5 Kinds of Content that Your Readers will Love
We, as bloggers, make our bread and butter from high traffic numbers. And in order to improve our traffic numbers, we must create content that our readers will love to come back to day after day after day. Otherwise, we risk running a stagnant blog, which isn't worth the trouble!
So how do we keep our readers happy and returning day after day?
Well, we have to create a variety of content for them to enjoy if we want to keep the blog fresh and exciting. Below I've listed my five favorite kinds of content-actions to pursue for a blog; of course, if you have other ideas, please feel free to share them with us and list them in the comments section.
Create an Archive of Feature-Length Articles
Perhaps the strongest kinds of content you can produce for your blog are feature-length articles that explain certain concepts in-depth. These articles are great tools for continually drawing in new readers to your blog. Readers often find these articles by search engines, and then if they like what they read, they'll ideally stay around your blog to see what else you come up with. It's a good idea to have a stable of feature-length articles that constantly bring in new readers.
Post Interactive Features
Once you can rely on your feature-length articles to bring in new readers, then you can focus on creating content that readers can interact with. Readers really like to feel as though they are involved with their favorite bloggers; it helps them care more about the content and the success of the blog, so do your best to involve them in some way in the blog's life. Asking your readers for post ideas is a great way to involve them. Giving guest post preference to readers who comment on your blog is another way to help them become involved. Readers are a great resource; do everything you can to make use of them!
Present Other Voices
Another great way to attract readers is to present a lot of other voices than your own on your blog. For example, if you're a blog that covers a certain industry, then you should do your best to invite members of that industry to write guest posts, or be interviewed, or participate in online panels on your blog. That way you can host a variety of perspectives and give your readers access to these perspectives. Readers love to feel like they are close to the movers and shakers in an industry or blogging community, so by inviting prominent voices to speak on your blog, you can attract more readers.
Make Use of Different Media
If you only rely on text-based media to boost your blog's search engine results, then you're definitely missing out. Yes, search engines can only crawl text (for now), but that doesn't mean you should keep your readers from experience other kinds of interesting media on your blog. Create podcasts, make video posts, host photo essays. If you do these things, readers will appreciate the variety, and hopefully some of your media will be shared at other blogs.
Write Thoughtful Opinion Pieces
Finally, you can create a great following of readers if you are a great writer who shares keen insights concerning the most recent developments in the blogging community. One of the greatest things a blogger can do is lead discussion among his or her readers; by writing thoughtful opinion pieces, you can present an argument that is certain to spark an interesting conversation about a recent event or a controversy or issue that your readers are interested in. If you're especially good at framing your opinions, then you can inspire a conversation throughout the community.
Author Bio:This guest post is contributed by Patricia Garza, who writes about gadget, technology, design, social media, e-learning related articles at online university rankings.