3 Important Things Milwaukee Bloggers Forget To Use
Are you limiting your blog potential by neglecting a few things? There’s a lot to consider when you’re blogging, and it’s easy to forget or even know you should be doing them but never quite figuring out how to. While not doing these three things won’t destroy your blog (you can still maintain without them), it may seriously limit your blog’s potential especially as a Milwaukee blogger.
What are these three things?
- Creating Content
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Let’s look at each one and why bloggers don’t focus enough attention on them.
#1: Creating Content
Many Milwaukee bloggers are really great at creating daily or weekly content. When it comes to their system of creating content, it’s mostly just on the spot. They sit down, ponder what to write about, look up trending ideas, write it, and then publish it.
An example to bring some life to your blog is to create a list of content you want to produce over the upcoming weeks and months maybe even put this in your “content calendar”. This helps writers to become more thoughtful with their content, and create content that takes readers through a story.
When readers come to you they’re in a certain circumstance, and you want to help them with it. Right? Well, usually. What do they need to know? What changes should they make? How could you inspire them? How can you help them gain the knowledge and expertise they need?
By structuring out the change you want to see in your readers, you can plan and create content that takes them through a story. Instead of just creating content that helps readers in the moment, you can give them the sense that you’ll be creating content that creates a journey. When people see this type of content they will want to more, and that will drive them to subscribe and to become a regular reader of your blog.
Note-to-self as a blogger put more time into:
- The Essence of Creating Content
- Search Engine Optimization
#2: Email
Email does not drive as much traffic as social or search. We know this but what it does, is drive traffic with targeted intent. People click through emails to read content, buy a product, or engage in a community discussion.
Many bloggers feel anxious around email. They know it’s important because everyone keeps telling them how important it is. Unfortunately, a lot of them get stuck in a couple of spots. Many times we use email to drive people to a Facebook group, our Facebook pages, our blog posts and so on. It’s vital for building engagement on our websites. Email is an important source for our own products and affiliate promotions. If you want to grow, it’s necessary when you are considering it for your brand. For readers who aren’t on Facebook or Instagram every day (or who aren’t on Pinterest, Twitter or SnapChat even at all), email is the number one resource readers have to connect with us.
Bloggers often don’t use email efficiently or sometimes ever at all because they get stuck in one of these couple places:
- Take action. Building an email list can seem like a waste of time. It takes time to build a list. Content today is more essential than ever to keep your brand alive. Choose an email service provider like MailChimp, Omnisend, or Litmus and get started.
- Collect email subscribers. Many bloggers just have a widget in the sidebar or footer. There are a lot more things you can do to get people to subscribe. You can have calls to action in your content, you can use a tool such as OptinMonster, Icegram or SumoMe. People like free, giving away education or something valuable is helpful for opt-ins.
- Campaigning emails. Some bloggers collect email addresses but never send emails. Even if you’re waiting to have something to sell, you should still send value-based emails. Create and send useful content to your subscribers at least once a month (the more the better). Then begin creating campaigns to bring subscribers back to the website.
- Automating emails. Many bloggers manually put together every email they send out. That’s super, but you can achieve a lot with automation. Set up a sequence of email topics for your local area to get your readers on board and introduce them to your website.
If you’re running into these issues as a Milwaukee blogger, push through it. Start the list, collect email addresses more effectively, send emails daily, or build some automation into your email lists. It can really optimize your blog viewers.
#3: Search Engine Optimization
“How do you focus your attention in terms of growing your traffic?”
The majority of responses probably include Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, guest postings, paid advertising and influencer networking. This is a great variety of answers but what is most fascinating is that not a single blogger will say their main focus for building traffic is search engine optimization. Secondly, “Where do you get most of your traffic?”
Most bloggers will say their number one traffic source is Google. Number two is usually whatever they focus most of their attention on. It’s great to focus on more than just search engine optimization when building traffic. Although, if we put more attention into driving traffic from Google, most bloggers would bring between 30% and 50% more traffic their way.
Currently, there is plenty of traffic driven with social media. But with the Facebook and Instagram algorithms breaking down our reach maybe we need to start focusing on search once more.
If you’re a Milwaukee blogger who ignores SEO, here are some things to think about. Optimizing your content. Learn how to use attractive headings and keywords within your blog. Think about keywords or phrases people would search for to find your content and in your location. What would someone type into Google if they wanted to search for a post like yours? Try to get back links on your site for other blog articles you have written and extra links from other sites or bloggers articles. Spend a little less time on social media and a little time optimizing content and you will see a big difference.