Marketing

Blog Influence: How to Maximize the Return on Your Blogging Efforts

April 20, 2012

Last week, I wrote a blog post on how to effectively measure online influence and offered some insight in terms of how to plan out your influencer marketing channel strategy. This week, I will share 8 tips to increase your blog influence by increasing both blog subscribership and level of influence amongst your readers.

Long-term readership is the key to blog influence, as return visitors and those who engage with you are the individuals who actually look to you as an authority in a given subject matter, and consequently are the individuals that you have the opportunity to influence.

8 Tips to Increase your Blog’s Influence:

  1. Understand & focus on your target audience. Figuring out who you want to talk to and then focusing on a limited set of topics/industries that are relevant to your target audience’s interests and needs is crucial to blog success.
  2. Clearly define the blog’s coverage and target readership in the blog’s description, so that your readers know what to expect from your content and know that your content is intended for their interests.
  3. Engage with your readership and draw attention to this fact.
    • Adopt a blog layout that clearly highlights the blogger comments with a comment button or a different color that calls attention to the blogger’s participation in the comment section of the blog.
    • Respond to reader comments within 24 hours or less. Responding to reader comments quickly shows that you care about what they are saying and view their input and involvement in your blog as an important component in the overall development of ideas.
    • Make your blog interactive, so that readers feel welcome to comment and engage with you.
    • Clearly post your email and all social media contact information in the blog description or About page, and encourage readers to reach out via any of these channels.
  4. Generously reference previous posts, so that new readers and occasional readers are exposed to multiple posts every time they visit your blog.  Long-term readers result from multiple touch points and continued satisfaction, so encouraging multiple page visits every time they come to your page will increase your blog’s RSS subscribership.
  5. Cross-promote your blog content via Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media channels, so as to ensure maximum exposure of each entry.
  6. SEO optimize posts, so that new readers have a higher likelihood of stumbling across your content when executing searches in Google and the other search engines.
  7. Write guest posts and articles for important community publications and participate in important community forums, blogs and discussions, so that you can expose new readers to your content and knowledge and hopefully inspire them to check-out your blog.
  8. Make your content predictable, so that readers know what to expect. Top bloggers use the following tactics to do so:
    • Post in regular intervals, so readers know when to expect new content.
    • Foreshadow the next topic that will be covered at the end of each entry, so that readers can get excited about your next post.
    •  Write series that cover multiple posts that encourage readers to visit your blog on a regular basis.
    • If you post more than once a week, write weekly and bi-weekly series to generate reader anticipation.

    Next week, I will share tips to increase your influence via Twitter based on tactics we uncovered while creating the top 10 venture capital online influencer report.

Marketing Manager, Pricing Strategy

<strong>Brandon Hickie</strong> is Marketing Manager, Pricing Strategy at <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/">LinkedIn</a>. He previously worked at OpenView as Marketing Insights Manager. Prior to OpenView Brandon was an Associate in the competition practice at Charles River Associates where he focused on merger strategy, merger regulatory review, and antitrust litigation.