Coaching For Success
Posts tagged content
Engaging Your Blog Readers
Aug 10th
It is Important to Engage With Your Visitors
Writing a blog has now become more than just a hobby. Blogs are no longer just meant for leisure; instead they have become powerful tools for promoting your business on the internet. The success of a blog is measured in terms of the number of readers visiting that blog. The higher the number of visits to the blog generally means the more visibility for your business on internet.
A survey of small to medium businesses was conducted by hubspot.com showed that companies that have a blog have far better marketing resukts than those that do not. The average company that blogs has approximately 55% more vistors, 97% more inbound links and over 300% more indexed pages – yes you did read that figure and it is correct. With these statisics it is clear that blogging in an engaging way is important.
In order to get more internet traffic on your blog, you must present your content in such a way that readers become interested in it and appreciate your skills. This is known as developing ‘Engaging content’ for your blog. We will discuss some ways to develop engaging content for your blog.
What is an Engaging Content?
Engaging content is much more than just information provided to the readers. Engaging content develops the interest of the reader. Research has shown that an average internet readers attention span is about two seconds. So you have only two seconds to convince the reader to read the whole article, therefore it goes without saying that the content must be ‘unique’ and ‘well written’. If you fail to create interest, then you may lose your readers. You may also fail to get backlinks from other sites.
Image Curteousy of http://www.hubspot.com
Presenting Content Effectively
The presentation of the content is as important as the content itself. Simple texts and images may not catch the readers attention. An effective way of presenting content would be to classify it and put it under one heading; add bolds and italics wherever you feel they are required; and add the correct spacing between the paragraphs. Use of pictures at appropriate places goes a long way in catching the attention of the user. It also helps you to promote your brand. You can make elaborations by using charts, diagrams or infographics. But you should be careful to avoid too flashy an article i.e flash animation etc which can adversely affect the performance of your website.
Be Expressive
As mentioned earlier, engaging content is not just a piece of information, lively content is one which reflects your original thinking. Your target audience is the important so you should post the content in a way that is paletteable to them. You should not hesitate in expressing your opinions about any topic, but ensure you do this in a way that does not invoke negative attitude towards you or your business. You can share your experiences and pass on your personal reviews on products. Honestly written blogs can motivate its readers to post their opinions freely and hence they can be easily engaged. Moreover, your visibility among the reader community builds up. Thus, having a voice in your content helps you to augment your personal internet brand. You can even make jokes to make your discussion as informal as possible.
Using Creativity
We all appreciate simplicity, as a reader, no one wants to read complex concepts which are full of technicalities and are incomprehensible. This is where a writer can use their wit and creative skills. The best way to elaborate a difficult concepts is by using life or live examples i.e. explaining Google analytics is easier to relate to a person if you use a busuness type like a plumber. Witty comparisons of different situations help readers to develop their own reasoning. Readers tend to think and express their own opinions. Hence a creative piece of writing is very helpful to engage your readers. If the content is just rephrased material from other sources on the internet then it will not do as well. People will lose interest in your blog. SO, being original is a pre-requisite. You can create new ‘concepts’, new ‘terms’ or post ‘controversial’ comments; but you must be original in your thought process.
Clearly it can be seen that honest efforts must be made to write your blog so that it does not seem to be just another ‘me-too’ blog on the internet. You need to go the extra mile to pull the visitors on your page and grab their attention. If you are able to initiate a thought provoking process in your readers, your objective of writing the blog is fulfilled.
Getting into Social Networking without dropping clangers
Oct 6th
Does your 2009 business plan include social networking? If so, do you know how to use social networking to explode your business? Online social networking is the newest weapon to get more customers.
Social networking helps you grow your business fast. Adding tastefully prepared video, good articles and content for your site can be very effective marketing tools you can use to inform people about your business and the services you can provide them.
If you are looking to use Social Networking to get more customers for your business then The Internet Business Coach is here to guide you in right direction. This article, which comes in three parts will hopefully help point you in the right direction.
Ok so you have heard all the fuss, you want to join in but are not really sure the best way to do it, below Dee one of our Internet Business Coaches gives an overview of the main points you need to cover in order to get great coverage for your business.
Hi
Social media is the phenomenon of our age builds faster than any other online process at the moment and is probably the most baffling to many businesses, however you know it must be useful if rock stars and even politicians use it to get coverage and there is no reason you can not use it too providing you follow the rules so that it is for the client and not a total sales pitch. I am a firm believe in if you give something, you get something in return no matter how small.
So how to you do it well there are four main factors that need considering, creation, control, converse and convert. Create something good, control the way this can work for you, converse, converse and then converse some more and finally convert those prospects into paying customers.
To do this you need to first create good content or gets some for free –then publish it – content is always a big issue (what to write, how to write it) – even when you get it right you still can never have enough of it. Basically there are millions of places to publish content but too little good quality content to make your business stand out in a crowd and this is what you need to do.
Then to be seen you need to spend time to create profiles in all the major social network sites and any smaller ones that are specific to your unique business offering. The major social networks tend to be Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn – millions of people visit these sites each day and as such make them a great forum to show off your business in. All you need to do to be in with a chance of promoting your business is to open an account. However do not do the bull in a china shop approach this will get you in trouble fast and possibly banned L from the network you have chosen to use.
Instead be more subtle create a blog (see our create a blog tutorial if you do not know how) then think about what knowledge you have in your field and create some really good content for your blog and articles from it to publish free in directories.
I heard a huh… one good piece on your area of expertise can be spun into many smaller articles that can be for submission to article directories (an article directory can help you to have a greater presence and help your SEO, in general the more articles you have is the more traffic you can potentially get to your site). Use these articles to create and post HubPages and Squidoo Lens’.
(A lens is a page made of modules that work on categories i.e. about you (called a squid who) or videos (called a squid vids) – get it… and a HubPage is a rich content webpage (images, text, design etc) you can publish articles on any topic as your own hub).
ok thats it for part one see you soon for part two
