Beyond Your Post’s Content

The gradual expansion of the availability of Internet, and thus the ability to blog over the past several years has enabled more people to share their thoughts with the world.  While you won’t immediately be affected by the general increase, it could, to some scale, impact how you manage and grow your blog.  This means that it will be harder to just slide by creating new content each day.

In any industry, it is important that you have an edge on your competitors.  Similar to topics that I mentioned in the past, if you don’t know how to discover who or what you should be competing against, you won’t be able to grow beyond your current standing.

Blogs have been able to direct traffic away from traditional (old) news media sites, as they lack a few critical elements:

• The ability for a single (or group) of writers to connect with their readers, knowing them by name.
• An independent source for information, while sometimes biased, but nonetheless reflective of the author’s opinion.
• Daily, but sometimes sporadic, releases of new content.  You look forward to reading the content of another blog author, not that of a news article.
• After you read through the article, you didn’t leave the site with anything more than you arrived at the site with.

A combination of the above factors helps distinguish your blog from others.  Some people have added forums to their blogs, enabled a comment plugin to further the spread of comments, and others have written books (whether online or offline).  These “add-ons” will ultimately help drive the most new visitors to your blog – not something that others can easily match – base content.

People are influenced by people who are able to do more than write a blog, but illustrate that they know how to connect with other people.  

Here are several suggestions:

• Add forums to your site, in which you distribute your posts over, allowing people to further comment, while being able to directly add their thoughts.  Most blogs already have comments beneath each article, but this will allow visitors to add their thoughts in an “off topic” area.
• Create dozens of pages, each of which serve to help illustrate that you understand what you readers want.  They should be relevant to your blog, but are “static” in the sense that you don’t have to update or revise them as often as posts – they are pillar content.
• Install plugins made for commenting, socializing, and building your blog.  Sites that prove to their readers that they are dedicated to providing the most value are the ones that succeed.

The one piece of advice you should take from this is that no matter what type of blog you run, the hardest part is not being able to publish a new piece of content each day, but that you are able to grasp the true meaning of a blog beyond its purpose of distributing your thoughts.