Do the Hard Work for your Readers

It’s sometimes difficult to put your finger on what exactly makes some blogs successful. There are successful blogs with bad designs, many which only update every other week and some which make good money in spite of poor marketing techniques.

Though most popular blogs share one common theme; They do the hard work for their readers. By doing the hard work your readers you can present them with quality content on a regular basis. The web is full of useful information, all you need to do is find it, collate it and present it.

You can do this in a number of ways:

• Solve Problems: Most people are generally lazy when it comes to solving a problem. They have a problem but they don’t want to spend hours figuring it out. So by taking the time to solve the problem for them you could gain an appreciative loyal reader.
  Examples: “How to upload songs via iTunes”, “How to remove virus ABC from my computer”, “How to stop your legs cramping after a run”.
• Research: The more you research a topic, the more information you can present to your reader. The reader could obviously do all of this research themselves but time is precious and they would much prefer to just read an article that has covers everything than reading dozens of articles about the topic.
  Examples: “An idiots guide to World War II”, “A complete biography of The Beatles”, “Handy advice for your first trip to Spain”.
• Lists: Readers enjoy lists as it’s an easy way to digest a lot of information. They are frequently used to present information found from research.
  Examples: “10 ways to be a better mother”, “25 ways to please your loved one”, “100 great sporting moments”.

It pays to go the extra mile in order to present great content to your readers. I recently wrote a post entitled ‘101 Great Blogs You Should Be Subscribing To‘. The article simply listed blogs which I thought readers would find useful. Anyone could have found those blogs through a search engine but that would have been time consuming. I simply did the hard work for everyone and listed all the sites in a presentable blog post.

It paid off. The post generated a huge jump in traffic, hundreds of new subscribers to the Blogging Tips Feed, around 375 Retweets and over 80 comments. This was not pure luck; nearly all of the articles I have written which solve a problem or list a lot of information are actively retweeted and linked to.

If you are struggling for an idea for a blog post or are just looking for ways of improving your blog with great content then I encourage you to do the hard work for your readers. Start solving more problems and put more emphasis on research for your blog posts.

Written by Kevin Muldoon from Blog Themes Club
Posted on October 20th, 2009 and filed under Blogging
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