Hello again, it’s Chris from The Traffic Blogger. I’m a blogger who specializes in driving traffic, building relationships, and earning an income online. Today I’d like to discuss with you the way relationships and content creation can be used together to build your business online.
Image Credit: TopRank Blog (@TopRank): Beyond Google; SEO and the Social Web
Image inspired by another graphic from Adam Singer (@AdamSinger) in his post 10 Reasons Why Social is Your Future SEO Strategy
In a previous post for Growmap, I spoke about how relationships were king; not content like the rest of the Internet seems to believe these days. I’d like to clarify and give some information which will hopefully help your blogging endeavors. Let’s look at how great content can be used to build awesome relationships, instead of arguing over which is better than the other.
Consider a piece of content which someone reads and then never returns to the same site again. If you’ve ever worked as a computer programmer you know exactly what I’m talking about. You look for a piece of code, find it, copy it and never even look at the name of the site you got it from. Maybe you can relate to picking up a piece of blogging code or html. This kind of content might get lots of Google traffic but it does not build relationships and therefore does not earn (much) money. What you need is not just content, but the “right” kind of content.
So what is the right kind of content for your site that will build relationships and earn you the revenue stream you’re looking for? Well, I’ll start off by saying that the right content requires an understanding of what your niche really wants to know. Then you have to take this information and go one layer deeper by making inferences and coming to conclusions about the topic at hand. Relevant yet controversial content is the best form of the “right” content when it comes to sparking conversations with new readers. Consider my previous post on Growmap as it definitely fits this description well.
A relationship, in the online marketing sense, is really just maintaining a subscriber who actively gets involved on your site, whether that be through your autoresponder, a forum or whatever you work with online. Content which inspires relationships (aka subscribers) is the real king in every way and your ticket to success online.
This “right” content is not limited to posts as you can create it on any form of social media or anywhere else online. Basically, every interaction you have with both potential subscribers and fellow bloggers needs to provide value in order to build a relationship with them. People read into the value of the content and come to the general consensus that it’s the content which is king, not the relationship which it inspires. This leads to bloggers writing content solely on the premise that they believe it to be useful and of excellent quality, but that doesn’t necessarily lead to more subscribers. Just think about my coding example and whether anyone is going to stick around to hear more about what you have to say based on your post alone.
From what I’ve said so far, you should now be seeing a pattern in what defines the “right” content.
What are your thoughts on content and relationships? Have you experienced your own content going viral? What changes could you make to possibly improve your relationship building content?
Thanks for reading and please take a look at my two most recent publications on blogging and earning an income online: The Why People Course and Black Sheep.
Sincerely,
Chris