Blogging Tips…Beginners Can Jump Start Their Businesses

Give Stuff Away

Freebies, lead magnets, tripwires, ethical bribes, opt-ins, and so forth can be lucrative ways to collect email addresses from your audience so that you can market to them via email. When you give away small things to help them accomplish their goals, you’ll endear yourself to them in a new way. Here are some valuable blogging tips – beginners can jump start their progress by following and implementing these tips.

To give away stuff without giving away the farm, follow these tips:

• Use PLR – To create your freebies consider using private label rights information that will appeal to your audience and help further your relationship.

• One Problem – Help them solve one small problem, not the entire kit and caboodle. You want them to come back for more, so in your freebie give them enough to show them your work quality and skills but don’t give them the farm.

• One Customer – Don’t try to please everyone, make each of your offerings focus on one persona / customer at a time. Create a profile for the ideal customer and direct your product only to the people that fit the profile. This works better than trying to appeal to everyone.

• Make it Short – A checklist, a spreadsheet, a simple app – these things won’t take much time and money for you to create but will make a huge impact on your audience member if you are careful to ensure it fits your audience.

Remember that you can also choose to “give it away” for just a buck. Optionally, if you use a system like Gumroad.com, you can let them pay whatever they want, as long as it’s at least a dollar. When a freebie isn’t actually “free” but is very inexpensive it can make more to the user and make them value you more. When they value you more, they’ll be more likely to come back. Remember inside your opt-in provide a link back to your blog, and to other products, services and offerings you have.

Get Visual

People get bored without pretty and interesting things to look at. In the case of your blog, you also want the images to be relevant. You want them to expand on your point and help your audience not only understand but to remember the information you provide. Images can brand you in such a way as to ensure that your audience really remembers you.

• Images – You can get stock photos from a variety of sources including StockFresh.com, StockUnlimited.com, and others. Be sure to read the licensing agreement and try to learn about copyright laws and fair use.

• Video – Today, video is one of the best ways to create a loyal audience as well as engage with them. They love seeing your face and feeling as if they know you. You can create video the easy way or the hard way. Easy – use your phone and decent lighting. Hard – buy professional equipment. Either way, video will get great results.

• Graphics – Infographics, memes and charts are a great way to explain hard concepts to any audience. There are awesome programs. A great infographic software to try is Piktochart.com. You can also hire a graphic designer to help you. If you have the data, they can create the graphic.

You can use programs like Canva.com to create amazing graphics, and use your phone to make video. Today, it’s not impossible for an amateur to create wonderful images, video and graphics but if your skills aren’t up to par, don’t think it’s too expensive to get help from a professional.

Build Authority

Another way to get more loyal blog followers is to become the go-to person in your niche. You can be viewed as the authority by being a guest on a podcast, TV show, blog, and so forth. You can also build authority by demonstrating your skills by creating amazing products and services that your audience wants to use.

• Write Long Form Posts – Long posts, more than 1500 words in length, are a great way to show what you know. Well-organized, long content pieces show that you know your stuff. When you know your stuff, people will gravitate to your content.

• Publish a Book – When you can put your knowledge down in book form people automatically view you as smarter, more successful, and intelligent. Don’t let a book scare you, if you can write a blog post, you can write a book, one page at a time.

• Speak – You can speak in public events, or by creating a YouTube channel, or even by recording talks and publishing on your blog. When people are able to speak clearly, tell a story and explain concepts in this manner it automatically makes them seem more authoritative.

Another way to build authority is simply by finding your authentic voice and using it on your blog and across all social media networks that you and your audience use. When you are simply yourself, it’s a lot easier than being false because no one can be false forever.

Engage With Others

As a blogger, there is almost nothing more important than truly engaging and interacting with your audience. You want your audience to comment, like, share and sign up to your lists or buy your products and services and you can accomplish that is by being engaging and encouraging. To encourage engagement it’s important that you know how to get them to respond.

It all starts with truly knowing your audience. Understand that even if you did a lot of audience research five years ago when you began your blog that even when demographics stay the same often audiences grow and change. For example, imagine what it would be like if Dawn dishwashing soap still marketed to you using the same techniques and issues from the 1950’s? The message probably wouldn’t even reach you and if it did, it would not go over well. Stay up to date and interact with them in a way that makes them happy. After all, it’s really about them, not you.

The Money’s In the List

The final thing you need to know about blogging and keeping a loyal fan base is that you should focus on bringing them back to your blog, every chance you get. There are many ways to do this.

• Blog Broadcast – If you have an autoresponder, for every post you create, also create an email to talk about a similar topic and then link back to the blog post so that they can learn more.

• Social Media – Announce blog posts on social media with a unique blurb. You can post about the new post more than once on each platform, more on Twitter, but don’t make each post a duplicate of the other. Instead, add a unique blurb to each one, even if it’s the same link.

You want to find ways to bring readers and customers back to your blog to read your new blog posts, as well as learn about your products, services, and programs. When you have a way to interact with your audience on a regular basis through blog comments, social media, email, books, public speaking and more will help people become even more loyal to you as a blogger and an expert.

You don’t have to do everything at once, but you can start by adding sing up boxes to your blog posts, and sharing more on social media. As you build up your blog, do more. Track everything so that you know what works and what doesn’t work. Do more of what is working and less of what is not working.