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12 Key Tactics The Pros Use to Become a Serious Blogger

Jay Baer has long been a serious blogger and social media pro that I look up to. This guest post was originally written for 12 Most as a guest post many moons ago and it remains one of my favorite resources for serious bloggers.

When I commented on the original article, Jay gave me a fantastic compliment and it meant so much to me as a new blogger. It reminds me to always be generous to people who are new and try to encourage others to be their best.

serious blogger

All that follows is wisdom from Jay on becoming a serious blogger. Read and learn.

If your blog shares your deepest, darkest secrets about your passion for Jersey Shore or troll head dolls, this is not the articleย for you. This is the post for serious bloggers who want their online musings to play a meaningful role in their business.

Myย blog is Convince and Convert. Maybe youโ€™ve seen it. Itโ€™s a well-regarded social media and content marketing blog โ€” or so says my Mom. Am I a full-time blogger? No. Do I make money from the blog? A little. But like most blogging businesspeople, my writing is a means to an end. It drives exposure, leads, and credibility โ€” all of which create revenue in a cascading, trickle down fashion.

There is no shortage of blogging advice out there, some of it may even contradict what lies below. But this is what I believe to be the 12 Most Imperative Must-Dos for the Serious Blogger, based on my personal experience and those of my clients.

1. Be patient

Every blogger starts with the exact same audienceโ€ฆ zero. Eventually, relatives will read your blog, followed by sympathetic friends and neighbors. And then youโ€™ll be on your way. But this notion that you start a blog and it becomes โ€œa big dealโ€ overnight is as rare as Keanu Reeves nailing a Victorian British accent.

I donโ€™t keep up on blogs in every category (my passion for diapers, free range chickens, souped up cars and other topics just isnโ€™t that deep), but in my world the only blog I can EVER remember successfully bursting on the scene in less than a year is Social Media Examiner.

2. Be specific

You have to have a clear sense of what your blog is about, and for whom youโ€™re writing. There are no shortage of blogs out there, and if youโ€™re going to successfully compete with a site like 12 Most, you better have a sharp understanding of what role you play in the educational or entertainment panoply of your audience.

3. Be consistent

Imagine if you subscribed to a magazine and it showed up at your house only whenever they โ€œfelt likeโ€ publishing an issue? The surprise factor might add a sprinkle of delight for a time, but the unpredictability would become irksome. We prefer to consume content in a disciplined and patterned way. Your blog should not contradict that circumstance.

The hard truth is that not every blog post you craft will be your best work. Nor is every meal you create, sentence you utter, hug you lavish, or bed you make. Nobody is at their best at all times. So this notion that some bloggers cling to of only writing when they โ€œhave something important to sayโ€ wrongly values inspiration over predictability.

As long as your quality doesnโ€™t suffer markedly, recognize that more = more. Seven posts a week are better for your business than five. Five is better than three. And if you canโ€™t write two posts a week, youโ€™re probably kidding yourself if you think you can drive real business results from your blog.

4. Embrace variety

Because youโ€™ll be creating multiple posts per week in a consistent, reliable way youโ€™ll want to include variety in your blog.
What if the magazine we referenced above not only came to you with seemingly random frequency and sequence, but also always contained multiple articles of approximately the same length, point-of-view, and design?

The reality is that your blog IS a magazine, and you have to mix up your content to keep things interesting and fresh. Add a video post. Conduct an interview. Go on a rant.Commission a cartoon. Just donโ€™t adhere to the same style over and over and over and over. Unless your blog is based on adherence to a hook (like 12 Most) in which case you can ignore this Must-Do.

5. Use imagery

Imagine if your magazine had no photos. Thatโ€™s a recipe for boring. Perhaps not as boring as Angelina Jolie in The Tourist, but in the vicinity. Whether itโ€™s visual window dressing or information-laden charts and graphs, everything you publish on your blog should have one or more images.
I like to use Shutterstock.com for stock photography for my blog and in presentations, and for more casual stuff I turn to Flickr.com โ€” which has a Creative Commons search feature that directs you to images that youโ€™re allowed to use with appropriate crediting and linking.

This is Jay and I at Social Media Marketing World in San Diego. We're serious bloggers but not too serious that we don't have fun!ย Jay Baer and Peg Fitzpatrick

6. Be a utility

Create content thatโ€™s useful. Solve problems. This is where you can get into publishing presentations, and creating free social media tools (in my case). Spend some time thinking about (or even surveying) your readers about their most common challenges, and then create content on occasion that addresses those challenges directly.

Note: sound familiar? Be a utility turned into:

Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is about Help Not Hypeย – Jay's New York Times Best-Seller!

