When it comes to blogging, your content is everything. You can not expect to grow a readership and make any money online by writing and publishing substandard, light content. Blog readers are able to see through, with painful accuracy, poor blog content and this can ruin your reputation in the blogosphere leading to an unsuccessful blog that eventually falls off the end of the Earth.
Over the years, I have seen many “services” that promise unique content that will automate your blogging, but I have rarely ever seen a blog become successful using these auto generated methods as they are rarely as unique as they claim. When it boils down to it, there is no replacement for self written, quality content that engages your readers. When it comes to publishing articles on your blog, you need to take a look at your content/writing and really analyze what you are offering your readers in your quest to become an expert in your niche.
Is your writing meat and potatoes or parsley?
Funny question…but it does have a point. When you publish content on your blog, are you providing information that is heavy and full of useful “nutrients” or is it decorative crap that has absolutely no value to the reader? When you provide information/articles that are useful and provide value to your readers, your content will attract a bigger following and allow you to grow you blog from a weekend hobby to a viable business. Often times, you might find it hard to get into your meat writing grove, so here are some examples of blog posts that will provide meat and potatoes content.
- “How to” Articles – The more you can teach your readers how to accomplish some task…the better. How to posts are an incredible way to provide direct worth to the readers of your blog. Your readers will end up looking to you as a resource in your niche and this will further promote your brand in your industry. How to articles…when done correctly…take a little bit longer to draft than most other forms of blog writing, but the long term benefits and link bait are worth their weight in potatoes.
- Lists Articles – Are there 10 things you can’t live without in your niche? Are there 7 hot spots that everyone related to your industry should visit? Publishing these sort of list articles are another way to provide serious nutrition to your blog. Recently, I saw a blog in the cycling industry do a top 50 cycling blogs list that brought him traffic and links that surpassed his expectations. Other bloggers and readers love to pass list posts around. Again…they take a little bit longer to draft up…but they pay off in the long run.
- Review Posts – High quality reviews on products related to your subject matter are another great way to provide some serious worth to your blog. Review posts provide a insight into products that your readers are interested in purchasing (affiliate revenue) and they are SEO gold as you strive to find new ways to pop on that first page of Google.
As you can probably tell by the list above, meat and potatoes articles take longer to publish than a fly by night, this is how my day is going journal entry. If done correctly, providing high quality, nutrition filled articles will grow your blog faster than you can imagine. The extra work that goes into providing this wealth of information for your readers is what separates the successful blogs from the un-updated failures that plague the web.
As you write your next blog article, read through your draft and ask yourself, “is this meat and potatoes or parsley?”. If you are writing worthless decoration, make the changes necessary and provide some meat and potatoes content that will blow your readers away. It does not matter if you have 4 readers or 40,000, quality content should be your goal with every click of the publish button.
2 comments
Your Blog Content: Meat and Potatoes or Parsley?…great opener.
excellent writing about decorating, it is actually useful for me. keep writing and happy blogging.