A guest post by Bamidele Onibalusi of YoungPrePro

As a writer looking forward to using the internet to grow your business, you’d probably have come across several articles telling you to start a blog, update it regularly, give the best of your content and expect results to come.

Times are changing, and it is important to face the reality that new times call for new measures. Creating great content alone, even if it is the best in world, won’t help your blog grow for one simple reason; anything multiplied by zero will always be zero. While great content is important, it will hardly help you get in the spotlight without you taking any other action.

While there have been people who were lucky and suddenly went viral online, those are only one in a million, and as the average person you probably won’t experience the same kind of success. Instead of waiting to be hit by a stroke of luck, you can start taking active measures to put yourself into the spotlight, and you can do your “audience” a favor by letting them know about your existence.

As a writer who has been blogging for almost 2 years now, I’ve had my struggles with building an audience (I still do), and I have learned a lot of lessons along the way; some of these lessons I learned the hard way, and some of them I learned by studying very successful people in my field. In this article, I will be giving you 5 unique tips to help you bring your writer blog into the spotlight.

1. Have a Clearly Defined Point of Difference

This is probably the most important lesson I’ve learned in my entire blogging career, and it took me so long to learn it.

Take a look at your blog and ask yourself one simple question; what is the first thing I want my readers to think about after landing on my blog? Take a look at your blog and ask yourself the same question. Can you come up with an answer for this right away, or is it taking you so long to determine what really makes your blog different from the others?

Sometimes, you will notice that your blog is just so lost that you have to start again, but you should also know that it is better not to have an audience than to have an audience without a purpose. It is one thing for readers to visit your blog, and it is another thing for them to have a purpose for visiting your blog.

The first step you should take to bring your blog into the spotlight is to have a clearly defined USP that makes your blog different from every other blog online; without this your blog will hardly move forward, but with the right USP you will be able to go places.

2. Develop a Strategy to Help Fuel Your Blog Growth

How do you actually get people to visit your blog? Guest blogging? Article marketing? Doing interviews?

Actually, those are just tactics, and without the right strategy to back them up you will be lost.

A major mistake most writers make when it comes to marketing their blog is running after tactics such as guest blogging and SEO, but what I have realized over time is that the best way to get results is by making those tactics a part of your overall strategy.

While using tactics like guest blogging to build your blog is important, what makes tactics like that work is the strategy behind them. In fact, I suggest you don’t come up with tactics until you have a strategy; instead, create a strategy first, and start using tactics you think will favor your overall strategy.

Examples:

So that you get what I mean by developing a strategy in comparison to just using tactics, I’ll be giving an example below.

Tactic: Everybody is using guest blogging and they say it works; let me start writing a few guest posts every once in a while and see how my traffic improves.

Strategy: What I want is to create a  blog that is visited by thousands every day. I want to achieve this in a span of 1 – 2 years, and my strategy is to use focus on building a strong subscriber base that ends up seeing my content repeatedly. My approach is to create a landing page focused on getting people to subscribe, publish around 5-10 guest posts on big blogs in my niche every month, and nourish the relationship with my subscribers to make them consistently engage with my brand.

In other words, a strategy is your long term approach aided with tactics; a strategy is a goal with a system designed to help achieve that goal. When it comes to tactics, most people just do what others are saying works and ignore it over time, but with a strategy you already know what you want to achieve and how to go about it, and you already have a long-term system designed to help you achieve your goals; your tactics will be a part of this system.

3. Create a System to Help Bring Visitors Back to Your Blog Again

The next step is to have a system.

Your system could vary depending on exactly what you want to achieve, but its main purpose will always be to drive visitors back to your blog again.

It is one thing to market your blog to people, and it is another thing to get them to visit your blog consistently. The system designed to bring visitors back to your blog could be an email list, it could be an active RSS subscriber base, and it could be a huge following on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. One thing is important, though; don’t just direct visitors to your blog and leave than hanging. Let your main aim be to convert them and make them repeat visitors.

4. Focus on Building Connections with People that Matter in Your Field

While it’s cool to have huge social media followings and a large subscriber count, one thing you need to realize is that the effectiveness of mediums like these diminish every day, and the only one thing that will always be profitable is relationships. Mind you, I’m not saying you should rush into relationships with other writers and expect them to send some traffic your way. Instead, focus on contributing value to them and gaining their trust, and they will be there for you when you need them

New tactics will always evolve, and strategies will gradually become obsolete; but, over time, quality connections will prevail even over sound tactics. The reason for this is simple, people will always adapt to the times, and by building the right relationship you won’t have to worry about starting from scratch; you just need to start utilizing your relationships.

5. Be Everywhere

Don’t just stick with one approach; use a combination of 2, 3, 4 or more – if people start to see you on every blog, on every forum, on every portal, and on various social media sites in your field they can’t help but pay attention.

The previous 4 tips are like the foundation you need to develop for your blog to ensure you achieve your desired results. The main thing that drives results is being everywhere. Use as many tactics you can use effectively, and try to be everywhere your audience can be found. The more of your work people see in various places they frequent, the more likely they will want to know more about you, and the more likely they will convert to be your fans.

Getting Into the Spotlight Isn’t that Difficult…

It just requires you to be smart, and it also requires you to be willing to put in the hard work needed. The first 4 points in this article are like the foundation your blog needs, and the real results starts to happen once you start appearing everywhere.

The most important thing, however, is that you take action. Implement the tips in this article and you will start to reap the results over time.

Bamidele Onibalusi is a finalist of the Top 10 Blogs for Writers Contest. He’s a young blogger and writer with one main aim; helping writers get traffic and income online. If you’re a freelance writer looking to grow your income, make sure you checkout his 7 series freelance writing eCourse.
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