Whether you’re developing an eCommerce business or an affiliate site, blogging is the lifeline of your passive income strategy. One of the biggest obstacles you’re going to face is understanding what blogging is.
Blogging is not merely writing something you find interesting. An in-depth successful blogging strategy has more to do with understanding who you are writing to and clearly answering their questions based upon an in-depth understanding of how they are searching for the topic you’re writing about.
I want to help you understand why blogging is important and secondly how you can make blogging easier through some tools that I’ve personally utilized.
Let’s cover why blogging is important first:
1. Blogging Increases the Amount of Organic Traffic Coming to Your Site
Organic traffic is free traffic. The process of gaining free traffic on the internet through your website is often referred to as Search Engine Optimization (SEO). While there are a lot of technical details to SEO it’s easiest understood as the process of defining the topics of your website in a very clear manner to Google and humans. I like to think of developing a website like writing a book. Imagine your home page is the title of the book. Your main pages are the titles and summery of each chapter and your inner blog posts are the in depth pages that go into each chapter and link back to your main title and summery pages.
If you’d like to dive into more detail on the more technical aspects of understanding how to put your website architecture together then learn more from my 5 part e-mail series on generating a passive income.
2. Blogging Increases Your Brand and Top of Mind Awareness
I discuss more about how to setup your marketing automation systems for connecting your content to subscribers in my 5 part e-mail series but for now I just want to help you understand that keeping your brand in front of your subscribers increases your top-of-mind awareness. Increasing top of mind awareness not only warrants more brand searches for your name but it also helps with increasing the likelihood of receiving high quality (PR) back-links to your website from other trusted relevant websites. High PR links are vital to not only driving more traffic to your site from those sources but they increase the ranking power of your website for more competitive key-terms that will make you more money.
3. Blogging and Social Media Walk Hand in Hand
You can go viral with your social media marketing. My internet marketing firm recently did an infographic on “Best Time to Post on Social Media”. We put the post out in September of 2013 and still continue to receive back-links and traffic from this post everyday. If your content is not good, then you’ll get very little social interaction. If your content does not get social promotion then quality of the content makes no difference… no one will see the content. Outreach and content go hand in hand.
Forumula = Great Content + Great Social Promotion = Virality.
4. Blogging Sets You Apart as a Leader in Your Niche
People connect with leaders who provide huge value. That’s because trust and quality are the two necessary components of gaining customers, fans, clients etc… Leaders convert more subscribers, more sales, more back-links, and better organic traffic.
As you may be already assuming, the reverse is true for people who do not create massive quality content strategies. Think about any leader in any industry. What sets them apart from others is that they’ve created incredible content. Content can come in many forms. Products, software, and education are all different types of content that affect people’s opinion of a brand or a service.
Tools that Will Help You Blog More Effectively
1. Subscribe to multiple Blogs
Use a service like bloglines or personalize your Google search page to automatically pull the daily headlines of the top blogs in your niche.
2. Create a Calendar of Your Writing Topics 1 Month Ahead
This is imperative to writing great content long-term. I used to “wing it” when writing out my posts but found out quickly that scheduling out my writing made me much more effective.
3. Write by Themes and Campaigns
When you blog, you should blog by themes so that you’re organizing you content according to a your pre-determined system. Remember the illustration of your website being organized like a book? You should organize your site in the same manner. Not only will writing in themes and campaigns make it easier for you to develop higher quality content but it will help increase your audience engagement with a specific product or service you’re promoting.
4. Use Engaging Photos and Images and Video
People love media content. Spruce up your boring text with some nice looking images that draw your readers into the topic your writing about. Take the next step and start blogging with Video. Create an engaging Podcast that will wow your subscribers every time you send them your content.
5. Use Contents to Reward and Engage Your Subscribers
I don’t mean that you need to give away an iPad to make your community love you… although that’s not a bad idea. What’s even better though is to focus on rewarding your community with something that falls close in line with your core value proposition. This guarantees that the new subscribers you do receive from any contest promotion are actually interested in the products you offer and not just in it for that shiny new iPad.
I hope you’ve found these tips helpful for developing your passive income online. Feel free to contact me with any questions and please comment below. I look forward to hearing your input.