Blogging Success - 18 Blogging Ideas You Haven’t Read on Brainzooming

I listened in on Dan Rockwell (aka “Leadership Freak”) and his “Writing Blogs that Get Read” webinar. Dan has built a very successful blog and social media presence with a large audience in a few years. “Writing Blogs that Get Read” was his first webinar and targeted at sharing his blogging success ideas.

While Dan Rockwell certainly shared many familiar ideas during the webinar, I kept a running list of ideas we haven’t pursued with the Brainzooming blog. Sometimes it has been because of priorities; sometimes is has been because of conscious decisions we haven't adopted a particular strategy.

Regardless of the reason, since we share social media lessons from our experience, the page full of alternative blogging success ideas I captured makes sense to feature since it's new to Brainzooming readers.

18 Blogging Success Ideas You Haven’t Read on Brainzooming

Here are eighteen blogging success ideas Dan Rockwell is using for content development, engagement, audience building:

1. Write each day’s blog post that day to increase the sense of immediacy.
2. Write in a “you” voice, not “I” or “me.”
3. Don’t ever go over 300 words in a blog post. If the topic could be longer, either don’t write everything or break it up into multiple posts.
4. Display your picture prominently on the blog.
5. Don’t feature guest blog posts. Readers want to hear the primary blog author’s perspectives and voice.
6. Contact industry leaders, business experts, and authors to connect and pave the way for interview posts. This strategy makes them part of your audience building effort as they point their networks to your blog when the interview blog post publishes.
7. Aggressively first follow on Twitter (i.e., follow many people first, and more people than are following you) – even after you’ve built a social media audience.
8. Reach out to book publishers to request author interviews. This also increases the range of connections and content opportunities you have.
9. Create awards you develop and sponsor. These grow the number of people engaged with the blog at multiple points in the awards process.
10. Incorporate excerpts from your blog posts into the tweets promoting the blog post link.
11. Keep extensive lists of how your blog promotion tweets perform and repeat the tweets creating the greatest engagement.
12. You can build an audience without paying much, if any attention, to SEO – if you use other social media audience building tactics.
13. Give away incentives for readers leaving comments.
14. Email contributors who leave comments to extend the discussion.
15. Have a specific set of needs you are asking readers and your extended network for help with on a regular basis.
16. Invest time to leave comments on high traffic sites, such as Harvard Business Review.
17. Avoid shifting the URL for your blog as it develops (we’re on our third URL).
18. Have a spouse who reads your blog (mine doesn’t…ever) to provide another perspective.

Blogging Success Ideas You HAVE Read on Brainzooming and Can Now HEAR!

Relative to blogging success ideas you have seen on the Brainzooming blog, you now have a chance to HEAR them as well. I was very excited to be a guest for the first SmallBusinessTalent.com podcast episode. During an interview with the host (and loyal Brainzooming fan) Stephen Lahey, we discussed a variety of ways to make sure a blog makes sense and produces results. It was a very fast paced discussion, and I invite you to listen to the podcast on Stephen's website, SmallBusinessTalent.com.

You Have to Find What Blogging Success Ideas Work for Your Organization

Ultimately, determining your own content strategy and audience building efforts must make sense for you and your organization’s overall objectives. That’s why there are so many different blogs and so many varied ways of approaching them. - Mike Brown

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