Focus Your Blog To Improve Traffic And Profit

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“What do you blog about?

Having a succinct, specific answer when someone asks what your blog’s about is the first step toward improving your traffic and, ultimately, to increased blogging income. As we’ve discussed before, people read blogs for two reasons: to get information and to be entertained.

Blog advertisers know this, which is why they choose where to place ads based on what a blog is about. They want their ads running on blogs that appeal to the kind of people likely to buy their product or service, and the best way to accomplish this is by running ads on blogs that clearly focus on their demographics.

If you want readers to think of your blog as a daily destination, and especially if you want your blog to generate advertising income, then you need to focus your blog.

1. Why you need a focus.

Many people, when starting their blog, look at it as a place to write about the goings on in their daily lives. Such a blog not only appeals to family and current friends, but also tends to lead to friendships with readers who feel they’ve come to know the blogger more personally. As the blog matures, the writer begins sharing opinions on a variety of topics they find interesting and maybe even doing some paid entries for various companies.

And that’s great, but it won’t bring in the lucrative blog advertising that generates easier income, the kind where companies pay $60 just for an ad in the sidebar. To get those, your blog needs more of a focus.

2. You don’t necessarily need to change your blogging style.

Chances are, your blog has more of a focus than you realize. We all tend to have certain topics we gravitate toward, whether that’s cooking or shopping or trying out the latest video games. One way to refine your blogs focus is to analyze what you’ve already written about.

a. Look at your tag cloud: If you’ve been tagging entries properly, your tags can provide a rich insight into the areas you tend to cover more heavily. If you’re running WordPress 2.3+ (and if you’re not you really do need to upgrade ASAP for security reasons), create a tag cloud to show what tags you’ve been blogging about most often. It’s easy to do. Just open your sidebar.php file and insert the following code:

Save your file and view your new tag cloud. The larger tags show topics you’ve covered more heavily, which means you’ve already been focusing on them, even if you didn’t know it.

b. Look at your categories: Take a glance at your category names, too. Do any of the areas relate to each other or overlap? Consider, for instance, the following list:

Recipes (29)
Wine (7)
Menus (51)
Cookbooks (18)
Scrapbooking (34)
Knitting (29)
Sewing (18)
Housekeeping (6)
Kids (37)
Marriage (22)
Games (3)
Vacations (7)
News (19)

Clearly, this is a blog written by a domestically-minded person with a variety of interests, but none stand out as more important than the others at first glance. But what if we rearranged the categories into more generalized subjects with child categories?

Cooking
Recipes
Menus
Cookbooks
Wine

Crafts
Scrapbooking
Knitting
Sewing

Family
Parenting
Marriage
Vacations
Games

News

We’ve just found a focus for this blog: it’s cooking, crafts, and family. If we looked through the 19 “News” items they probably touched on one or more of those topics, too. Now, it’s clear this isn’t a blog focused on 13 different topics. It’s actually one covering three primary, easily identifiable subjects and it always has been. Now that the blogger knows it she can communicate that to her readers and potential advertisers, too.

If you took my advice on installing 10 Must-Have WordPress plugins, changing your category names to reflect your focus will also change your blog’s meta-tags. Next time the bots crawl your page you’ll start appearing in results related to your new category structure.

3. A focus brings more regular readers and more comments.

If you’ve been writing a blog that’s about your daily life, interests and opinions — without any real primary focus among them — then you probably already know your readership is casual about their visits. Some friends will visit daily just to find out what you’ve been up to, whereas other readers stop by only now and then. Those casual readers visit because they find you interesting, but they haven’t yet begun to look at your blog as a daily destination. The result is sporadic and slow-growing traffic, both of which can drastically impair your ability to make money with your blog.

Once you find a blog focus, your page becomes a source of information. Since that’s one of the two reasons why people read blogs, your site becomes a resource which will attract readers who are interested in (and sometimes knowledgeable about) your topics. That combination leads to greater comment participation among your readership, a change which brings about a committed readership while further enhancing your authority on your focus topics.

4. Once you know your focus, you can promote your blog better.

Having established the primary subjects your blog is about, now it’s time to start networking with other bloggers in your area. Use tools like BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog to find similarly focused blogs and start reading them. Network with other bloggers in your area by “friending” them or joining their neighborhood; link their entries and comment on theirs.

Eventually you’ll start receiving links from them, and those links will help tell search engines about your blog’s focus, too. That reinforcement will go a long way toward making your blog stand out.

5. A focus helps you blog better, too.

Writing new blog entries requires inspiration. If you were the blogger in the example above, how much inspiration would you really find bouncing from news headline to news headline? Sure, you might run across an article now and then that sets you off, but the rest of your browsing time could be so much more productive.

When you know your blog is primarily about cooking, crafts and family, for instance, it’s obvious that those are the topics you should also be reading about. Making them a priority will give you more ideas for things to blog about, which means you’ll be updating more often, giving readers an even greater incentive to return regularly.

6. A strong focus brings more advertising.

When an advertiser signs up with a company to place ads on blogs they provide certain information about the demographic they’re interested in. That information relates to the type of product they sell and the type of person likely to be interested in it. A company selling home remodeling, for instance, won’t be interested in blogs written by college kids or relating to college life, the club scene or finding roommates since those readers aren’t likely to own their own home.

But such an advertisers would be interested in a blog about cooking, crafts and family life. Why? Because people who have domestic interests tend to have a home in which to be domestic, and they tend to enjoy improving it, too. Focusing your blog helps advertisers see that there is a benefit to giving you their money, and isn’t that what you’re here to make happen?

Take time to analyze and think about your blog’s focus. Are you writing about specific topics more often than others? If so, does anyone — including you — realize this? Once you know where your blog is rich on content you can begin to establish yourself as an authority on those areas, drawing not only more readers and reader participation, but further opportunities to make money writing about the things you already love.

Tomorrow: How to find your focus if you still think don’t have one.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, January 19th, 2008 at 3:53 pm and is filed under Building Traffic (Blogging 201), Make Money Blogging. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Tagged in: advertisers | blog focus | blog traffic | demographics | niche | readership

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