What is your purpose for writing and blogging and what benefits and value does it provide for your audience? Is it simply a personal journal of your daily life, a venture for achieving success, a source of valuable information and guidance for others or are you just following a formula that seems to work for everyone else? Hopefully, you can answer these or similar questions for yourself since for any successful venture you need to have clearly defined goals and realistic action plans for what you want to achieve.
There are over 152 Million blogs on the web and that number continues to rise as platforms like Tumblr and WordPress make it easier for anyone, with almost zero technical skills, make their voice heard. So how to does one standout in such a noisy and crowded marketplace? An average effort won’t make the cut and your eyes should be set on creating content that dominates, is of greater value that what is commonly found on the market while building relationships. More specifically, you should be genuinely connecting with your audience with the ultimate goal of knowing your readers better, providing truly beneficial content for them which will in turn capture a dedicated following for your blog.
In addition, blogging is among the most influential mediums driving sales and other results driven metric; with a 31% chance of influencing sales, more so than even social networks.
Becoming an Influential Blogger
This sought after status is not gained overnight; it takes passion, dedication, study in your field and consistency to achieve. I was reading a few articles on Darren Rowse’s website and realized that he has been blogging on problogger.net since 2004. That’s 10 years since he has started blogging and for what I know about Darren, he started blogging as a complete newbie. He started from nothing and was not an expert in his field at all.
After reading through his articles in the huge time line, I notice that he has not been using any magic formula for his success. His success simply required the basic ingredients for all major accomplishments in any area of life; which are passion, dedication, consistent blogging and a desire to truly know what your audience is craving for.
So the commanding influence and authority that many of us desire as bloggers is well within reach. It depends on how we apply our skills and how far we are willing to go with it. Bear in mind, however, that if you notice 100 million blogs doing the same things and are talking about the same topics then something truly extraordinary needs to be done. We simply cannot choose to pursue our passion and blindly execute our goals. We must conduct targeted market research to see how best we can bring something unique to the table and truly stand out as professional bloggers.
Bringing the Community Together Through Tools
Successful blogging is laid on the foundation of community building. There more people you can bring together for common goals and sharing of ideas, the greater your influence and value to your niche. There are many online tools that enable you to deliver value and build communities right out of the box. Create a Triberr group, Google Plus community, engage groups on LinkedIn and even take it to a professional level and build stronger team / personal relationships with a service like ClickMeeting. For example, the ClickMeeting service allows you to create branded, audio / video meetings with people and groups to collaborate, share resources and is built with special features for facilitating questions and answers sessions and moderated chats. As a leader in your niche, you could use this service to deliver your expertise and rally fellow bloggers and potential clients together to not only grow your industry and make your presence known, but also close sales in the long run.
Tools are a major part of your blogging journey as they help multiply your effort, reach larger audiences and even add a touch of professionalism to your public profile.
Keys to Obtaining Authority
Therefore, in summary, here are the most important things we should be aiming at to truly push our blogging journey to its limits:
- Be Original — To truly stand out, it’s a waste of time to be just average. You know for yourself that you won’t spend the time to read articles that are old news.
- Be Awesome — Always go the extra mile to provide more useful information than the average blogger.
- Learn Something New Each Day — Depending on your niche, you will be better able to provide unique content that appeals to your audience. If you are consistently providing new techniques and strategies to help your audience in their field then you will be their first choice, every time.
- Be Professional — Operate your blog like a business. Always be a step ahead of what the market is producing.
- Connect with Your Readers — While being professional, be super social! Respond to your readers’ requests, questions and feedback. Connect with them on Twitter, Facebook and the other major social networks. This is where they get their information and spent most of their online time.
