Nowadays, the blogosphere is heavily crowded with millions of blogs and it is more than just a challenge for bloggers to get their blogs out of obscurity. They need to keep on trying to make a strong impression with their work in order to get to the top of the game. It is certainly not an easy task and can never be achieved without a strategic approach.
If you are one of those who have been finding it hard to get noticed from the rest, this comprehensive guide is exclusively for you. Check out 25 simple yet powerful ways to make your blog more productive so that you can make it stand out from the crowd easily:
Be Unique With Your Niche
The biggest secret to running a successful blog is quite simple and basic. You have to choose a unique niche and own that space completely. While there are tons of general (precisely ‘multi-niche’) blogs doing great in the blogosphere, sticking to a niche blog is always good as it is less risky and offers more scopes to grow. It is next to impossible for any individual to cover each and every topic efficiently and that is the reason you need to be real specific to pick one and focus on it.
Try to be as unique as possible while choosing your niche so that you face less competition and grow fast. All you need to do is proceed strategically for building authority in your niche and creating a strong readership. Once your readers gain confidence in your expertise in that niche, it will be effortless for you to expand your reach.
Know Your Target Audience
It all starts with identifying the target audience and understanding them well even before the launch of the blog. The more time you spend to know your potential readers, the better you will be able to figure out their requirements. As you drill deep for your target audience, it becomes much easier for you to write useful posts for them. It forms the base to attract real readers for your blog, which eventually helps you go a long way.
Analyze Your Competitors
Knowing your target readers is not enough, especially when you are trying to stand out from the crowd. If you want to outperform your competitors, understand your competitive landscape thoroughly. From recognizing your competitors to decoding their strategies, all these will help you enhance the quality of your work significantly. An in-depth idea about your competition is not only essential for improving the strategies for your blog and making it attractive to your readers, but it is also pretty helpful in establishing a better position in the highly competitive world of blogging.
Find A Catchy Blog Name
Now, as you are almost ready to take a plunge into blogging, start thinking about the name of your upcoming blog. This is quite a task and you should never ever make haste for it. The title of your blog is something that will attract the attention of your potential readers at the very first place. So, take your time and brainstorm an extremely catchy name that would make people intrigued immediately. Needless to say, it will never fail to make your blog easily recognizable among the crowd.
Choose A Memorable Theme
The theme of your blog plays a crucial role in making it stand out and ensuring its growth. You have to find an aesthetically appealing theme that will give your blog a distinct character. At the same time, it should be hard-to-forget in order to create a strong positive impression to your target readers. In addition, a fully dynamic and well-structured theme can help a blog rank high in search engine results.
Therefore, pick the most suitable theme based on your niche. There are numerous free yet eye-catching choices, which are pretty easy to customize. However, selecting a premium theme will let you modify the basic layout elements as per your requirements while providing you with certain cutting-edge features.
Create A One-Of-A-Kind Design
Spend enough time to find the right template design that is unique and can make your blog distinguished from others by creating an awesome first impression. An eye-popping blog can simply have a high-quality design offering great user experience or include incredible colour scheme, images, header, graphics, and so on. Also, make sure that you do not go overboard with Flash files as it will increase the loading time of your blog to a large extent.
This may sound a Herculean task as not every blogger possesses coding knowledge or designing skills, but in reality, you can either hire a professional designer or opt for a premium template to come up with an attention-grabbing blog that will be remembered by your readers. However, there is nothing more effective than a custom design and you can always go for that if you have the required skills or if budget is not a constraint for you.
Develop A Strong ‘About’ Page
The ‘About’ page is the second most important page of your blog and you must make the most of it. While the home page and the posts on your blog reflect your knowledge and taste, it is the ‘About’ page that displays your personality clearly. Hence, it is of utmost importance that you build a strong and informative ‘About’ page that will help your readers know more about you and your interest. Introduce yourself to your visitors and let them know how your blog is different from thousands of other blogs in the same niche.
