If you consider being efficient, beware of the difficulties that await you on the path to effectiveness. Wondering what the difference is? Well, efficiency is about how much you achieve with a given pool of resources available.
On the other hand, effectiveness is about how much you achieve out of the target that you’ve been given. The illustration below will help you understand the difference better.
How efficient advertising may not be effective.
Let’s consider you as a businessperson who has hired an advertiser to attract and inform your target market about your company’s newly launched product.
The market you’re targeting has an income over $100,000 a year and the advertiser has been allotted a budget of $1000 for the month-long campaign. The minimum number of people to be informed about the product is 1000.
After a month, you are surprised to hear from the advertiser that over 2000 people had been informed about the product during the past month. The figure definitely proves the advertiser’s efficiency i.e. ability to deliver a task (i.e. attract people) with the given resources (i.e. time and funds).
You then later found out that only 500 out of the 2000 people belonged to the target market. The rest could not be identified as targeted customers, and thus had no potential of turning into customers.
You will not consider such an advertiser successful. In short, even though the advertiser was efficient, he wasn’t effective and did not help you reach your desired goal.
Are you an effective blogger?
The success of a blog all depends on the number of readers it appeals to. In this case, more is more. But even before it succeeds in appealing to readers and visitors, there is another objective that it has to achieve – generating traffic.
Yes, given the clutter in the world of blogging today, it becomes difficult for a blog to get the limelight it deserves.
There are thousands of blogs within each genre including technology, cooking, fashion, business, education, health, entertainment, careers and travel. So how does a blog get the limelight? How does it attract readers and get them to give it a chance? Moreover, how does it attract the right traffic to itself?
If you do understand the difference between attracting traffic to your blog and attracting the right traffic to your blog, you will certainly benefit from the seven tips mentioned below.
Seven tips for smart bloggers.
Unlike other tips that you might get here and there on the Internet about increasing traffic on your blog, the tips below actually work. So once you’ve read them, do apply them and you’ll see the results.
Please note that since all these efforts are organic (they don’t require you to pay for implementation), it will take some time for the results to show up. The exact time taken depends on a number of things, including the frequency with which you blog, and the extent to and accuracy with which you implement these tips.
Tip # 1 – Quality
If there is one thing that a successful (or aspiring to be successful) blog cannot compromise on, it is quality. High quality entails numerous requirements, including:
- Originality of topic being discussed
- Complexity and depth of ideas mentioned
- Creativity with which the issue is approached
- Language used – vocabulary, phrases, grammar, tone, etc
- Attitude
- The quality of comments and conversations by readers under your posts
- The way these comments and conversations are moderated
The quality of a blog and the content that it has to offer its readers has the potential to work like magic. Of course, added techniques to promote a blog will hasten its success but if the quality’s bad, nothing in the world can save it from failure.
As the adage goes, ‘nothing kills a bad product by good advertising’. Once you’ve made sure that you have all the ideas and tools to make your articles worth not just reading but referring to others as well, proceed and incorporate the rest of the tips below.
Tip # 2 – Search Engine Optimization
After Facebook.com, Google.com is the world’s most visited website. Yes, it is Google.com that drives traffic to a great extent. It does so in an automated way so you can always tune your blog in a way that makes Google.com generate traffic for it. Here’s how you can do it.
There are four basic things that you have to take care of when optimizing your blog for results generated by search engines.
Keywords – Whenever a reader searches for a certain keyword on a search engine, the engine searches for articles on the Internet containing that keyword. So the very first thing that you must take care of is the optimizing your blog presence of keywords in your blog posts that your target market is likely to be interested in.
For example, if you want to attract people who are interested in buying footwear, add keywords/phrases such as ‘shoes’, ‘high heels’ and ‘summer shoes’, ‘knee length boots’ and ‘flip flops’ to your articles. An article may contain more than one keyword.
Articles containing these keywords will show up among search engine results and attract traffic. Furthermore, add keyword(s) to the meta-description and the title of the article/blog too if possible.
Density of Keywords – The maximum density of keywords in an article should be 1%. Keywords should be equally distributed throughout a blog post. The over usage of keywords leads search engines to blacklist the blog.
Tagging – Most blogging platforms such as blogger.com and wordpress.com allow bloggers to tag their articles. This makes it easier for readers to find the content they want to read.
Tip # 3 – Blog networks
Given the wide range of blogs that cater to a reader’s interest in a variety of topics, a number of platforms have sprouted that allow like minded bloggers and readers to interact. Such blogging networks instantly inform their members about recent blog posts uploaded by bloggers and generate traffic.
These blogging networks often have a common basis such as geographic location, product category or a social cause. You have to conduct an in-depth search online to find out which blogging networks your blog can become part of.
Tip # 4 – Treat others the way you want to be treated
Yes, if you want others to come to your blog, give feedback ,and engage with other readers of your blog, a very effective way of achieving your goal is to do the same yourself. Follow the steps below and you won’t regret investing your time on this simple yet highly effective tip.
- Search for blogs that directly compete with or complement your blog.
- Subscribe to these blogs so that you are alerted about posts as soon as they are uploaded
- Read the blog posts and be among the first to comment on them. Make sure that your comment is such that appeals to most readers and at the same time represents your stance on a particular topic accurately.
- Post the comment by logging into your blogging ID if possible. If you choose not to log in through your blogging ID, use the extra tab available to mention your blog.
- Once readers find your comment interesting, controversial or even objectionable, they will visit your blog to find out more about you. This is the second moment of truth for your blog – if its content stands by the test of quality, you’ll surely gain some loyal followers.
- No matter how popular your blog becomes, always invest some time in following and participating in other blogs.
Not only will you gain new readers, you’ll also develop healthy relations with these bloggers. Such relations will help you in the future as illustrated in the next tip.
Tip # 5 – Guest blogger
If you wish to develop a good rapport with bloggers, contact them and tell them how much you appreciate the good work they do. Keep in contact through email, social networks and their blogs. Eventually, when you know you have reached a point of trust, request the blogger to let you write an article and post it on their blog.
If the person you have made this request to is smart, he/she will know that a guest’s blog post benefits both the guest blogger as well as the host blogger.
Tip # 6 – Social networking
Yet another type of network that you as a blogger must make use of is social networking. Facebook alone has more than 800 million active users. Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn and other social networks are similarly if not equally popular. For its success, it is imperative that your blog has a presence on social media.
There are millions of people who read blogs. Not all of them regularly visit a blogging platform. Instead, they visit blogs because of their friends and pages they have subscribed to who share these blog posts.
It is quite possible for a person to become an avid reader of a certain blog without subscribing to it on a blogging platform.
However, the same person is more likely to be an active user of one or more social networking websites. Your blog’s presence on different social networking websites will enable interested readers to subscribe to the page and be notified whenever you upload a new blog post.
Tip # 7 – RSS
RSS is a widget that people add on their smartphones and other devices. The widget allows them to get updates on changes that occur on different platforms including blogs.
This way people who really like your blog and have the potential to add value to your blog, such as by commenting on it sharing it among their friends will subscribe to your updates. In fact, all the tips mentioned above will generate traffic that is best for your blog.
Remember, not all readers who come across your blog will subscribe to it, only a percentage of them will. But the greater the conversion rate, the more effective (as explained at the beginning of the article) your ‘trafficking efforts’ will prove to be. We wish you the best of luck!
Image Credit:Robinson May
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