Marketing Monday: Five Ways to Grow Your Blog Audience

© Marek

Intro by Skip Cohen

Going through the SCU archives, I ran across this post from my good buddy Scott Bourne. What I love about all the advice he shares with so many of us, is that it's always timeless. In this Marketing Monday post, he's sharing five outstanding tips to help you grow your blog audience.

As I wrote last week in a Facebook post - your website is about what you sell, but your blog is about what's in your heart. The two "properties" essentially make up your storefront with consistency being the key to the front door every day. You can't build readership if you're posting every other full moon!

Today you not only have the greatest selection of creative tools in the history of photography to capture/create images, but you also have the greatest reach of any small business owner in history! Make yourself habit-forming and do your best to exceed not only your client's expectations but your readers!

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By Scott Bourne

If you're attempting to become (or already are) a professional photographer, in my opinion you need a blog. Blogs lead to more business and more money. But not just any blog will do. Your blog needs to be an extension of you. It needs to show off your work for sure, but it also needs to show off your personality.

Once you build a blog, it won't do you much good if people coming to it don't stick around because you aren't giving them a reason. So here are five ways to increase your blog's audience.

1. Avoid too many ads, too much sales talk, too many banners and too many commercials on your blog. Make sure there is a nice content to marketing ratio. Read your blog as if you were someone else and ask yourself, would I find this blog to contain enough helpful, valuable information to put up with "X" amount of marketing.

2. Publish your blog on a dependable and regular schedule. While publishing new posts every single day will get you a bigger audience faster, it's not a requirement. What is important however, is publishing with consistent frequency. Publish every Monday, Wednesday and Friday for instance and let your audience know the schedule. Whatever day(s) you promise to publish, stick with it so people know there's a reason to come back and more importantly, so they don't forget your message.

3. Tell stories. Be engaging. Talk more about your subject expertise or your clients than yourself. Make sure your content solves a problem for someone else, not for you. Narrative is a powerful form of communication. Use it.

4. Be yourself. You can't make a blog work unless it's honest, transparent and truthful. It has to be written from your very own true perspective, NOT the perspective you THINK people want to hear. It's way too hard to be someone else and to keep it going. Just be yourself. Not everyone will like what you do. Don't worry about that. There's a big world out there. You only need to reach the people who DO like what you do - the rest can head on down the road to find someone or something else. Life goes on.

5. Be helpful. Make sure every blog post provides the possibility of help to your audience. Your content has to be useful, or nobody will care about it. The more targeted, and niche oriented, the better. The more problem solving the better.