- Make it Personal – use the word “you” a lot and speak to your readers
- Use the KISS Principle – keep it simple, stupid!
- Make it Detailed
- Write How-To’s Guides
- Use Creative Headlines — Don’t skip this part!
- Make it a Conversation — Ask direct questions to your readers (and answer questions!)
The Value of a Great Title
Without a great title, no one except your most loyal readers will read your post. So before doing anything, do this first!
For some great resources on this, check out the following from CopyBlogger:
- http://www.copyblogger.com/magnetic-headlines/
- http://www.copyblogger.com/10-sure-fire-headline-formulas-that-work/
- http://www.copyblogger.com/proven-headline-formulas/
- http://www.copyblogger.com/headline-swipe-file-3/
Another great tip I got from Perry Marshall is to go through the covers of the Cosmo (yes, you read that right!) magazines. They have titles which stops you in your track and demonstrates the kind of impact that you want to have with your own headlines.
Great Content
The value of great content means everything for your blog. This is where everything starts — if you want to build a reader base, get traffic, build an email list, sell to your readers — you need to provide value by giving great, and engaging content. A lot of bloggers seem to miss this and think they ought to be writing for Google (which incidentally is getting smarter at detecting whether or not you have unique and good quality content).
Finding topics to write about might not be so easy. Visit http://alltop.com/ and see what the top bloggers in your industry are writing about to get you going. Also read through the comments section for ideas
Write Regularly
Write consistently and regularly. When you find a bunch of great content, write them all down and schedule them for certain days of the week — e.g. write something about X Wednesday and then something about Y next Thursday. There’s a plugin you can get for Wordpress which schedules your calendar according to what posts you want to write. Search engines also prefer websites that produce content on a regular basis. No matter what you do, remember to keep up good quality instead of churning out crap copy at a rapid clip.
Guest Blogging
If you are just starting out, you should also try reaching out to bloggers in your area, introduce yourself and offer to write a guest post. This is a great way to gain exposure. You can also interview ‘experts’ in your field and do a podcast, video interview etc.
Tips for Monetizing Your Blog: Email List
There are several tools you can use to capture email addresses including Pop Up Domination, Viper Bar (which I use here) or Hello Bar and get emails! As I mentioned before, you should start from building great content. An alternative which I have used is to use squeeze pages to get emails but you need a great email campaign to monetize that list effectively. Educate, Build Trust, & Then Sell! This method works for me extremely well. I get around a 21% conversion rate from most of my email lists using lifecycle email marketing. Some of the biggest wins for me came from split testing the subject lines.
Run Webinars
They can be quite expensive but not many people run them and if done correctly, they can be very profitable. I personally use GoToMeeting for this.
What other ways do you think are good ways to run a blog profitably?