How to make a blog to increase qualified traffic in 5 steps

There’s a reason 76% of marketers are blogging more this year. Sites with a blog gain 434% more attention from search engines, and almost half of marketers call blogging their most critical content marketing tool. If you’ve ever wondered how to make a blog that Google will fall in love with as much as your readers do, you needn’t be intimidated. It’s easier than you think.

-1) How to Make a Blog with Buyer Personas

Marketing online without buyer personas is like trying to shoot flies with a cannon. You might hit a few flies, but you’ll damage your assets at a low chance of success. Shooting fish in barrels is far more effective, and this is what buyer personas achieve. They locate your potential customers and herd them into one place. Before you set words to the page, you need to find out how to craft a strong message that attracts your ideal clients. You need to:

• Collect information on your demographic's income, occupations, interests, locale, and education level.
• Find out what problems they want solutions for and what goals they want to achieve.
• Discover where they travel online and which social media they use.

Tools like SurveyMoz and FluidSurveys help you to tap into your existing buyers’ habits and characteristics.

-2) Keywords and Search Optimization

After Google Hummingbird and Penguin arrived, your blog’s engagement rates became more important to your rank than your page views. Engaged readers share content, leaving social media signals in their stead at no charge to you. Relevant long tail keywords remain a powerful SEO tool, but if you cram too many of them into your posts, you’ll be penalized. Use Google Adwords to research ideas and insights.

-3) Calls to Action

A robust call to action turns a dead blog post into one that gains traction. Clearly stating your most important goal as an invitation will engage your audience, too. Your conversion goal needn't be an immediate purchase. You might invite comments, shares, or clicks into your website. Every interaction has SEO value because Google is constantly looking for signs of engagement.

-4) Promoting your Blog

Once you’ve moved beyond the question of how to make a blog, you’ll need to harness traffic from other parts of the web. Your website, social media pages, and outbound marketing contacts are obvious (and free) ways to capture your existing audience and gain new readers. Search engines recognise that many of the most reputable sites carry outbound links to blogs. They let you track your traffic, make your site more valuable for readers, and gain trust rank. A domain level trust metric tells you which other links you should use to improve your search results.

-5) Keeping Track of Performance

Marketing 1.01 teaches you to analyse your campaigns at every point so that you can adjust, and this is even more important online. We live in the age of big data, and it’s never been cheaper to track your success. Your metrics must measure:

• Total visits
• The number of new readers you receive
• Traffic from referrals
• Number of conversions in terms of ROI, clicks to your site, and purchases
• Reader retention rates

KISSMetrics and Moz offer the most sparkling analytics apps, and some blogging sites offer their own tools. No data has value until it’s used to make improvements, so keep measuring and adjusting your strategy to reach your goals.

The ultimate blog is engaging at its core. If your readers enjoy it, so will search engines. If you’re ready to see your content marketing rates soar, watch our “How to Make a Blog” video: