Bloggers are writers. You write. You expect people to come to your site and read. You want people to take action on your words.
But what goes on each page? How can you know with a high degree of certainty that what you write about will grab your audience?
The secret to successful site building or blogging is this formula: numbers, value, numbers.
Know Your Market
The first part of your writing formula starts with numbers. Good writing starts with good research. This edict isn’t new, but do you follow it? Isn’t it more fun to fire up your computer and just start writing? That method works fine if your outcome doesn’t matter.
If you’re building a business, however, good keyword research can guide you in your choice of topics. When you sit down to write on Monday morning your research will inform you what your topic is. You don’t have to guess. Keyword research can give you data on what your potential site visitors are searching for, and what your competition is doing with those keywords.
Keyword research, done properly before you start writing, can give you a good idea if your article will potentially pull in your audience, or if it will languish in your site as if it’s an article archive.
Give Value
We can’t say it enough. Only write content that gives your audience what they want. Write it as well as you can. Share in the channels your audience uses. Give more than anyone else in your niche. Do this often, then do it again.
Once you have good numbers on your keywords and you have a clear idea about what your audience is searching for, only then do you start writing. Now you’re writing with purpose. Your page fits with the big picture of your business. You have a clear call to action on the page. The elements of the article lead your reader where you want her to go.
Most of all, you give your reader all you’re capable of giving in that particular article. You can keep your focus, because you know that other elements on the page will help you branch out to other parts of your site. The links you place on the page, the navigation of the site… these elements serve as additional cues to your site visitors (and to the search engines) that tell them, “This is what we’re about here. This is what you can get here.”
More Numbers
You’ve written bunches of articles using good keywords with numbers that support your business goals. You’ve written great content, broken up with images and subheadings, that your site visitors gobble up and love. Now it’s time for more numbers.
When you start building your blog it’s essential to collect data on how people use it. Analyzing the metrics of the site helps inform your choices about what you offer next and what you might improve in your site.
Google Analytics is a great tool to use to collect information about how people are using your site. You can see how people get to the site, watch what pages they read, observe how long they stay, learn what actions they take while there. You can learn about your business by analyzing how people use it. With that data, you can make good decisions about what to build next. You may decide to:
- write a page that gives readers a next logical step to go to from a page with a high bounce rate
- add a product offering on a page that people read and click back to the previous page
- perform a split test on a page that gets good traffic but doesn’t convert well
The Secret Formula for Success
If you follow this formula, you have a ton of information that helps you make good business decisions…
- you know from your keyword research that your article topic is in demand,
- you’ve presented this topic to your readers in a high quality article that they will love to share, and
- you know from your Google Analytics data how your blog is being used.
Too many writers just toss a page up and hope that doing lots of talking will build a business. But there is just too much noise online already. You can’t win your niche with sheer volume. The numbers-value-numbers formula gives you data to help you pick your way through the noise online and build a path your visitors can follow. Then it’s a win for you and a win for your visitors all day long. Value over volume.
SiteSell members have been using this system for many years, building sites that are great online businesses. Use SBI! to build your business and get all of the tools, training and education you need to build a highly successful e-business. Join today!
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