7. Find an anchor

Especially for new bloggers, itโ€™s often very helpful to create an โ€œanchor postโ€ โ€” something you can create on a regular basis that becomes the nucleus for your blog. Your other content becomes electrons that you publish in between anchor posts.

I used to do live interviews on Twitter with social media luminaries every two weeks. The transcript of those interviews (20 questions each) became my Twitter 20 series of blog posts. This anchor became my anchor and was part of the trampoline that expanded the readership of my blog.

Mack Collier used to have an anchor at The Viral Garden where heโ€™d rank all the social media blogs by the number of RSS subscribers they had.
My friends at Jane Nation used to do a live review on Twitter and their blog where women would critique advertising for content and tone.
These types of anchor content give you and your readers a proven, reliable archetype.

8. Be human

Itโ€™s a blog, not an annual report. If you canโ€™t inject some of your personality into the content you create for your blog, donโ€™t bother. Whether itโ€™s adding a photo of you (and other authors if itโ€™s a group blog), or having interesting bios, or just touching occasionally on more personal subjects, a blog should very much feel like it was written by a person, not a committee.

9. Cultivate a community

Just like selling products, the best way to increase your blog traffic is to get people to want to read it every day. And the reality is that even if your writing is superb and your perspective is sublime, your awesomeness is not enough to create that type of loyalty.

People will come to your blog because of you (and your co-creators, if applicable), but theyโ€™ll stay with your blog because of the OTHER PEOPLE that hang out there. If youโ€™re not answering nearly every comment with one of your own, and if youโ€™re not acknowledging your audience and proactively looking for ways you can help them intersect and connect, you are ignoring one of the most important aspects of being an online leader, not just a writer.

As Chris Brogan once said, the only difference between an audience and a community is the direction the chairs are facing. For long-term success, you want the latter.

10. Be findable

Even now, with a steady and growing audience, nearly 25% of my blog traffic comes from search engines. If youโ€™re not paying attention to the keywords you use in your blog, how your URLs are created within your blog software, and how your posts are titled, you are costing yourself visitors โ€” and possibly a lot of them.

At the post level, I appreciate tools like Inbound Writer that help me optimize content for search by recommending keywords and how often they should be used. I know you want to be an artiste, free from the confines of SEO of other burdensome guidelines. But being smart about SEO doesnโ€™t mean you canโ€™t write posts that people will love and share.

11. Embrace extensibility

Your blog should not be the only expression of your ideas. Every blog post you write could be turned into a presentation and posted on Slideshare. Every useful post you create or free tool you devise could be uploaded to Scribd. Your interview post could be in video format and uploaded to YouTube and other video portals.

You need to think of your blog as a farm โ€” a source of raw materials that you can combine in an infinite number of ways in a wide variety of online locales.

12. Be shareable

Social sharing and blogging go together like tequila and limes. You need to make it exceptionally easy for your audience to share your content with their social graph through smart placement of icons. And donโ€™t restrict yourself to Twitter and Facebook, either. The Linkedin share button is a tremendous source of traffic, as areย Google Plus and Pinterest.

Recognize too, that if you want other bloggers in your industry to take notice of your work, the way to make that happen is for your to support THEIR work. Visit their blog. Leave smart comments. Introduce them to your social graph. Itโ€™s not a quid pro quo necessarily, but if you want your content to be shared, you need to be a great sharer yourself.

If you follow this advice will your blog be a success? I canโ€™t guarantee that. But if youโ€™re serious about your blog, and you can and will commit the substantial energy to it necessary to execute on these twelve imperatives, I can promise youโ€™ll have a decent shot at it.

12 Key Tactics The Pros Use to Become a Serious Blogger

20 Comments

  1. Hi I truly enjoyed the information that you had to share. It coincides with some gut feelings I had. And advice my girlfriend was telling me. I will definitely put some of thes tactics to use. Great post!

  2. Hi Peg,

    I love seeing your comment to Jay Baer from 2011. It’s KOTAWesome how far you’ve come in so little time. Only 5 years later, people come to YOU for blogging advice.

    Jay Baer mentioned not forgetting to share blogs to “other” platforms such as LinkedIn. I’m always so impressed by the number of shares you get on LinkedIn. Do you have a particular LinkedIn strategy?

    I ask because for my own blog, I either get a lot of shares on LinkedIn or very few (and nothing in between!) so the randomness confuses me.

    Not sure whether or not you have an answer regarding the randomness because I myself was recently asked how I got 179K shares from Pinterest to the “Our Story” page of KOTAW. After recovering from the shock of this (I track blog shares but not shares to pages so I had no idea) I was a little stumped as to what to say about “how” I did it. There was no “strategy” except to write great content, create great graphics and make great Pinterest boards.

