Reprinted with the author’s permission from THINKing.
The young lady pictured above is skeptical, and rightly so. So many blogs are posting content that doesn’t really relate to her. Will your blog be any different? She thinks not.
I’ve been taking a look over the last couple of weeks at developing compelling blog content. Today we’re going to take a look at WIIFM, or What’s In It For Me, so we can erase that look of skepticism and turn your blog visitors into regulars.
You must answer some questions and perform a little research to find out what your readers or prospective readers truly want from your blog. My blog THINKing covers advertising, creativity, PR, marketing, and social media topics—a pretty broad spectrum.
First, we keep an eye on our blog stats to see what are the top keywords bringing people to our blog.
We have written a series called “New Business Primer”, which has been very popular. The term “new business” brings in a lot of traffic for us. Phrases containing the words “creative” and “creativity” show up often in our top keywords, as do phrases containing “journalism” or “journalists.” Are you using your blog stats to review keywords?
Another thing we do is review our stats to determine which posts get the most traffic, both initially and over time.
Our posts on media relations always seem to be a hit, as do our creativity posts. Writing-related and social media posts do well, too. Advertising posts are not doing as well and we don’t post much on that topic any more.
But it is not enough just to post on those topics. Just as we do in advertising copywriting, we need to think about the reasons people “buy” something. In a blog’s case, visitors are “buying” your writing.Geoff Ayling writes about the reasons people buy in his book Rapid Response Advertising. The 51 reasons people buy include,
- to make more money
- to attract praise
- to avoid criticism
- to make their work easier
- to speed up their work
So, how does that apply to the blogger? Let’s take the first one and come up with a post title that fits into THINKing’s list of topics. We know that people like our writing-related posts and Ayling tells us they want to make more money at it. So, how about: Copywriting Tips To Help Build Your Direct Marketing Business?
Just remember, give the readers what they are looking for and they will come back.
Harry Hoover is a Partner in the marketing communications firm My Creative Team.
