Every blogger markets his/her products/services/company/skills etc. by publishing useful content on his/her blog.

One of the most important things about marketing via blogging is connection!

With a blog, you have information for the world – no matter whether it is in the form of text, images, videos etc. – it is still some form of pixels on a screen.

The information, no matter how useful or amazing, is lifeless, unless you add some personality, and voice to it and use it to connect with people.

That’s the focus of this blog post.

I write this post motivated by the fact that I see so many lifeless posts. The posts could be informational and even entertaining. But if the posts don’t have a human touch to it, the information there is lifeless.

And it fails to make your readers feel connected, your business and the information you present.

Yes, no matter what kind of information you provide in your blog, it has to be in a conversational tone and not sound like a lecture.

I usually talk to myself when I write my blog posts – either loudly or within myself. I talk as I write and I write as I talk.

When I’m alone or if I’m working in a separate room in a house I usually speak out the post loudly.

I picture myself talking to my target audience (you) who is sitting just before me and I just type the blog post.

Believe me I do this seriously for every blog post I write.

There is an added advantage to this:

I also get to know the possible queries that the target reader will/could ask when I present a tip or a strategy.

I get questions like “what if it doesn’t work”, “what are the loopholes or drawbacks in this strategy” and so on. This helps me to write posts that cover many facets of a particular topic.

OK so let’s dive in further – before that, I have created a course specifically to help you with content creation. You can check it out here.

Content Marketing: How To Write Posts That Makes Your Reader To Feel Connected?

See, I came across this question when I was picturing conversing this topic with my target reader (you) and the reader asked this question:

OK Jane, you say that I can make my blog readers feel connected by writing every blog post as if I talk to my readers. But how do I write posts like that?

And here goes my answer.

Stay Super Focused

When you are writing a blog post, you cannot be tweeting, texting, updating Facebook and hanging out in Google+.

The more sharply you focus on writing your blog post, the more you can respect the reader who is sitting in front of you.

From my experience I’ve found that whenever I multi-task while writing a blog post, I just try to put the information in.

I usually outline my blog posts and I try to fill the bits in. Surely, posts written like this will be information-rich – but they will lack user-friendliness.

This is something I’ve found from my personal experience.

So stay super focused when you are writing your blog post.

Respect the blog reader who’s sitting in front of you and make that conversation really real.

Use “You”, “Your”, “Me” “My” etc.

Talk directly to your blog’s loyal reader. Did you notice how I’m talking to “you” in this post?

Let me pause the natural flow of this post for a second and give you a sample of how bad this post will read if I write in a different tone:

Well, that was so hard to write for me In fact I started putting “you” and “I” at many places and deleted to rewrite in an alien tone! That’s good for me and you.

Content Marketing Is Based On Understanding Your Blog Readers Well

How well do you know your readers? Have you identified your readers in the first place?

Do you know that you have to first identify YOUR target audience before you start writing blog posts?

Without understanding their current stand, you will not understand their problems.

And not just that – you won’t understand their capacity as well.

If you are going to guide them to overcome their problem, you need to know what language you should use to talk to them – basic, intermediate or advanced?

You need to know their current level of understanding and also how much they can afford (in terms of investing time, money, expertise etc.).

How To Understand Your Readers?

Now that’s a million dollar question, isn’t? But it’s not that difficult as you may think of.

I actually use the following methods to get hold of my readers’ levels and expectations.

On a side note, Semrush is great for finding what keywords your blog is currently ranking for – this information is gold and I have not seen any other SEO tool provide this information so far.

Content Marketing: Key Takeaway

I stress that again – talk to your readers! And that’s the best form of content marketing.

Before you talk, get to know about their level of knowledge, involvement and their capacity to invest time, money or anything from their end.

Content marketing that has the humane element into it will work best.

Jane shares cutting-edge, practical blogging tips at her blog Savvy Blogging Tips. If you want to get a head start with blogging or want guidance to make progress, check out the FREE resource at this page.

But not all bloggers are making money as they should.

You know, there are white hat ways to stuff and also black hat ways.

Be it SEO, blogging, doing business, loving people, whatever! And yes, blogging is not an exception.

