David Boozer wrote a post over the summer that really resonated with me. It was titled, “Do You Need a Million Readers For a Successful Blog?”
David makes the case that the answer is no, you don’t. But there are some things you do need, one of those being quality content and a content marketing strategy focused on creating high quality content to build authority in your niche.
I started following David a little over a year ago. He had joined the Copyblogger Authority program about the same time I did. The interesting thing to me about that was David already had a mentoring program of his own. So the fact that he found value in the Authority program was important to me. (And yes, after a year in Authority, I found value in it too – so much so that I renewed my subscription for another year.)
The Authority program is all about developing and building authority in your niche through a consistent process of developing high quality content and a content marketing strategy. But even more than that, there is the process of turning the resulting traffic from that content and content marketing efforts into income for your blog. The more you focus on building authority, the more likely that will be a successful process. In other words, casting a wide net in hopes of generating huge flows of (possibly uninterested) traffic is not going to result in success.
If you read David’s post, you’ll understand that having regular “customers” that are engaged and interested in what you have to say (and sell) is much more important that a large audience that is largely uninterested in what you have to offer. It doesn’t take much to figure out that the former is going to generate more income than the latter. Building authority with an engaged audience through an effective content marketing strategy is going to win over generic traffic sources.
[B]y creating the kind of content (blog content) that attracts and keeps people interested and credible, you create for yourself what the traditional business arena always called, “regular customers.”
As a blogger, these are the key elements to building a successful income with a blog, if that is what you are gauging your success on, which is what most bloggers do gauge by.
Yes, analytics are great to help find what is working best in your blog and to target that subject matter better, but money is the bottom line here, right?
Yes again! And that idea and philosophy should not wreck quality content, it should be a positive in creating quality blog content that continues to build authority and trust, as well as community and, “regular customers.”
Note his emphasis on “creating quality blog content” to “build authority.” This, I would argue, is a content marketing strategy that is much more effective than simply hoping for large amounts of nondescript traffic.
I must admit, early on in my blogging career, I thought that “the numbers game” of generating a large traffic stream would return untold wealth through advertising. While I still believe that it is generally true that you can generate significant revenues through advertising, I have learned it is not a realistic approach for the average blogger, especially one just getting started, to produce the kind of income needed to be full time. I have learned through the process of trying and doing different things, that generating income from a targeted audience is much more likely to yield success.
Here are some posts that will give you some additional insight on content marketing and how to build an effective content marketing strategy:
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