How to Build a High Quality Blog Following

by Lior Levin on April 5th, 2012 | 4 Comments »

When building an online community, in many cases, quality really does matter more than quantity. You don’t want a lot of quick hits from web site visitors who disappear into cyberspace as quickly as they arrive. You want visitors that will stick around, read what you have written, engage with you and your brand, and share with their network. All of this, of course, can lead to more sales from loyal, repeat customers.

How to Build a High Quality Blog Following

As you strive to build a high quality following to your blog, John do has some ideas that can help:

1. Know Your Audience

This is one of the fundamental rules when trying to build any sort of a following. Determine who your audience is, and then speak to that audience. Your blog posts should address the concerns and desires of your audience. You should use the language your audience uses, and talk about the same things your audience is interested in. Don’t try to be too general, attempting to appeal to everyone. Instead, figure out who is most likely to use your products or services and address your blog posts to that audience.

2. Offer Timely and Relevant Information

You should understand your audience well enough to offer information that is relevant to them—and timely. Offer tips, how-to tutorials, headlines and commentary that can help your audience with what is important, when it is important. Pay attention to popular topics with your audience, and keep up with the latest news that affects your audience. When you are timely and relevant, your audience is more likely to turn to you as a trusted resource, and that means a higher quality following.

3. Consistency

People like to know what to expect. They want to know that every day you will post something timely, relevant, and/or interesting. Your blog and web site should complement each other. Your brand should be recognizable in your blog posting, as well as in your social media profiles and on your site. Your audience needs to know that you are the same across platforms, and that you are recognizable and consistent. Your audience needs to know that you consistently post high quality content, and that you are an accurate source of information. If you practice consistency in your blogging, you will find that your blog is followed by high quality people.

4. Avoid Traffic-Boosting Gimmicks

There are a number gimmicks that can be used to provide a spike in traffic. These often include sensationalistic and misleading titles, ridiculous videos and other efforts to encourage a blog post or other content to “go viral.” Unfortunately, this kind of gimmicky blogging usually results in a traffic spike that disappears quickly and leaves you without new loyal followers. Even worse, you might lose followers who resent the “fluff” that you posted for the sake of a traffic spike. A high quality blog following cares more about content, and quality, and less about whether or not you got so much traffic off a sensationalistic post that it crashed your servers.

5. Engage in Guest Posting

One of the best ways to attract new followers to your blog is to guest post. You can write guest posts for other blogs, and raise awareness for your blog. You can also invite other bloggers to submit high quality guest posts to your blog. They will likely promote the post, and point others to your blog, helping you acquire new followers.

6. Encourage Interaction

High quality blog followers don’t just read you regularly; they engage with you. Encourage interaction and discussion on your blog. Answer comments. And, allow those that disagree with your to comment. As long as commenters are disagreeing politely, and not making churlish personal attacks, this can be a great way to stimulate discussion and encourage your blog readers to come back for more.

As long as you make efforts to provide high quality content, and encourage interaction with your readers, you will likely inspire a high quality following—and loyal customers.

Do you have a blog? What kind of posts have created a loyal following for you blog?

Featured image courtesy of Flickr.

This guest post is written by Lior Levin, a marketing consultant for a neon sign store that offers custom neon signs and also consults for a company that specializes in psd to xhtml conversion.