There are various ways to make money via blogging – both white hat and black hat.

Quoting 1 Corinthians 10:23 –

All things are lawful for me, but all things are not expedient

In this context there are numerous ways to make money blogging but not all ways are ethical and white hat.

Let me share 3 shady things I happen to see quite commonly these days.

Faking Stuff

Image source

Faking has become a fashion thing these days.

Especially in the blogging world, people fake so many things in order to keep things afloat. Let me give you a few examples of faking:

So Why Do Bloggers and Online Entrepreneurs Fake Things?

Bloggers and entrepreneurs mostly do this in order to make money.

And I am not only talking about new/emerging entrepreneurs, even the established bloggers and also some of the big companies do this all the time.

“Fake it until you make it” is popular just because a blogger can pretend to have already succeeded or have achieved something while he/she haven’t had a clue yet.

So why do they do that? Let’s see an example. Blogger A starts a blog and blogs for 2 months.

He/She hasn’t yet succeeded in making money (it is OK given that the blog is relatively new). But the blogger writes and publishes posts about how to make money online.

He offers a product or a service that promises to teach other bloggers how to make money.

Now, people are smart these days. Unlike the old times, people won’t believe a promise that is made online; because there are way too many promises that create hype.

And people are quite tired being ripped off by such fake promises.

Now in order to make people believe him/her and in order to boost his own sales, the blogger has to provide some sort of proof! Here are some examples:

• Posting fake pictures of himself living a luxurious life – a picture of a posh car, a really big and posh house and so on.
• Pretending as if he has “achieved” success by posting fake screenshots of Paypal payments.
• Showing fake graphs of traffic, product sales, etc.

These are a few examples.

Now I don’t say that all bloggers who share photos of happy life or screenshots of traffic are faking.

There are genuine bloggers who are living their dream. One good example is Erik.

I follow him on social media and he posts a lot of pictures as I see them in my Facebook feed!

His pictures clearly tell me that he has a great time quite often

Another example is Ryan. He shares everything about him in his blog and he truly does so.

I’m talking about those who fake it in order to trick people into their trap.

Stealing Stuff

Image source

This is another major issue in the blogosphere. There are people who steal all kinds of stuff. Images, blog posts, smart ideas, blog design, and so on.

Now, I am not telling that you shouldn’t learn from the pros. Of course you can steal and you should steal some.

That’s part of learning and improvising. You can steal blog post templates, title templates, worksheets for a particular purpose like a planner or a calendar etc.

But there are people who lift content, images and ideas just like that without even giving proper credit to the content owner.

It used to be really worse a while ago before Google released the major algo updates.

At that time there were the so-called “auto blogs” that were simply set up so that the blog owner can rip content off a blog automatically (how comfortable!) using a plugin which retrieves content from the corresponding blog’s RSS feed.

The blog owner doesn’t even have to search for content and he/she doesn’t even have to copy paste it. The whole stealing process was comfortably automated.

Even today, I see some of those auto blogs.

Why Do People Do This?

Mainly because they’re lazy. Lazy to create their own content. Lazy to create anything of their own but still want to make money without doing real work.

They want some piece of code to do the stealing for them so they can cash in money from ads or other programs.

In short, they want to make money without doing any work!

Cheating Customers/Readers

This is another popular shady thing that’s quite common – cheating people. Now, cheating is a quite common term. Let me give you a few examples:

I can go on and on but you get the idea.

So Why Do Bloggers Cheat?

Again it all boils down to making money. Every cheating act is directly or indirectly related to money as I can see.

Not all people will be smart enough to catch these kind of cheaters.

For instance in the feature list of a web hosting package there could be so many promises.

But not all people will go through their account details in the control panel to check if they have been provided with all that was promised.

Apart from the bandwidth and disk space all the other features are mostly over looked.

Similarly not all people will remember about a product’s license or their support feature after 5 years of purchasing.

So a lifetime update can easily cheat this fraction of people.

Why Am I Writing this Post?

Partly a rant.

Also a kind of mourn as you can assume.

While its totally fine to have the desire to make money through blogging, bloggers should not adopt any of these shady techniques to achieve their desire.

