The 3 Elements of an Irresistible Blog, Regardless of Your Budget People ignore sales pitches but love stories. Happily, it costs little to tell potential customers the story of you, your business and what you offer.
By Pratik Dholakiya Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by BIZ Experiences contributors are their own.
You're a new business without big bucks for your content marketing. You don't have the money to shoot beautiful HD videos or the time to interview celebrities for your blog but that is fine. The most cost-effective way to create a successful blog is to make it a source of quality information that people enjoy reading.
Related: 6 Strategies for Launching a Successful Blog
A good blog is the powerful center of content marketing strategy. Here are three suggestions to help you create a blog that people will visit again and again.
1. Give your blog a personality. Giving your blog a personality will make it stand out in people's minds. People get attracted to things for reasons that are often subconscious. When your blog has a distinct personality, like will attract like, and you will receive more readers who are potential customers.
If you run a café, for example, zero in on your specialization (a certain kind of organic coffee, for instance). Give your blog a dominant flavor of it in terms of the color scheme, the emotions you want your product to evoke in people and the place you see your product taking in their lives.
Embrace the essence of your business and let it shine through your blog via a combination of design and targeted content. Marie Forleo's blog is a very good example of this. It's quirky, captures the author's unique take on things and attracts like-minded people in hordes.
When you are starting out, focus on the quality and the tone of your content to build a personality. What are you about? Do you want to be known as humorous, serious, informative, authoritative?
A graphic designer is handy but can be expensive. Make use of the many free-to-use images on the Internet instead. Say in words that which you can't yet capture in other formats. To eventually develop a personality for your blog and bond with your readers, be consistent with the theme of your content.
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2. Don't hold back when sharing your expertise. Identifying people's problems and presenting step-by-step and detailed solutions to them is likely to find many takers. But the key is to give out as much as you can.
Don't hold yourself back. Some businesses make the mistake of giving out only a little on their blog posts, hoping readers will click on the "download ebook for only $49.99' button in droves for detailed answers. Mostly, they don't.
In our experience, the more you impress people in the form of detailed posts, the more likely they are to buy from you, even when you are not pushing your product in their faces. Don't tease your potential customers. Give out freely and in good faith. The business will follow.
3. Use different types of content. Short is sweet but lengthy can be epic. Some topics don't need a lengthy discourse. A short and pointed post can give your readers plenty of food for thought (think Seth Godin's blog), and get a discussion going. (You should, of course, have something worthwhile to share.)
Similarly, there are occasions for:
- Fun infographics
- Witty quotes
- Standalone images
- Curated content
- Ultimate guides, full of engaging examples, which can become your target audience's go-to source
- Basic videos where you talk to your audience directly. No fancy visual effects or background music; professional and to-the-point
- Interviews with industry influencers
Engage your audience on multiple levels and keep things exciting. If you don't have the time to create content yourself, hire a content writer or outsource content creation to save money, but do work closely with your hired agency to make sure you're on the right track.
The best way to make a blog work for you is by turning it into a quality resource for your target audience. If you want more of them to come to you, you have to give them more of what they will love to consume, repeatedly. Thankfully, this does not require you to spend a lot of money but it does demand clarity of purpose and a commitment to quality content.
Related: 5 Lessons About Blogging You Can Learn From BuzzFeed
