There are many ways to use blogs for effective communications and content evangelism. But are fundamental building blocks of a good blog that reaches it’s core audience, establishes a good solid voice and reader retention and makes for a great resource?
In order to create a blog that wins its target audience over I’m decided on what I believe to be 4 pillars that you can use to create blog success. These pillars are what I have focused on for creating and useful blog and I’ve used these to help others as well.
I call these pillars because I like to think of them serving the vital role of supporting the infrastructure of your blog. If you could for a moment see your blog as a building than these pillars are what provides for strong and sturdy blog.
The 4 Pillars
The 4 pillars are:
1. Content
2. Communication
3. Credibility
4. Community
Pillars 1 and 2 is reaching forward to your audience while pillars 3 and 4 are the result of your audience reaching back to you. Let’s discuss each on in turn.
Pillar 1 - Content
You cannot create a success blog without compelling content. Compelling blog content is not a compelling sales message. It is much better to create compelling conversation that wins a relationship than to try to leverage your blog for an opportunity to deliver a compelling sales pitch. Looking for the sales pitch opportunity is much to short-sighted and usually ends up with you shorting yourself by not delivering valuable information that can boost your business in the mind of your audience.
Here are some suggestions for writing great content that makes for a blog that becomes a valuable resource to your audience.
Passion. Passion is required. Passion captivates others and causes you to over deliver with the end result being great value. Whether speaking or writing other people know when you have passion for your topic. Passion is contagious but even more important is the fact that when you are passionate about your topic you WILL create compelling content. Compelling doesn’t mean controversial but certainly it means content that draws the interest of others and causes them to want to take a closer read of your content and explore it a little further.
Your passion will fuel your desire to deliver value and focus on content that really informs your audience and provides them with something to think about. What you deliver as informative and what you deliver as value can be as varied as their are topics of interest. But the “constant” is passion. Without you will not be able to maintain your topic for long nor will you be able to continue to provide information to your audience over a long period of time. I’m not talking about dry spells where you may be a bit short on topics for content. I’m talking about the longer term interest in delivering informative content and building up traffic and readership to your blog.
Write To Inform. One intention you should have is to inform your audience. Whether you want to make them laugh or learn, you want to direct your content towards causing movement within the person who is reading your content. This can be a link from your blog and interesting destination, it could be a piece that makes the angry or a piece that simply causes learning. No matter the topic if you have passion and write to inform you are highly likely to provide information that your audience will see as valuable and useful.
Write Frequently. Write frequently. Give your readers a reason to return to your blog. Decide on how often you will publish each week. This sets the expectation of something fresh and new on a regular basis.
Pillar 2 - Communication
Your blog communication represents the quality and texture of your message as it is delivered through a clear voice. I’ll repeat that again…your voice. You should approach your blog with a clearly defined voice that is both personal, collaborative and yet authoritative.
Only you know what you really know. Just write like you know it. Communicate who you are and let your personality come through your blog. Avoid trying to be anonymous or clinical in your blogging discourse. Speak in a personal voice as if talking with a friend or group of friends and let yourself come through.
The key important point here is that your blog has to communicate in a clear and definite voice. You don’t want to appear off topic or out of focus. Good content should not only inform but should also communicate. It should communicate who you are personally. Your communication or how the voice of your content is interpreted by your readers will be the vehicle that adds the most weight of the next pillar which is…credibility.
Pillars 1 and 2 are happen as are result of your desire to reach as specific audience with a specific message using your blog. Remember the are outreach activities. Pillars 3 and 4 are the result of response and relationship.
Pillar 3 - Credibility
This pillar is the result of your audience beginning to make a social connection with you and content. I firmly believe blogs are creating a demand for products and services to have voice along with information when consumers are making decisions. Consumers will consider the voice of business or person making the suggestion based on how familiar they are with the specific “voice” of that business or person.
Your credibility is simply the measure of trust that your audience has in you and your recommendations. If you become a trusted source of information and instruction then your audience will be open to your recommendations. That means selling opportunities. Whether you are selling through information that leads to recommendations or you are displaying ads throughout your blog…when your audience trusts you they will buy from you as well.
This also leads to customer evangelism and referral traffic as others talk to others about your stuff that the like most. This is very important to keep and mind and is one reason why thinking of only the sale is a short-sighted strategy. Become a community builder and leverage customer evangelism to get greater visibility and exposure for your content. Your customer doesn’t necessarily have to be someone how purchased from you before. Depending on your intent, you may not be looking for just sales alone or sales at all. You could be looking for clients or partners. The bottom line is that you want to be a trusted source that others can refer to often. This is exponential growth potential for you, your content and your blog.
Pillar 4 - Community
Community is the last pillar and the last half of the response and relationship activities that happen around your blog content. When you have community you have establish content that communicates to your audience with credibility which leads to trust.
Everyone wants trusted advisors and they look for those that they can trust. You should desire to become the trusted advisory in your niche and build conversation and expertise through your blog content. You will begin to see a community of people rise up around your trusted advice. This is where you can begin to have a most effective voice and this is where others can move in for a closer look at what you are offering.
Community is the result of feeding your niche with great content that attracts and interested audience that comes to rely on your expertise and information for discourse and general decision making. This is a high quality relationship that may also become an important revenue stream. When it comes to blogging is relationship before revenue.
I know there are some that would like to take a more direct marketing approach with blogs and would desire less involvement with reaching and audience with their message. But there are trade offs for everything. Blogs are powerful but the trade off for the time being seems to be the need to build relationship. This may be a bit inconvenient for some but a fantastic opportunity for others.
Blogging and RSS are rather old in use according to Internet time and they are still very young but growing technologies as business communications tools. When establishing your blog consider these points as good ingredients for creating blog success.
© T. L. Pakii Pierce at http://blogforfunandprofit.blogware.com/blog
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