When blogging for business– visibility is important. It’s how you are found. It’s how you get results. So you market yourself through social media, or you use Adwords and guest posting.
In the meantime, when people search for issues and topics in your niche, are you there to enlighten and delight them? Do your internal and guest posts rank high enough to bring you great traffic organically? How do you break through to Google’s first page?
How do you rank with those influencer pages with huge audience and engagement?
Does it seem impossible for beginner/intermediate bloggers? No! You CAN have your breakthrough. Usually by posting the latest news, and what readers need and want to know.
Going to top by keeping on top
What’s the news? What’s new in your niche? What’s something your readers should know because it would help them and/or they care about it? Does your expertise give you something fresh and unique to say about something going on in your field?
Back in the day, the first people to speak up became the most quoted on any given subject. There’s going to be a railroad. This politician says something in favor of it. That politician says something against it.
Not to be outdone, a third and fourth politician contradicts them both. But all four are the first ones to speak up. They were fast. Their thoughts may not even be original. But they spoke up immediately.
Another thing to take note: they didn’t break the news that there’s going to be a railroad. They simply opined about it. But you can bet all four had runners, spies, sources who beat the newspapers in letting them know what’s what. Their views were already in the newspapers along with the news!
As a blogger, and especially when you blog for business, it’s your duty to be updated on the latest, and to share it with your audience.
Benefits of covering relevant news/topics:
- It’s what earns you trust and authority in your niche. You establish yourself as a reliable source.
- If it’s a unique tidbit no one else has dug up yet, or you give something old a new angle (it doesn’t always have to be news! New insight on something you find through deep research can be newsworthy), it would truly be ‘fresh’, something new.
- You could get an explosion of inbound links. People link back to the original. You get noticed. That’s why it’s called your breakthrough.
5 techniques for fresh and relevant blog posts
You don’t have to break the news. You simply have to present it, with your own expertise thrown in. It’s like content curation. But how do you FIND the news FAST?
1. How well do you know your audience? What are their pain points?
Break it down. Who is your audience? If you have more than one type of audience, profile each one.
What would motivate them to choose you? (This is what your service or product offers)
What are their goals in choosing you? (This is what they obtain from your service/product)
What pain points of their’s do you solve? (Their needs and issues)
2. Based on these three questions, especially their pain points, identify user intent.
See a need, fill a need, as Disney’s Meet the Robinsons movie said. These pain points are the relevant needs you should provide for, not just with your product or service, but through your blog content and news gathering. Predicting your audience’s pain points makes you ready for the time when they’ll search for answers and solutions.
Here’s a sample of a customer profile:User Intent falls on DO, KNOW and GO. This is what your customer intends to do when he/she goes online.
For your Thrifty Bookworm Joanna Smith, the user intents will likely be:
- buy cheap books online (DO)
- first edition differences, cheap bookshelf ideas (KNOW)
- book seller sites (GO where)
These user intents are their ‘problems’. You provide solutions. That’s what makes you relevant.
3. Create a list of broad and long-tail keywords
You don’t just create keywords and write for them. You identify user intent and create keywords around them AND THEN write content around those keywords. This makes sure you provide blog posts relevant to your audience. AND by subscribing and setting up alerts related to those keywords, you’re on top of what’s new in those specific topics.
If you discover something, you share it. You provide the scoop. Create it fast and you’d be the blog everyone links to!
4. SEO makes the world go round
You could be relevant and up-to-date but no one would realize it without SEO. Yes, write for people, but you still need to play the field of search engines. According to Neil Patel, here’s the essentials of SEO:
- Use a variation of the keyword in the page title.
- Use a variation of the keyword in the H1 header.
- Use a variation of the keyword in the content itself.
- Use a variation of the keyword in any image alt tags.
That’s it! In addition, go for magnetic headlines and meta descriptions.
Hubspot created a great guide on how to accomplish #3 and #4, using data to find and create relevant content.
5. Go to the community
Now more than ever, you can find the new, unique and fresh, just by going to the people. Yes, you should subscribe to RSS feeds and news aggregators, and set up alerts, but go beyond that if you want to find something ‘first’. Reddit, Tumblr, Facebook communities– these are all buzzing with intelligent conversation. This is how you find still-obscure Youtube channels to share with your audience. This is how you find offline marvels– and be the ‘first’ to put them online.
Tap into this. Your audience could be too busy to find them, but you’re there. You’re in the loop, you’ve got your ears to the ground.
Bonus: Be a reader. Not included in the techniques, because it seems only natural that if you blog about something, you (obsessively) read about it. You seek news about it. You read other bloggers’ articles. It’s part and parcel of being an active community member. But reading a lot makes you more than a member– you find things, you share them, and you become a thought leader.
The sweet spot of news to blog about
Something you are good at, something you care about, and something your audience needs and wants. That’s relevant content with genuine painstaking effort put into it. Don’t blog for ranking or traffic. Blog for you and your audience.
Have you had a breakthrough article? Something that went to the Google search results first page completely organically, just because you talked about news in a timely and well-thought out manner? What news aggregators and communities do you watch for news in your niche?
Please share in the comments below!
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