0501 – Blogging to Bring Visitors to Your Site

As you embark on your journey to lead a niche market, you’ll need to share ideas and thoughts as well as opinions and news on your new blog platform. Some people always ask how they can get traffic pushed to a new site.

A better way to look at this is to work on how you can pull traffic into your site, using creative and valuable content that gets posted to your blog. Make sure you don’t stick with only using text content.

A good variety of images and videos will help break up the text and make your blog more interactive. You can get images to use on your blog using stock photo sites. Some of the best ones are:

• iStockPhoto.com – A site where you pay to use the images and there are thousands of stock photos in many sizes that you can use.

• DepositPhotos.com – The same as iStockPhoto – choose amid a wide array of niche pictures.

• Unsplash.com – A free stock photo site where you don’t have to pay. Photographers have granted you permission to use their photos.

Don’t worry about investing in larger photos. The smallest versions will be plenty big enough for a blog post. You can then write your post, and about halfway down, embed the image.

This is also good for when you share the blog post on social networking sites because it will automatically pull the image into the post. It’s been proven in research that posts with images get more attention than those without.

So what will you blog about? Let’s look at a few ideas to help you brainstorm a list of blog topics. One thing you might want to do is find a printable calendar (or buy one) and jot down potential topics so that each morning, you simply open the calendar and choose the topic.

The topic you choose should be those that your readers are searching for. So using a good keyword tool (free or paid) is a nice way to discover what your audience needs. For example, if you have a golf blog, and you want to know what those readers are searching for, you might start out by entering the words golf training into the keyword tool.

From there, you may see the phrase golf training balls so you click on that to “drill down” and see what people specifically want to know. You find the phrase golf training balls: foam or plastic and you know that a blog post comparing the two options would be something that your readers might enjoy.

Another thing you can do is post about any breaking news in your niche. For example, if you had a survival site and you wanted to use a news slant, you might choose a current topic like the Zika virus or any sort of economic fluctuation that alarms preppers.

To find out what’s in the news for your niche, you can set up what’s known as a Google Alert, where each day’s news and information hits your inbox. Or, you can simply go to Google and type in a keyword or phrase from your niche and click on search and the news tab.

So for example, if I did type in Zika and clicked the news tab, you would find that the FDA approved the use of mutant mosquitoes that kill Zika infected mosquitoes. And then of course, your blog post could share the details of the news, while continuing to advise your readers of what to do with the information.

Giving your readers tips in a blog post is a great way to develop loyalty. Blog readers love things like, “7 Ways to Keep Wrinkles at Bay” or “5 Tips for Catching More Bass.” Numbered blog posts for tips are very popular.

You can also do step-by-step tip posts. With these, you’re sharing a bite-sized snippet of information, such as, “3 Steps to Improve Your Marriage Today.” They don’t have to be posts with 101 tips.

Q&A sessions are an awesome way to bond with your readers. There are a couple of ways you can do this. Obviously, if you have a blog readership, then you can poll (or survey) your readers and find out what questions they have for you.

But what if you’re new to blogging and don’t yet have anyone to poll? Another good way to conduct a Q&A is to go out and scout out common questions in your niche and answer them yourself.

So your blog post would simply say, “Q&A for FAQ” and you would start off by saying you wanted to address some common questions about survival, or anti aging, or golf or whatever topic you’re blogging about.

You don’t need to fib and say they’re questions that came in from your readers. Be truthful at all times with your audience and they will appreciate the transparency and develop loyalty to you for that.

Another good blog post to make is just about your personal journey within the niche. Cover common struggles you’ve had, successes (big and small) and mindset evolutions.