Be a (content) rainmaker
You’ve got a blog. You’ve got readers. You’ve got your mojo working. The only thing you don’t have are ideas. Sometimes they flow like water – other times – not so much.
A drought of good ideas can lead to all sorts of problems for you—boring copy, long lags between posts or the dreaded dormancy, all of which can cause your readers to unbookmark your blog, essentially killing it.
But never fear, Al Biedrzycki over at Academy knows right where you can turn to find blog fodder: your readers. Biedrzycki outlines an eight-step plan for creating content by engaging your audience. His advice:
“…identify what type of problem you’re offering to solve” and then ask your readers to submit questions related to the problem. Your copy comes in the form of answers to the questions. It’s a brilliant idea for a lot of reasons, and it’s sure to become a blogging best practice.
See how easy it is to implement the plan on Academy
Images are everything
“Slideshare made PowerPoint presentations sexy again.”
You’ve heard the axiom that a picture’s worth a thousand words, right? Well, that may be an understatement.
In today’s world, where everybody’s got a blog, Twitter account, Facebook and Pinterest pages and eNewsletter, a picture might mean the difference between cutting through the clutter or getting lost in all the internet noise.
Luckily, some super smart people over at the Marketing Profs blog know a thing or 10 about what makes a blogging best practice, and they share four types of visual content that can help you improve your social media marketing–including, surprisingly, presentations:
Imagine that, and see it for yourself here
Vampires, mummies and the ‘traffic fairies’–who will promote your blog?
Who’s reading your blog? Your friends and relatives? Your significant other? The guy in the cube next to yours?
If you’re looking for a larger audience (and who isn’t?), you need to promote your blog. You can write like Dylan and have ideas every bit as good as Jobs’, but if unless you actively build a readership, no one will ever know.
And you’ve got to do it yourself. As the folks at Copyblogger point out, there’s no “traffic fairy” sneaking around in the middle of the night delivering readers to your blog, and “…magical content dust is hard to come by”.
Luckily, they’ve developed a blogging best practice for promotion. Read it