Remember the cave and the café?
The five foundations of growth ensure that your blog is like a warm and welcoming café (and not like a cave). The five foundations are: design, usability, content, benefit, and uniqueness.
In our course, Make Your Blog Rock, we’ve already talked about the principles of design, usability, and content. However, now we need to take an in-depth look at how these principles can help us achieve a particular goal: conversion.
The conversion you are aiming for is to to turn visitors to your blog into subscribers.
If you want visitors to stay and read, the design needs to be eye-catching. Most importantly, it needs to reflect what is unique about your blog. If your style is sassy, your design needs to be sassy. If your tone and topic are serious, your design needs to reflect that.
When you consider which kind of design will grow your blog, you need to think about the readership you are targeting. For example, young guys looking for a tech blog will respond to a different design than female readers looking for a self-development blog.
In the context of blog growth, the part of your design you need to optimize is the part above the fold. ‘Above the fold’ means the part that visitors see without scrolling down. This term stems from newspapers where the most important part of the content had to be visible ‘above the fold’, that is, on the part of the newspaper that showed when the paper was folded in half.
The reason why this part is most important for blog growth is that many visitors won’t bother to scroll down if they aren’t reeled in right away.
The main usability factor you need to focus on is the ease of subscribing. It must be immediately clear how to subscribe – and why the reader should take action.
There are many blogs out there where it’s hard to find out how to subscribe. And most bloggers don’t give a clear call to action, that is, they don’t clearly ask readers to subscribe. One of the outcomes of this course is to have a clear call to subscribe and to offer readers multiple opportunities to subscribe.
If you want your blog to grow, you need to become an asset for your readers. If your content touches the pain points of your readers and offers useful solutions to their problems, readers will want to return and read more.
There are certain types of posts that can help attract new readers. For example, list posts work particularly well, especially if they are content rich and contain interesting links.
This course assumes that you have studied the course Write Like an A-List Blogger, and have put into practice what you’ve learned there. If not, we suggest going through it in detail before tackling this material.
The most important foundation of blog growth is benefit. This means that your blog needs to benefit your readers. I touched on this above. Whatever you write, and whatever you do on your blog has to have a clear benefit for your readers.
If you surf the Net randomly, you’ll see that most blogs don’t offer any benefit for readers. They are just vehicles for the blogger to air their thoughts – with no consideration for the needs of readers.
Maybe you are one of the bloggers for whom their blog is more like a public journal. Maybe your focus is on your thoughts and your experiences. That’s fine. Just remember: such a blog will always have a small readership.
If you want your blog to grow, you need to shift the focus away from yourself and onto your readers.
In order to grow, a blog has to be unique – and not just a me-too site. The key is to find what is unique about your blog, and then to focus on this uniqueness in every aspect of the blog.
Sounds easy, doesn’t it?
In reality, it can be quite difficult to pinpoint what makes your blog unique.
If you work on the five factors of blog growth, your blog will turn from a cave into a café – where people want to hang out and join others.
Author: A-List Team