Craft Magnetic Content Titles
You have devised the best title for your blog, but that is not all. If you want your blog to make a distinction from all of its other counterparts, you have to know how to draw the attention of potential audiences with killer headlines. Every single post you publish on your blog should come with an attractive title, which is able to lure readers in digging into the content without hesitation. Only a powerful headline can magnetize people to open the post and read it till the end. As a result of your efforts, the readership gets improved and your blog stands apart from others easily.
Publish Outstanding Posts
A blog is mainly about writing content and hence, your focus should always be to write brilliant posts. In fact, no other aspect can influence the popularity and growth of your blog as much as your posts do. If you invest your time and efforts in creating epic content, it will easily set your blog apart and build your authority by attracting more and more subscribers, links, shares, etc.
Try to create unique, elaborate, and highly informative content that will add value to your readers and turn you into one of the most reliable sources of information in your chosen niche. An insightful and equally entertaining piece of content is always more effective in driving potential readers than purely promotional posts. Do not pay much attention to the word counts. Flooding your blog with huge number of posts is also not essential. Rather, utilize your time wisely and put your efforts in publishing something of very good quality.
Make Content Easy To Scan
When it comes to reading a blog, the readers should always find the experience enjoyable. If you fail to offer a good user experience, the chances are high that your blog will never be able to acquire a good readership. Here comes the importance of scannable content. It not only helps readers find the right information they are looking for in a hassle-free way, but it also makes the entire piece of content truly presentable. You can make your blog posts easy to scan by replacing those big chunks of text with short, precise, and to-the-point paragraphs. Using subheads, bullets, underlines, etc. will also increase the readability of your blog to a great extent.
Tell Interesting Stories
Being a niche blogger, you may find yourself struggling with the task of brainstorming juicy topic ideas for updating your blog in a regular manner. Well, try to create attractive stories with your posts and your blog will turn much more interesting to your readers. The concept of blog revolves around the creation of content with a conversational tone that facilitates the connection with readers. When you integrate great stories into it, the posts become even more impressive. Also, keep a close eye on the top trending topics in your niche and talk about them in your blog in order to give its talk worthiness a significant boost.
Write Listicles / How-To Guides
Apart from stories and trending topics, there are quite a few other ways to make your blog content fascinating and gain competitive advantage in due course. Listicles and how-to guides are the most popular ones among them. You can compile a list of tools or facts or resources in your niche to come up with compelling listicles that are entertaining and easy to go through. Generating comprehensive how-to guides, which provide all necessary information to guide a person through a certain procedure is also quite helpful in making the blog a definitive resource in that particular niche.
Add Attractive And Relevant Visuals
In last few years, blogging has become incredibly visual in nature. You simply cannot survive better the competition by ignoring the role of relevant and eye-catching visuals. So, take advantage of this and make it a point to add clear, crisp, and quality photographs as well as graphics to each of your posts. This practice will make your content both engaging and extremely pleasing to eyes, thereby increasing the possibility of more exposure. The use of highly recognizable images and graphics also contributes to the style of blogging, which leads to consistency and helps in branding. Furthermore, there is no need of having professional knowledge in editing visuals as there are plenty of easy to use photo editors available online.
Include Different Media Formats
The effects of your brilliant content and wonderful visuals can even be augmented by including an array of other media formats in your blog posts. Look for helpful audio and/or video files pertinent to the subject matters of your posts and keep your target audiences glued to your blog. You can also go for presentations or any other supportive materials that you think to be valuable for your readers. However, never forget to associate appropriate descriptions with your chosen media files.
Focus On Cross-Linking
Cross-linking is the practice of linking the content on a certain page of a blog or website to that on another page of the same blog or website. It helps bloggers a lot in providing more and more information to their readers on specific topics, which is certainly a great way to set apart from others and establish authority in the niche. Linking out to other high-quality blogs having reliable information has also been known an integral part of blogging.
Consider Search Engine Optimization
Your readers should be your first priority and you should always create content for your blog by keeping them in mind. But, at the same time, you also need to consider Search Engine Optimization or SEO in order to reach out to more people and surpass your competitors. Try to incorporate high-volume keywords in your posts in a natural manner so that you can optimize your blog for major search engines. This will help you rank high in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), thereby leading you to online success.
