How to Build Your Blogging Audience and Expand Your Brand

Building a successful blog takes quite a bit of time and effort. In addition to high-quality content, you also need to market to new audiences constantly if you hope to keep things moving in a positive direction. While the work can be challenging, it isn’t without its rewards.

How to Build Your Blogging Audience and Expand Your Brand

Varying surveys demonstrate that blogging is capable of generating plenty of revenue on its own, particularly if it serves as an avenue for marketing your brand. The truth is people just aren’t as patient as they used to be; they want quick, useful, concise posts.

Your job as a blogger is to deliver on that promise. But where should you start?

Develop a Personality:

How you act in real life and how you depict you or your brand on your blog don’t necessarily need to match up. An incredibly introverted person can be a very outgoing personality online. What’s most important is deciding on the personality that fits you best on the blog.

In many cases, blogs become a sort of “cult of personality,” with followers far more interested in the individual posting than the content. That doesn’t mean you can slack on the content but that you want to be consistent.

• For instance, if your blog is solely supplementary to your primary business, consider your tone:
• ·         Frank, authoritative
• ·         Concise, matter-of-fact
• ·         Detail focused, fact driven

This is in stark contrast to an opinion-piece type of blog. Blogs that focus on reviewing items or otherwise on supplying the author’s thoughts and feelings can take a very different tone. They might show up as:

• ·         Conversational
• ·         Opinionated but considerate of differing views
• ·         Anecdotal; facts may be secondary to feelings

Within each of the above categories there is some room for bleeding over. Fact-driven pieces whose purpose is to market your major brand might still include personality and wit.

Know Your Market:

One of the first rules of any kind of marketing is knowing your target audience. As basic as it may sound, this is a step commonly forgotten after a while. Writers become complacent and fail to be proactive in checking whether their target audience has changed and if their messages are even reaching places that target audience looks.

For example, a visually heavy blog might consider more of its outreach on social media platforms that deal with more pictures. Whereas Twitter and Facebook do have some visuals, they rely a great deal on text. Instagram, on the other hand, is heavily photo driven. The same goes for Flickr and even YouTube.

No matter how good your marketing message, it does little if the target market never reads it. Put yourself in the mind-set of a customer and do research on their browsing habits. You might not get it right the first time, but due diligence is needed in any successful venture.

Become a Trustworthy Source:

Being trustworthy doesn’t necessarily mean you need all your sources cited and lined up on the margins of your post. That never hurts, but trustworthiness goes beyond that. It means demonstrating competence and integrity at the same time.

Competence comes in running a tight ship on your blog. Believe it or not, bloggers face major security risks, particularly if their blog markets products. As blogs often encourage commenting, they become breeding grounds for phishing posts, spam and negative feedback. These elements need to be carefully moderated.

So too does your own security. If you’re running a page and your devices aren’t properly secured, you run the risk of compromising both you and your audience. Hackers can gain control of devices with insufficient security and wind up ruining your page, leaking confidential information and casting a negative shadow on your business.

Be sure you’re using the most up-to-date software and apps, and don’t neglect the use of security. Use a Virtual Private Network for all your devices and an anti-malware service. The former protects you against network “sniffers” (especially common on public WiFi if you blog away from home) using encryption while the latter deals with infections on your system.

Integrity is another crucial element to preserve. That means ensuring your work is unique and that your sources (if any) are attributed properly. One great way to demonstrate this is by working with other bloggers. Together, you can produce a greater variety of content to interest more users, and you won’t even have to become an expert in each topic.

Diversify Your Portfolio:

When material stagnates on your topic of choice, it may be time to bring in some new material. There are several benefits to offering more diverse content on your blog:

Expand Your Brand by blogger

• ·         Opportunity to reach new audiences
• ·         Avoid becoming too stale
• ·         Expand your niche
• ·         Help prevent author burnout

Although initially you may be focused on a single audience, there may be limits to how many viewers you can engage in that particular niche. Expanding the topics on your blog to cover more things will give you a chance to bring in new people to keep conversations rolling. Just be sure you don’t abandon what made you successful before, lest you risk losing old followers.

Writers also experience a certain degree of burnout if all they ever do is write the same thing. Given long enough, your blog could suffer the same fate. Avoid that by giving yourself different topics to cover, even if at times they seem to stray from your brand’s focus.

Engage!

We won’t say you need to live and breathe every second of your blog’s life, but you need to keep a meaningful watch on it. One of the reasons people enjoy reading blogs so much is because of the opportunity to engage the author. It’s the same reason celebrity Twitter pages have gained such popularity.

When you post your call to action at the end of a piece, be prepared to respond to comments. This is where it gets tricky; you want to encourage conversation among your visitors without smothering them in your own comments. Remember you’re the authority, so what you say carries much more weight than a random comment.

Consider sprinkling your comments like a fine spice: Too much will ruin the dish, but just enough will stimulate everyone’s palate.

Don’t Give Up

Even when things seem to be going slow and your brand doesn’t appear to be growing, keep at it. You might be talking to yourself for a while on your blog before comments start to pour in. It’s a necessary step on the road to success.

Conversely, recognize when nothing is happening and be prepared to change directions. If something isn’t working, maybe it’s time to rethink. Always be ready to ask yourself, “What next?”

About the Author: Faith is a blogger and tech expert. While much of her time is spent writing posts about how users and businesses can avoid security pitfalls, she likes to dabble in other topics.