Beyond Blogging: 6 Strategies to Attract Readers & Drive Conversions

blogging

Bloggers of a certain age remember the halcyon days of the early 2000s, when intrepid writers bought up clever-sounding domains and filled them with musings — some professional-grade, some downright awful.

Fast forward to the early 2020s and the blogging game is very, very different. Starting a blog is even easier than back in the day, when writers doubled as amateur designers and devs. (AI does all that boring stuff now, and soon enough it’ll write our blog posts too — but that’s another story.)

On the downside, the blogosphere and its adjacencies have far higher standards today. That means bloggers — “webmasters,” to turn an archaic phrase — need to be as good at content creation and promotion and optimization as the well-resourced publishers against whom they compete.

On a shoestring.

You can do it, believe it or not. Here’s how.

1. Work on Your Headline Game

Creating great headlines is less of an art than most writers assume — which is why most writers don’t write good headlines (and many publishers ask writers not to bother). This SEO expert’s take on the science of headline-writing is invaluable; here’s a complementary take from a leading marketing platform.

2. Open an Account With Medium

This financial professional’s Medium profile took five minutes to create and requires less than that each month to maintain. Take a page out of her book and create yours today, then use it as a turbo-SEO’d blog-in-a-box that supports your standalone blog. (Or, if you prefer, use Medium as your primary blog — it’s really user-friendly.)

3. Vary Post Length, But Avoid Outright Brevity

The longer, the better — really. The best blog posts are meaty, comprehensive, down-in-the-weeds, and top-driven; keep this in mind as you decide what to write about. If you can’t write more than 1,000 engaging words about something, move on to the next.

4. Embed Visual and Multimedia Elements in Every Full-Length Post

Ah, the beauty of blogging in 2020: no coding required. (Usually.) Popular blogging platforms facilitate easy image and video embeds. These are non-negotiable in longer posts. One image per 500 words is a good benchmark to shoot for.

5. Cross-Publish (And Promote) on Social Media

Want people to actually, you know, read your blog content? Take it where people congregate online these days: Facebook. (And other social media platforms, but Facebook is the big one.) Republish select blog posts on Facebook and LinkedIn after they’ve been in the field a few days. Use Medium for this purpose, too, if it’s not already your primary blog platform.

6. Link to Complementary, High-Value Content From Thought Leaders You Follow (And Whose Radar You’d Like to Be On)

Links are currency — treat ‘em as such, and don’t be stingy. Linking out to posts by subject matter experts adds indisputable value for your readers and may endear those experts to you, making them more likely to reward your blog with a link.

Your Readers Are Out There

Your friends and neighbors are just people who haven’t found your blog yet.

Put it like that and the possibilities seem endless, no? You won’t convert everyone, but you sure can do a lot better than the status quo.

These six strategies will put you on the right track. Don’t expect real movement overnight, or tomorrow, or even next week. Have patience; success will come. As the empire-building bloggers of yore found out, blogging is a marathon.