Just imagine how excited you will be when your current blog post is your most popular post ever? Or maybe the most admired one among your peers?
Audience is one of the key factors that transfigures a good blog post to a popular blog post and helps you increase blog traffic. Anyone with the knowledge about what they write and suave writing skill can write a good blog post, but it takes a few more tips, tactics and tricks to make it readable and admirable.
Here are some of the tips and tricks, that not only help you to improve your blogging skills but also provides your blog a standard of quality thereby improving the popularity of your blog posts.
Tip 1: Do some background work before writing your blog post
Anything from cooking to blogging needs certain background work to be done in order to draft a perfect final copy. The work to be done here is research the most popular blog posts from some of your favorite blogs.
Trick: Many blogs have a list of most popular blog posts right in the sidebar or footer.
Tactic: When you research popular blog posts, compare those blog posts and try to find out the similarities between them. The similarities can be in the genre of the post or the writing style. Uncover these similarities and start following them, but of course with your own uniqueness.
Tip 2: Use Established framework
There are certain well established formats that help you to create a standard to your posts, hence resulting in striking raise of the popularity.
Trick: When you start with a certain format, bond to it until the very end.
Tactic: Some of the well known and standard formats are as follows:
How to (instructions on how to do something)
E.g.: How to write popular blog posts?
List of (“Top ten”, “10 reasons for”)
E.g.: Ten reasons that made CSK win the IPL trophy (Well, that's so Indian, I know :))
Inspiration (helping people get past fears, about improving skills, etc.)
E.g.: Tips to get rid of paranoia
You get the idea…
Tip 3: Genre Selection
When you are about to create a blog post and your major aim is to make it a popular one, you have to concentrate on picking the right genre for the blog post.
Trick: Select a topic such that it will have immense response from your audience in the form of comments.
Tactic: To gain popularity, try to choose current trends, controversial topics, media related topics. These topics generally pave the way to discussions in the comments. For example you could write about the latest Amazon plugin for WordPress or Twitter Profile app.
Tip 4: Killer headline for your blog post
“Face is the index of the mind”; similarly the headline of the article depicts the quality of its content. The headline can make or break a potentially great post.
Trick: Spend extra time for your headline; constantly think about the headline; because headlines most of the time strike our mind, when we are indulged in any other work.
Tactic: Do background work even for headlines; correlate your proposed headline with that of other popular blog posts. Alternatively you can post the summary of your proposed post and ask for public opinion about the title in social networking sites; this may give more publicity to your post.
Tip 5: Invest more time and energy than usual
Writing a normal blog and writing a blog posts to get it to the level of popularity are two different standards; the latter takes double the time and energy than the former.
Trick: Create a schedule for each and every module, research work, genre selection, headline selection etc.
Tactic: Spend the optimum time on writing the blog post and spend the rest of the scheduled time in publicity (via Facebook, Twitter, blogging networks), and other background work.
Tip 6: Encourage readers to share the blog post
Popularity is like gossip, it increases only when people share. Your post must have a few ingredients that entice readers to share it with their friends.
Trick: If you tag someone in your blog post or mention about them in the post, they are more likely to share (but don't tag them just to improve popularity, have a valid point to tag or mention them).
Tactic: Few things that make a reader share your post are awesome content, controversial topics, useful tips or stuff. You can alternatively ask them to share if it's really special content you want to share with the world.
You can alternatively email your friends and fellow bloggers about your new blog post (your email list is great for this). However don't overuse this technique; don't email about every post you publish, because it will annoy people.
More techniques to promote your blog post
Additionally add relevant images to your blog post, use themes to match the genre of your post. Finally don't forget to share your blog post in your own Facebook and/or Twitter profile – that's a no brainer, isn't? What are your favorite techniques to promote your blog posts?