Write Right: 12 Surefire Strategies for Creating Incredibly Popular Blog Posts

Writing blogs is an essential part of content marketing and building and maintaining an audience, but many people waste time writing blog posts that never receive many shares or even views. Here Shweiki Media teams up with expert Gina Dietrich, founder and CEO of Arment Dietrich, to present a webinar–the second in a five-part series–featuring 12 useful strategies to make a blog post popular and to really capture an audience.

 


Five-Series Agenda:

  1. Generate and capture blog post ideas
  2. Tricks to write popular blog posts
  3. Get people to share blog posts
  4. Content hubs
  5. Content distribution

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12 Strategies for Generating Readers and Shares for Blog Posts

1. The Manifesto: Manifestos are published verbal declarations of the intentions, motives or views of the issuer.

2. The Debate: Debate blogs can create a fun environment where people can agree or disagree in a very professional way.

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3. The Good:It’s easy to talk about the bad and the ugly and have everyone pile on, but it’s hard to talk about the good and get the same reaction. FedEx had a social media issue when one of their drivers was caught on camera throwing a package over the fence instead of taking it to the door. FedEx responded brilliantly, and a blog reported on the crisis and then discussed the way in which FedEx handled the situation.

4. The Bad:  Union Street Guest House was caught saying they would charge their customers $500 dollars if any of their friends or family left a negative review. Union Street did not handle it well, and Spin Sucks talked about what happened and how Union Street Guest House could have handled the situation differently.

5. The Ugly: Bob LeDrew discusses the difference between a news hook and a newsjacking.  A bad example of newsjacking is something like “What Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death taught me about marketing.”

6. The Lists: People might always complain about lists, but the truth is that they are super effective and people use them all the time. There are two types of lists people most commonly use:

  • Research-Based Lists: Peer to Peer professional forum looks at the top ten programs by total gross revenue every year and how much revenue each program—like Relay for Life—generates.

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  • Popularity Contest Lists: Kim Garst took the hashtag #LikeAGirl and listed 30 women in social media who were rocking it like a girl. That essentially automatically gave her thirty women who read her blog, shared her content and brought her content to their readers.  

7. The “Something of the Year”: This type of blog is typically used to unofficially award people for having the best something for the year, such as People magazine’s “Sexiest Man Alive” or Godot Media’s “Top 99 Social Media Marketing Blogs.”

8. Book Reviews: This type works best as a monthly blog post. The author will visit the blog and bring their readers with them, creating a lot of traffic.

9. Interviews: Interviews can generate great traffic for a blog because they engage both the blog’s community and the interviewee’s community.  For example, Spin Sucks invites an author to hang out for an hour and in the comments they answer questions from their readers. Once, the hour is up, the conversation is then transcribed into a blog post.

10. Parables: Parables are great for asking questions that do not normally get asked about the industry:

  • How do you run your business?
  • What is it like walking on the company floor?

11. Trends: People may always complain about trends, but the truth is that they are extremely popular and it’s important to capitalize on the opportunities they create.

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12. Smarty Pants: Smarty-pants blogs are clever pieces that generate a lot of clicks. For example, one blog was titled “Eleven Words Guaranteed to Generate Killer Search Engine Traffic and Clicks” and that was it. It had no content, just the title, which was exactly 11 words.  This blog entry generated a lot of clicks and traffic with just 11, which is what the title said it would do.

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 TWEETABLE FACTS:

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Gini Dietrich

Gini Dietrich is the founder and CEO of Arment Dietrich, an integrated marketing communications firm. She is the author of Spin Sucks, co-author of Marketing in the Round, and co-host of Inside PR. She also is the lead blogger at Spin Sucks and is the founder of Spin Sucks Pro.

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