. While I agree, I think that it’s also important to do research and find out what your audience wants to read as well as post links to good stuff that you find.
A really cool tool for this is The Yahoo-Yoda system. It takes a few minutes or hours of your time depending on how detailed you want it to be, but once its complete adding new posts will only take a couple of minutes each. You can see a quick demo here:
Habit #2 – Craft killer headlines
Writing content isn’t always easy and sometimes you have to spend a little more time on your headline. A lot of bloggers have their first thought for what they want the post to be about and create the headline using that…it’s usually not very compelling. The best way I’ve found is to use an app called Co-Schedule Headline Analyzer. It’s free shows you how likely people are to share it on social media, highlighting common words that people use when posting similar headlines.
Habit #3 – Post long form content
There is no doubt that shorter posts get more traffic than longer ones, but there is something really interesting going on with long form content lately that you should know about. My buddy Jon Morrow recently wrote a huge post (like 5,000 words huge) where he analyzed the top 100 most shared posts on Reddit. What he found was fascinating. Among these top 100 most shared posts there were no screeds against the evils of Reddit…all of them had something good to say about it.
Jon knows his stuff when it comes to content marketing so I listened when he said that over at his website Boost Blog Traffic he gets more traffic on his longer posts.
You can see some stats here:
A look at my Google Analytics account showed me that low quality short posts don’t always receive more hits than long ones either…in fact in some cases they didn’t even get 10% of the attention!
This is interesting because a lot of bloggers feel that more people will click a shorter post. The reality is, the further down the page your post goes, the less likely people are to read it. Also if you have a niche topic with a small audience (like SEO) then there might not be as many interested people as you think which means lower traffic and ad revenue for you.
Habit #4 – Write epic content
There is no reason why every blog post that you publish should not be 10x better than anything else on your site…in fact they should be 100x better! It doesn’t matter how good something is if no one wants to give up their time and attention to read it. Your posts need to stand out from the crowd.
I’m not saying that you should write overly fluffy content though. Quite the opposite actually, I find that by writing in an informal style people get a better feel for me and my website which helps them relate to me more easily. If your blog is full of long wind posts then you need to get a little better at editing yourself because it can be a huge turnoff to visitors.
Habit #5 – Use social media effectively
If your social media strategy sucks then there isn’t any point in doing what you do well on your blog if nobody sees it. You have to take every opportunity available to promote each post across all platforms as much as possible. It often the case that only 5-10% of your visitors will actually find you through Facebook or Twitter, but if you don’t advertise your posts on those sites then that is 95% of the traffic gone.
Conclusion:
I’m a big believer in quality over quantity when it comes to blogging. Instead of publishing one great post per week I try and double that by publishing two articles on Monday and Friday for example. When you ask someone else to publish your work on their website then you don’t get the same level of traffic, so if you do this right then you should be able to double your daily traffic very quickly.