Advanced Blogging: How to Make Your Blog Serve Your Business

Do you have a blog?

Want to supercharge your content and increase email subscribers?

To explore advanced techniques for improving blog content, collecting more email addresses, and promoting products and events, I interview Darren Rowse.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode, I interview Darren Rowse, one of the world's leading experts on blogging. He's the founder of two popular blogs: Digital Photography School and ProBlogger. He also co-authored the book ProBlogger and hosts the ProBlogger podcast.

Darren shares how he learned to better serve the needs of his readers.

You'll discover how Darren uses portal pages and what goes into creating them.

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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Advanced Blogging
Determine What Type of Content to Create

Darren started by writing what he was excited about in the moment, and he believes that's a great place for bloggers to start because their writing comes across as passionate. However, for bloggers to build expertise in a niche, he notes, they need to put more thought into it. Darren says there are two parts to achieving that outcome.

First, you need to understand the people who read your blog and what their needs are. Ultimately, Darren's content ideas come from the conversations he has with readers; this determines what he writes about.

Second, you should develop before and after avatars. The before avatar represents who his readers are when they come to the blog, and the after avatar represents who he wants his readers to become. Use your avatars to fill in what your readers need to move from the before avatar to the after avatar, he explains.

For example, readers first come to the Digital Photography School blog because they don't know how to use their cameras to full potential. The "after" readers have full creative control of their cameras, along with the confidence, knowledge, and technical skills to get out of automatic mode and take their photography to the next level. Give them what they want and sell them what they need.

For example, readers who come to Darren's blog to get photography tips realize they need more help when they return from vacation and discover their photos didn't reflect their journey. His ebook, A Guide to Captivating Travel Photography: Transcending Travel, delivers the things they didn't realize they didn't know, such as tips to help lift their photos.

Darren used this exercise for the first time in 2006, and came up with 200 things his blog readers needed to know. Those notations became the first 200 posts on the site.

Listen to the show to discover how Darren uses what he knows about what people need to collect email subscribers, attract Facebook fans, sell products, and more.

Develop an Editorial Strategy

Darren shares the nine different elements he and his team work through each year to figure out their editorial strategy.

Voice: Is your content more conversational, teaching, or storytelling?
Evergreen vs. Time-sensitive Content: What's the proper ratio? Darren's photography blog leans more toward evergreen, but he notes others may need to create more time-sensitive content.
Intent: Is your aim to inform, inspire, educate, or interact? Darren's blogs focus on information and education, but mix in inspirational and interactive content here and there. As an example of content created to drive interaction, Darren says Digital Photography School does a challenge post each week in which they prompt readers to take photos using a specific technique and then share the photos in the comments.