Write And Invite Guest Blog Posts
Since past few years, guest posting has been getting more and more popular in the blogging environment and you should leverage this to take your efforts to an all new level. Get in touch with different non-competitive blogs, which are somewhat related to your niche, and write enlightening guest posts for them. This will allow you to put your knowledge, skills, and ideas at the forefront of many bloggers and their readers through your best write-ups, thereby spreading your recognition considerably. Similarly, invite guest posts from your fellow bloggers, who are adept at writing and already have remarkably large followings. Also, ensure that they are able to compliment your point of view perfectly.
Leverage Exposure And Experience
Your exposure and experience are two biggest aspects of your strength that can be leveraged for paving the right path for you as a niche blogger. Remember, there are lots of other bloggers in your niche, who have been coming up with similar topics each and every day. So, it might not always be possible to dish out fresh ideas to your readers. But, you can always try to present your thoughts and ideas in a unique way by focusing on your own exposure and experience. Take your time to think about yourself and figure out what actually should be considered as your exclusive ‘strength’. It will help you significantly in making your blog stand out in a crowded niche.
Connect With Readers And Followers
Be it on your blog or on social networks, make sure that you connect with your readers and your followers on a personal level. If you can give them a feel of personal connection, probably they will spend some more time on your blog, return to it later, or even subscribe to it.
Start with responding to the comments left on your posts. Being active in the comments section and replying to each and every comment thoughtfully instead of a mere ‘thank you’ show that you value your readers who take out their valuable time to go through your content. Moreover, interact with your followers on different social media channels and make yourself a dynamic part of the social ecosphere. This is undoubtedly one of the best ways to grow and set apart.
Promote Your Blog Everywhere
The way you promote your blog is really important as it determines how successful you are going to be in a super competitive blogosphere. The more you let your people know about the existence of your blog, the higher is your chance of getting successful in the competition.
Each time you publish a post, share it immediately on your social channels. Give your visitors the option to subscribe your posts via email or choose RSS feeds. Encourage them to spread your work socially by adding social sharing buttons at the top and the bottom of every post. Arrange contests, giveaways, etc. on your blog. Do not ignore the power of various internal media (company emails, catalogues, brochures, flyers, business cards, etc.) for the promotion of your blog. You can even try advertising on social networks to drive more readers to your blog and make it distinguished from others.
Think Realistic
No matter how strategic or how confident you are, you should keep your thinking absolutely realistic. Turn your blog into a highly practical one so that your readers can find your content extremely helpful and put your words actually into action. In short, pay attention to the practicality and actionability of your posts while ensuring their quality. Thus, you will be able to rise over others effortlessly.
Follow Your ‘Own’ Style
Following others will never ever push you over the top. If you truly want your blog to stand out, follow your own style. It is crucial to have your own idea and your own writing style in place in order to achieve exclusive readership as well as great followings. Once you offer a fresh reading experience to your audiences, it becomes easy for them to keep you in mind and return to your blog later.
Be Honest With Opinion
When it comes to successful blogging, honesty becomes the one and only policy. Always be honest with your opinion and let your content reflect it completely. Expressing your personal thoughts and admitting your mistakes will make your readers realize that you are genuine, rational, and trustworthy. Whatever the topic you are talking about is, just be yourself.
Be Consistent
If you dream of pushing your blog to the peak, take blogging seriously. Being consistent is absolutely indispensable for an aspiring blogger. Make a publishing schedule and try to stick to that. It will help you achieve consistency and take you closer towards your goal faster.
Cut Off The Fluff
Last but not the least; cut off all the fluff and stay committed to quality. Successful blogging does not essentially mean that you have to publish one post every single day no matter how vague it is. Rather, you need to dedicate your time and efforts to the creation of fewer awesome posts by eliminating everything unnecessary and useless.
Conclusion
This all-inclusive guide to making your blog get distinguished from others in a crowd of competitors will definitively give you the required push.
So, are you ready to follow this approach?