    But I know you’ve written many blogs on LinkedIn with fantastic advice so I’m curious to know your thoughts!

    Wishing you a fantastic week!

    — Katherine

    1. Hi Katherine!

      I saw you had a viral pin – hooray! I’m really consistent with my sharing to LinkedIn with every single post. I think that helps a lot!

      1. Hi Peg,

        You knew I had a viral post before I did too?! That’s pretty funny. Do you share your posts directly to LinkedIn or to LinkedIn groups? I rarely see engagement in the regular LinkedIn feed for anyone and have a lot of conversations in groups but don’t feel comfortable sharing my own work there. And usually when I get a ton of LinkedIn shares it’s before I’ve even shared my blogs there myself! So it’s still a mystery to me! But as you know, I like Nancy Drew, so I’m happy to keep working on the mystery! ๐Ÿ™‚

        1. PS: I just noticed you have your Twitter shares back! And your Social Warfare share buttons still look pretty! I didn’t think both were possible!

          What’s your secret?! ๐Ÿ™‚

          1. I’m on Pinterest all the time – I think I saw it on Pinterest.

            I don’t do much at all with LinkedIn groups – they just haven’t been my thing. I just share to public and people reshare I guess. ๐Ÿ™‚

  3. Thank you Peg,
    You deliver eveytime, either I learn something new or compelled to apply something I already know every time I read your work. I am totally intrigued and happy I came across your blog.
    Keep it up.

  4. Such an inspiring article — thanks, Peg (and Jay)! ๐Ÿ™‚

    The comparison to a magazine that comes only when “they feel like publishing an issue” is so true. I needed that reminder today to keep plugging away at my editorial calendar, even when my inspiration is low or my writing doesn’t flow like I’d like it to.

    1. Julie,
      When you take your blog more seriously – like a magazine – things really start to flow. I hope you got some good ideas to implement.

  5. Thank you so much, Peg! It’s good to know you don’t use LinkedIn groups much because everyone always talks about them being so essential and important and I feel the same way you do. I’ve met a lot of people and had a lot of chats but the subject matter, even in groups in my genre, never seems to quite gel with what I’m about.

    And why wouldn’t people share your content on LinkedIn? It’s KOTAWesome! ๐Ÿ™‚

    Thanks again, and enjoy the rest of your week!

  6. Hi Peg,

    Thank you (and Jay) for sharing this! #3 hit home, “And if you canโ€™t write two posts a week, youโ€™re probably kidding yourself if you think you can drive real business results from your blog.” It has been a real challenge for me to write once a week let alone two… I have actually been contemplating writing longer posts. What are your thoughts on longer, less frequent posts?

    By the way, I noticed your Twitter share counts with Social Warfare! I noticed them on a few other blogs… and hope this roles out to all soon ๐Ÿ™‚

  7. Hi Peg,

    Such a great post. And it was nice to see that you started out as a newer blogger in 2011 and have built up to this point ! That is truly inspiring to me and gives me loads of hope that my audience + blog will grow as well. I have had my current blog for a little over 18 months and I am definitely beginning to see meaningful growth.

    I typically post once a week – usually these are 1200-1500 long posts and so the thought of writing twice a week is a little daunting to me. And though I have heard it over and over again to post more frequently, your post kind of just gave me the kick in the bottom I need to get that underway. Maybe stick to 700-word posts but post 2x a week as opposed to my current method.

    It will definitely be worth the test.

    BTW, I loved the Tourist. I definitely did not the expect the ending but great movie. Way to use a movie reference ! LOL.

    Thanks for the informative post Peg.

  8. Hi Peg
    Thank you for the, not just inspiring, but also instructional article. A while back I came across the book you wrote with Guy Kawasaki and I really love it and go back to it from time to time. And this article is going to be one of the places I can come back to refresh my thoughts, and I know is going to help me tremendously in strengthening my writing.
    Thank you ?
    Cรฉlia Dias

  9. Great tips for a starting blogger like me. I have to start looking for an anchor… Any ideas for a family travel blog? ๐Ÿ™‚ The social aspect and building the community is the one that looks the most difficult in the beginning. Thanks for sharing!

  10. Hi Peg!
    That’s a great post.
    I love the way you expose it, and I totally agree with your points.
    I’m trying to boost my own blog, related with social media and digital marketing, starting from zero, and creating content, but as you write here, I want to find an anchor, for example in my country (Spain), there’s no much information about multiple uses of Pinterest as you have in US (also in your blog, I will continue look up to you closely ๐Ÿ˜‰ ), so I think this can be my differentiation.

    Kind Regards,
    Rosa

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