Communicating Effectively with Your Blog Audience

I like this recent post from freelance writer, Internet marketer, and life coach Sylviane Nuccio about "Why Valuable Content is Not Enough to Attract Huge Traffic to Your Blog."

Blogging gurus often insist that good content is good enough to create a popular blog, but don't go deeply into what really constitutes good content.

In her post, Sylviane sets out some specifics that anyone creating a blog at either the corporate level or for a small business or other purpose can use to communicate more effectively with an audience and thus attract increased traffic:

Be a leader. People tend to follow leaders in their niche, those who have been successful or can share insights from their own experience that go beyond the information everyone else is providing.

Offer food for thought. Challenge your readers, go into topics others may be afraid to tackle, offer your opinion and be different. All of these are simple ways to offer thought provoking posts.

Create great headlines. Sylviane suggests a headline that will attract your potential reader. This, of course, means someone interested in your niche. To take things a step further, however, I'd suggest blog titles are the best place to employ Search Engine Optimization while at the same time piquing reader interest.

Pick the right platform. Sylviane focuses on the comment platform here, but obviously there are other things to consider, like using the right blogging platform (WordPress is super popular but Blogger and TypePad are also effective.)

Promote others' content. Hey, that's what I'm doing right here! Become a person known for sharing content and you'll have others sharing your content too. Don't forget that, just like other kinds of social media, blogging is a conversation. Sharing is one way to get the conversation started.

Create some connections The other part of sharing others' content, of course, is that you will also be creating connections with other bloggers. As Sylviane rightly explains, this is not the same as making connections with customers, but these other bloggers are the sources of natural backlinks that can help build your audience.

Leave intelligent comments.What's an intelligent comment? The opposite of a dumb one, of course, explains Sylviane. We're talking about those comments that say nothing like "Great post!" and "I think you are making some good points here." Let me add that, in a nutshell, an intelligent comment should add something to the conversation, perhaps a new thought or a question that can be answered by others.

Finally, let me end this post in the same way that Sylviane ended hers. What do you think? What are some ways you'd suggest for communicating effectively with a blog audience? Please leave an "intelligent" comment below!