Sharing My Personal Blog Growth Plan

Without further ado,

• Ponder about and create a model of your ideal reader/audience. Think about how your blog is going to help them. Keep their age and professions in mind. Consider what your target audience is going through. Look at other similar blogs and read the comments to get an idea about the problems that your audience might be going through.

1. What do they like, what do they hate? 
2. What are their feelings and thoughts? Who shapes their worldview? 
3. Who or what is most important to them? 
4. How can your writing appeal to someone in that category? 
5. What motivates them and why? 
6. How can you put a smile on their face? 
7. How can it change their life? 

• Create up to 7 categories and create subcategories under each. Under each subcategory, you’ll need to have different blog posts.

• Use Google Adwords and Wordtracker to find a topic to write about. You can also stay on top of the latest buzz by using Google Alerts. You can write about, for example, ‘Ten Reasons Why Learning Should Be Continuous’ or about your unique story about any topic. Find ideas and stories that are fascinating, entertaining, thought-provoking and inspiring. You can also share behind-the-scenes info and insider tips.

• Write 5 headlines. Choose 1.

• Trust yourself. Write honestly with your audience’s best interests at heart. Don’t worry about the rest.

• Let your personality shine through your posts. Determine your blog tone and brand voice based on your personality. What 3 attributes describe your blog? And what do these attributes mean or don’t mean? Moreover, determine your blog’s expressions: words, phrases and emojis that suit your blog’s personality. 

• Start writing. What message should the blog post convey? Write it down. Write the headings/steps and the central message under each.

• Fill in the details using a friendly, conversational tone and simple language. Write relevant, well-crafted, true and authentic stories about real people. Write engaging and unique content. Use keywords all through the post. You can also use longtail keywords (phrases made of individual keywords). Elicit responses from your audience by asking for their opinion or by asking other open-ended questions to motivate them to comment and join the discussion. Encourage readers to submit stories and photos.

• Edit. Use subheadings and format your text with ‘Bold, Italic, Underline’. Use bullets. Links used in the post – make sure they are coloured, made Bold and Underlined.

• Use visuals, like powerful images. Wrap images. 

• Preview and publish.

To up your game, think about building and sending out newsletters to your subscribers. Some other blogging ideas to grow your mailing list would be:

• Address a problem that your audience has and educate them about it and the difficulties they could run into because of not knowing. For example, ‘Ten mistakes you didn’t know you’re making about...’ 
• Draw attention to the fact that you have a quick and painless solution. For example, ‘Five simple shortcuts to great parenting’.
• Send them customer reviews and experiences of other readers. Include an FAQ to eliminate questions or issues they may face.
• Ask them to subscribe for inside or exclusive access and give them premium content.

A few more general points to consider:

• License your content and set rules for how your content can be shared. For example, can your readers change your content or use it for commercial purposes?

• Write at least one blog post every week. Look into the performance of your previous posts and learn new ways to take it to the next level. Don’t stop.

• Write a guest post on another site. 

• Sharing is caring; share widely. Every time you blog, create some images for Pinterest and share them with text overlays. And, prominently feature your social media share buttons on your blog. Visit sharethis.com. If you have mentioned anyone in your blog post, email them and request them to share your post.

• Give your audience the option to download your articles in PDF format and presentations (if any) in Powerpoint formats.

• Use Twitter to promote your blog. Start with attention-grabbing tweets that are clever and funny and use superlatives. Once you get the hang of writing tweets, you can direct your followers to your blog. 

• Spend time to respond to comments on your blog. 

• Reproduce your blog posts in other formats like podcasts and videos. 

• Create a sense of community.

For now, that’s the end of the list. 

And….Yay. I feel generous sharing information like this. Please do comment with your pointers as well so that other readers too can benefit from your suggestions.

Happy blogging! 🙂