This is a guest post by Franklin Bishop. I’ll be back at the wheel on Monday.Â
7 Factors of a Successful and Trusted Blog
1. Writing Quality Posts – When you are reading around the web and most successful bloggers are saying content is king, then it must mean that content really does matter. You need to offer something of value to your readers that they can make them slowly begin to trust you more and more. If you do not give them anything of value, then they will likely not stick to your blog. All the quality posts make your blog more sticky and will give you a better chance of getting people to subscribe and come back to your.
2. Write Daily Posts – People are looking for content more often than not. That is basically the point in subscribing to your blog. If they cannot trust you to give them content every day or so, then they likely will not want to come back to your blog. I know there are a lot of blogs that can make it by just posting every week. However, most those blogs had a new daily post every day until they built up enough readership and trust where people still wanted to come back to read their content.
3. Having Expertise – This is one factor that can really get visitors to your blog to trust you. It’ll be a lot easier to create a successful blog with some sort of expertise. For example, I have been blogging for five years and have created two very successful blogs. It would make sense that more people would trust what I am writing since I have some sort of expertise. If you’re writing a blog about dogs then I hope you have dealt with dogs before. This is one thing you need to include in your about page because it is likely it will be one of your most visited pages on your blog. Of course you have to back it up by writing quality posts.
4. Having Attention – You need to have attention from other people around the Internet otherwise people will wonder why they have never heard of you before. Try to win some blogging awards, get referrals, get media attention, and of course get backlinks. The more people are talking about you, the more likely people will come to your blog. This one is closely tied to getting exposure, but this one more deals with getting attention from other people in your industry. Persuade bloggers to accept a guest post from you. It’ll prove to their readers that you are already trusted by other bloggers.
5. Getting Exposure – This is closely tied to getting attention around the web. However, this is more of you promoting yourself. This is also related to being personal, but a little different. You need people to see you first before they ever want to come to your blog. You need to expose yourself to people that would want to read your blog. How do you do this? Use social media websites like StumbleUpon and Digg. Find people that are interested in things that you talk about on your blog. Other ways of getting easy exposure is by commenting on other blogs that are similar to your niche. Make sure that you add to the conversation and not just post one sentence. People will want to read more from you if they like what your input is on other blogs.
6. Age of the Blog – A lot of people base their trust on how long a blog has been around. No one becomes a top blogger overnight. It takes a lot of time and patience, but if you stick with it then you will slowly but surely gain the trust of people. If you have stuck around a long time, then people realize that either you are successful or you just love what you are doing. Sometimes the love of the game can build the trust of others.
7. Being Personal – This is similar to getting exposure. Although being personal is more about acting like a real person and not some robot. Having exposure is great, but having direct conversations or direct contact with your readers is even better. The word will get around that you are doing this, but of course it will take time. You have to stick around long enough to make this work. However there are things you can do right away that can point you toward success. Display pictures of yourself so that you do not look like some anonymous person trolling the Internet. This goes back to not acting like a robot. Make people feel like you are a person just like all of them. Also, write a post thanking all your readers and tell them how much you appreciate them.
Blogging is really not a science. Those 7 factors can lead you to trust and success. Try not to make it harder than it is and just be yourself. If you really don’t know something, then don’t say you do. There should never be a problem saying you’re wrong. You never want to come off as the person that always thinks he’s right. Just be yourself and add in those seven factors and you will be on your way to success.
Franklin Bishop is a blogging & social media expert and a friend of mine. He once built up two blogs and sold them for a million bucks (pretty cool). You’ll find him at FranklinBishop.net and on Twitter at @franklinbishop.
