Hey Gang,

This week we're going to piggy-back a little on last week's Whiteboard Friday that discussed how to increase your blog's visibility.  So you get readers to your site, now, how do you keep them there?  Well the direct answer is great content. Create awesome material that keeps your readers interested and engaged and they'll keep coming back for more. Beyond that, they may even hit the "Koolaid Point" and become fans and evangelists for you, helping to grow your audience even wider.

So what are the four cornerstones of creating great content?  Watch the video and Rand will discuss them in all of their glory.  When you're done, scroll down and we'll briefly recap the main points for you.





As promised, let's quickly go over the main points covered in the video.  There are four major areas to consider when you're generating content to attract and engage readers:

• Inspiring material--If you want bland content, then go ahead, write about paint drying. If you want awesome content, then write about the dangerous chemicals released as paint dries, or 13 ways to make paint dry faster, or the best paints for true one-coat coverage so you don't need to worry about drying time! If you can't picture the title as an exciting enticement on the cover of a magazine, it's probably dull and could stand a tweak of perspective to punch it up a bit.

• Timeliness--Trends come and go so fast online that if you blink, you can miss it. If you can position yourself at the head of the curve, just before a story/trend/topic explodes, you'll be a thought leader, reference source, and veritable black hole for links on the subject.  Look at the trend curve below. That red 'X' is where you want to hit. Rand discusses this in more detail in the video.

• Quality of Content--This factor is multi-fold. The quality of your content depends on not only your writing skill, but having site/page design appropriate to the material you're presenting.  One more time, allow us to plug "Don't Make Me Think," buy it, read it, pay attention to it.  Your content also needs to be informed and well-researched, but most importantly, it needs to be well-written. In blog-reader surveys, quality writing is always the number one most important factor in blog readership, return rate and longevity.

• Emotional Appeal--In order to create passionate devotees, and long-term readers, you need to understand your users. You need to empathize with their needs, anticipate their desires, and craft content that appeals to them on both informational and emotional levels.  The most influential sites speak to the reader in such a way that the user must keep reading to feel informed. Readers can identify so strongly with a site that they'll begin to feel that they don't know what to think about a topic without first consulting your blog.

If you're able to stick to these four cornerstones and allow them to guide your content creation efforts, you'll be well on your way to creating a devoted user base.  If you've just read through this recap, I suggest you scroll up and watch the video. It's only seven minutes, but it covers these four areas in greater detail than what I've written here, plus it's kinda flashy this week!