Drive traffic with effective blogging

The most effective bloggers, the ones who get paid by businesses to write their content, drive traffic, and the ones who people listen to aren't necessarily the best writers.

In fact, more often than not they aren't even the most knowledgable about their topic. What they are good at, is being creative about what they blog about and how they present that information in an exciting and engaging way. There's an art to it, without a doubt.

The good news is that you can do; anyone can do it. The bad news is that it takes a bit of practice. Here are my suggestions for creating powerful content that will drive traffic to your site and help to increase conversions and revenue for your business - regardless of whether you are an affiliate marketer or purveyor of cookies.

1. Write for a targeted niche

I know it seems counter intuitive that you should focus a blog post on a tight niche. Surely, if the goal is to drive huge amounts of traffic, you should write as broadly as possible to appeal to as many people as possible? In fact, content that goes viral often does so because it was hugely appealing to a group of people and it was these people that drove its popularity.

No matter who you are, its simply not possible to force an article to go viral by yourself. Viral content needs a fanatical group of people who evangelize it by sharing it around the place. People will read "good content" on the strength of recommendations from people they know.

2. Make heavy use of social media

Popular content is popular because people share it. If you don't give people every chance to share it using whatever network they choose, you are putting your content at a disadvantage. Look at any popular blog. They all have plenty of buttons or widgets that allow readers to share that content around.

3. Be relevant

Don't write content for the sake of it. Whatever you write should have something that is interesting, emotive, unusual, funny, entertaining, sad or anything else that will evoke a response in the reader.

If you can't think of something that will do this, then it is a good sign you need to look for more insipiration before wasting time and effort writing.

4. Grow your reach using other sites

If you haven't yet made it into the top ten list of the world's most powerful bloggers, then it is likely you will benefit from writing for other popular blogs or sites that are relevant to you. Writing for popular, well respected sites imparts credibility to you as a blogger and exposes your knowledge and writing to a new audience.

5. Success breeds success

Foster a culture of sucess in your writing. If a strategy or service worked wonders for you, share this information in your blogging. By helping others to succeed through examples and demonstration of how you have succeeded, you instantly "show off" your own success without alienating people.

Everyone else out there wants to succeed. Share your successes and become an authority on success. This is a sure fire way to gather a following.

6. Be creative

Not only will being creative help to keep the act of blogging fresh and interesting for you, it will help keep your readers interested in what you have to say. The more interesting the content, the more that people will talk about it and the faster it will gain a following.

Find unique and interesting ways to talk about things. For example, one of the most popular articles I have written gave a list of marketing definitions, explained with reference to cows. It's perhaps not the most brilliant blog in the world, but people liked it because its easy to read and not quite as dry as business blogging tends to be.

What about starting a competition? Or making a quiz?

7. Be excited and passionate

Finally, it is important to look at blogging as marketing. Every time you write new content you are effectively starting a new mini-marketing campaign, complete with its own target audience, message and power to drive traffic and revenue.

If you are excited and passionate, your writing will reflect this and it is far easier for a potential customer to put their trust and hard earned dollars into a site that is clearly created with passion.