I love blogging. Writing a blog post is almost the first thing I do when I start working. Every time when I want to blog, I go earlier at the office, make a good cup of coffee and start writing in Google Docs. And I just let the words flow.
Sometimes blogging is easy and sometimes blogging is hard. Sometimes I don’t have any idea what to write about and sometimes I already have the entire post in my head. And this is why I use Evernote so often.
Every time I have a new idea, whether it’s about blogging, social media, Bannersnack or whatever else is part of my industry, I write it down there.
[Tweet “@evernote is my box of ideas.”]
But today’s blog post is an idea I stole from Rand Fishkin’s Whiteboard Friday about SEO in blogging. And yes, I admit I’m not a good SEO when it comes to blogging but i know my strengths in strategy, content marketing and creativity.
Rand has talked about nailing the optimization process for a blog posts and he started by telling his audience about the importance of determining the goals. So I want to get a little deeper into this topic and talk to you about the 8 goals you can have in mind when you are about to write a blog post.
Whether we talk about a personal blog or a company blog. It doesn’t matter.
Every good blog post should have a goal and every writer, content marketer, blogger should understand the role of it.
1. Attract new audience
When you are about to write a blog post you should always think about an audience first. Sometimes that audience already exists and it’s within your community and sometimes that audience is something you want to get. Well, when you want to attract new audience you should understand that audience’s behavior.
Before you start writing your blog post, do the research part where you take your time and analyze that audience.
- Who are they?
- What’s their daily activity?
- What blogs or magazines do they read?
- When is the most convenient part of the day for them to read blog posts?
Analyzing your audience before you want to attract a new one is a good strategy that every blogger should practice.
2. Serve existing community
Maybe you have a community and you want to give new information every week about a topic that they might be interested in. For example, let’s look at Rand’s Whiteboard Friday.
Go on his website and click on the category button. Then open 3 or 4 tabs and go to the comment section. Now look at the audience. Do you know what you will see there? An existing community. And Rand is serving that community every Friday with his Whiteboard video.
So, if you already have an existing community (it doesn’t matter if it’s a big one or a small one) I recommend you to serve them. If you are faithful about the small things then you will be about the big things as well.
3. Earn influencers amplification
There is a lot of rumors about influencer marketing. Every marketer is talking about influencer marketing and they want to reach to highest one.
But what about the medium or small ones? Can we say “little influencer”? Well yes my friend, we can. Why? Because everyone who can influence even a single person through their actions, is an influencer, right?
Well, how do you write an article that can earn influencers amplification. For example, you can do a round-up with them.
On Bannersnack’s blog I’ve done a few roundups with marketers and designers. And everytime I published the article, many of these influencers shared on their social network and I gained a lot of awareness and also a lot of traffic from those blog posts.
- How can design help online advertising engage with its audience?
- How Do Specialists Define the Modern Marketer?
- Designers opinion about working for free
Before you reach out to these influencers, You should first analyze their behavior.
What’s the social network where this influencer takes his time? Does he reply on twitter? Does he share where he was interviewed? What is his expertise? Does this expertise fit your industry? Take a good look at these and see how you can reach out to them, how you can help them and what they can do for you.
4. Answer a question
Answering questions with a blog post can be a great SEO strategy and can also help the reader understand or find an answer to his problem.
People are asking question because they have a problem and they need an answer, a solution. So why not create a blog post, even an evergreen article where you can write down the answer and try to rank on first page on Google.
But what kind of question should you answer? Where do you find these questions?
I recommend you go to Quora and look at your industry’s category.
Take the top 10 or 20 questions and read all the answers. After this, look at these answers and see what’s the best value you can come up with in a blog post. Maybe you can design an infographic and make the answer easier to understand. Maybe you answer with a personal example for this question.
5. Contribute to an existing conversation
This is kind of the same with the answering a question but here you go even deeper with your blog post.
Let’s say you are a social media marketer and you work for a social media agency. And you read every day about the importance of Snapchat filters and how brands should use these features from Snapchat and why it is important for them. But you never see an article where somebody teaches the community how to design a Snapchat filter and how to set up an account for their brand.
Now here is the point where you can go deeper with the conversation and write a blog post not only about the importance of Snapchat but also about how to create these filters, how to set it up, how to measure the results and other points a brand should know about Snapchat filters.
Just like Dane Gonzalez did What You Should Know Before Submitting Your Geofilter
And after you wrote this article and publish it, you can go to all of these blogs where you read about Snapchat and get into the conversation and tell them about your new blog post.
6. Promote a product/service
I believe that bloggers should promote only the product or services they used. For example, if you are a beauty blogger I recommend you to only promote products you used and tell your community your personal experience with this product.
By sharing a personal experience with a product/service with your community you give the blog post not only a more personal touch but people are also more interested in personal testimonials than something random about a product/service.
This is why every time I had the opportunity to write about a product or service I wanted to try it myself and then write my personal opinion.
7. Convince/Win the audience to your perspective
When I started this blog I wanted to help my readers understand 2 important things: how they can use evangelism marketing in their business and what’s the importance of visual marketing. After a few months I started receiving emails where people would ask me more about these 2 topics.
It’s my personal perspective about evangelism marketing and visual marketing. It’s my own expertise and I can write about these 2 topics easily. So I try to keep it close to my strategy. I can’t write from a perspective that I don’t fully understand or try. Let’s say, I can’t write about SEO or e-mail marketing because i’ve never done it at a professional level.
This is why I always recommend to every blogger who wants to write their personal opinion and want to convince an audience about it, to try to be as close as possible to the topic, not only in theory but also in practice.
8. Share important news
Look at Mashable. Pete Cashmore started this online magazine as a simple personal blog and today it’s one of the biggest online magazine in the industry. Why? Because he gave the community the important news from the industry and he leverages this growth to create a project bigger.
The thing is that everybody can be a journalist today. You only need a good smartphone, internet and voila. You can also write on your personal blog about the news you want to share with your audience.
This one time I was at a student conference and I talked to them about the importance of blogging. I told them that today everybody can start a blog, everybody can write about anything and everybody can start something special. But the difference between the ones that make it and the ones that don’t can only be seen in time and through perseverance.
Conclusion
So, here we are with all of these 8 blogging post goals that you can determine before you start your blog post.
Next time we’re going to talk about the metrics that will help us analyze and measure these goals.
Let me know in the comment section which one of these goals you already use the most and why.
Leave a Reply