Blogging remains one of the most important ways to gain readership, and whilst video is increasingly becoming an important aspect of any content marketing strategy, building a strong blog is essential. For modern bloggers, it’s vital to develop a smart strategy, not only to build branding, but also to use a blog as a launch point for other material.
One of the most important things for any blogger to understand is their target audience. The days when writers could simply upload to high-quality blogs and watch the readers roll in are long gone. Now, a marketing strategy is essential if people want to gain any longevity from their blog, and it all starts with the target audience.
Narrowing down a potential readership is extremely effective. Even the best articles cannot appeal to everyone, so it is best to focus on one niche and serve those in that group with the answers and information they’re looking for. It’s important to nurture a community of engaged participants, rather than readers who stop by for a couple of articles and then move on to the next thing that catches their eye. Therefore, identifying and homing in on a target audience can be a key factor in determining success.
Once audiences have been identified, it’s then essential to serve content that they want. And to make them notice content, it’s also important to find out where they hang out. Luckily, in the digital era, this is not very hard – particularly for content marketers who’ve targeted a specific interest. When it comes to serving adverts, Facebook can be a great tool, enabling marketers to use their audience insights to define readership and target the right people directly. As another avenue, it is wise to also identify different key websites audience members might like. These can then be harnessed to attract extra attention, either through guest posting or commenting on people’s posts.
As with all strategies, varying content is a must. Writing articles for a blog can be a good foundation to get people interested. However, to keep readers focussed, it’s important to change format now and then. This can be done by including infographics, producing podcasts and capitalising on the latest interest in video with film content that can be showcased on websites. Though it might seem like a lot of work, creating many different forms of content means that the same ideas can often be recycled. An expert interview is also an extremely good way to create interest, not only because current readers can find value in such content, but also because bloggers can gain the attention of the expert’s fans too.
The days of using great content to gain attention are gone, and though a small readership might be created, it’s unusual for content creators to gain huge followings from this alone. Most of the time, a smart content marketing strategy is required. But, by finding and serving target audience members with a variety of content, even the smallest blogs have a chance of success.