Your success should be genuine and should be based on hard work. Hard work certainly pays.

It might seem a lot easier to make money using these shady techniques. And a lot faster too!

But there’s isn’t much value to it, and of course its not ethical to do so.

That’s my little message. Hope I conveyed it correctly. Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

But if we take a deep look inside the so-called blogosphere, there are numerous (yes, numerous) bloggers who are struggling to make a single dollar with their blogs.

Now, before you ask a question, let me make myself clear. Yes, I’ve titled this post to be about “blogging success“. You may ask, does blogging success merely relate to money? Of course not!

But when a blogger is struggling to make money and is indeed worried about the same, his/her blogging success is probably in question.

OK now let me get back to the first paragraph. There are numerous bloggers who struggle to gain recognition. They struggle to get blog readers. They struggle to get attention in social media and other places. Yes, they want others to share their blog posts, but that never happens.

Comments, blog posts going viral, clients, authority, products being sold like hot cakes, payments coming into bank account from affiliate commissions – all these happen in the sweetest dreams of many bloggers! But sadly, none of those happens in reality.

Here comes the most important bit, please pay attention.

Most bloggers approach me after they’re already blogging for a few months telling me that they don’t know what their interest is and they don’t know “how” to make money with their blog!

This clearly shows that they’ve simply started a blog with no vision and no clear goal. And then they keep worrying about their blogging success, when they’ve not yet defined “success”.

In this post I am going to address some of the very basic yet highly crucial things you need to set right so that you can actually achieve blogging success, faster.

Do You Have a Goal?

Many newbie bloggers email me asking me help with blogging. For most cases, I email them back with one question:

Do you know the purpose of blogging? Or Why do you blog?

You could be shocked at what I am going to tell you now. Most of them reply: I don’t know.

This is something serious. Even before you think about a name for your blog, even before you get a domain name and even before you start writing your first blog post, you should get a crystal clear view of why you want to do this, in the first place!

Otherwise, success will simply be a day dream. I’m not trying to scare you or discourage you; but that’s a fact.

Do You Have a Business Model?

Having a blog and writing blog posts is not a business. A blog won’t help you succeed unless it’s backed up by a good business model. You should only use your blog as a tool in the front end.

At the back end there should be a business model.

A business model is totally different from having a goal (my previous point).

A business model contains the bits and pieces that help you achieve the “goal” – of course, these “bits and pieces” need to be put in a strategic manner.

You may be interested in reading this : Make Money Blogging – Is This Really Possible?

Be Warned: Blogging Will Take Time and Smart Work

Most bloggers’ worries can be washed off right away just with a simple understanding (the understanding itself is simple, but I didn’t say it would be simple to accept it – anyway…).

You must accept the fact that blogging will take a decent amount of time and some kick-butt hard work up front before you can start seeing any kind of results.

It takes somewhere between 3 to 6 months of real hard work before you can see some sort of traction. Yes hard work.

Blogging is not a silver bullet.

There is no overnight success with blogging.

There is no magic push button.

Work smart

There’s always some sort of learning associated with anything. Blogging is no exception. When you start as a newbie blogger, you are prone to make a lot of mistakes. That’s fine.

But your smartness should come into play right from the beginning. You should start to learn from your mistakes; they’re lessons. Don’t ignore them!

If you found out that something didn’t work out today, try an alternate. If it works don’t just go back to the next thing.

Rather, take a moment to step back and analyze. Find out what went wrong and what actually fixed the problem. And take note of it so that when a similar situation happens in the future, you could use this analysis and cut down a lot of time and effort.

Learn on the go and improvise. In short, work smart. Don’t reinvent the wheel every time.

And keep a journal (private or public) of your most important findings and mistakes. I recently wrote a blog post out of my private journal >> 12 things I learned about blogging in 2012 – This is nothing but a compilation of the mistakes I did, things that worked out perfect for me and the lessons I learned!

Takeaway

As you can see, the four points I mentioned above are no-brainers. But they’re highly crucial for your blogging success.

If you ignore them, you will end up wasting hours of your blogging effort and will simply be worrying about success.

We all want success, right? So stop worrying about it, and get things going.

Go back to square one and get these little things straight.