Few months ago I wrote an article on blog’s own characteristics and how they are instrumental in bringing blogging success for a blogger. If you want to read it, here is the link for you:

Blogging success lies in blog’s own characteristics!

But this is different story. Long before starting this series about Blog Content Strategy – I decided that I should write at least one article about the most important characteristics of premium blog content. Here is the reason behind it.

For a couple of years I have been observing blogsphere very closely and found that there have been only few blogs in millions who actually dominating in the market in their respective fields. They are consistent in driving the most of targeted traffic to their blogs and becoming more popular among their readers while the rest of the blogs is still in the dark or getting some kind of scattered and inconsistent traffic.

Why is it so?

I started to introspect the real truth behind the success of those few handful blogs, which are in the limelight always occupying the top spots and rest of the blogs are far behind in the dark or getting some scattered lights.

While studying on them I found some interesting points for my findings report.

Premium Blog Content

There are certain similarities in most of the successful blogs irrespective of the differences in their domains or topics they blog about. The most important aspect of their success is that they are always driven to produce premium blog content over the years to satisfy their blog readers.

They produce premium articles or premium blog content to provide solutions to their people, educate their readers, inspire their followers and more importantly they are dedicated to provide benefits to their niche audience.

If you want to know how to write premium blog content – read my latest article. It is part of the series Blog Content Strategy.

How to write premium blog content?

Another important aspect of their success is the characteristics of their blog content. All of them have certain winning features or characteristics, which actually made the differences between successful blogs and rest of the blogs.

Important Characteristics of Premium Blog Content

If you notice those important characteristics of premium blog content, it will be easy for you to understand why they are miles away from the rest.

Visually Impressive

First of all, a successful blog is visually impressive. At a glance you will be attracted towards it by its unique design, layout, color combination, logo, pluggins, widgets and lots of other small but important components. Al together, it establishes uniqueness, professionalism and credibility of your blog.

It doesn’t essentially mean that you spend lots of money to design your blog. Just start with default theme or go for a premium blog theme like Thesis (if you are serious about blogging) to visually impress your visitors.

Unique Blog Content

A blog is successful when it has unique and confident voice. A reader always prefers to read uniquely created blog content focused on providing solution to a problem relevant to its niche rather than redundant and ambiguous common topics that are usually spread across the web.

Uniqueness in all-possible aspects of blogging such as topic selections, addressing problems, solution to those problems, writing skills, examples, real life case studies, personal opinions and in-depth analysis is the key to blogging success.

Relevant To Niche

A successful blog doesn’t try to address multiple and all-possible issues of life. It restricts its content only on those topics, which are necessarily relevant to its niche. It is specifically focused on providing quality blog content, which is relevant to its topics and address its readers’ needs.

Useful Rich Information

A successful blog is different in its approach in producing its content. It always tries to make an impression on its people by creating direct impact on them.

It is filled with useful rich information that helps people solve their problems, educate people on latest emerging technologies and ideas and enhance people to become successful ultimately. Therefore it is natural that people enjoy reading this kind of blog and absorb whatever published in it. It eventually increases targeted traffic, repeat visits and useful linkbacks to a blog.

Fundamental Analysis

A blog is successful when it dares to express it’s own opinion and analysis to bring fresh new ideas to challenge pre-conceived and erroneous concepts, reinvents intelligent tricks or techniques to replace a conventional lengthy process, comes out with fresh new point of views to challenge old-fashioned models and set up new path of success for its readers to follow.

So, become aggressive, explore as many resources as you can, update you knowledge and expertise, find out the needs of your niche, think about how you can contribute to solve their problems and come out with unique thought process and realistic solutions to fulfill those needs.

New Emerging Ideas

A blog takes almost no time to become it’s readers’ favorite when it continuously does researches on its niche’s needs and accumulates all possible useful but largely unnoticed emerging ideas, information and technologies from all possible sources and makes them available to its readers well in advance.

If people get first hand information from a blog, they’ll surely love it to absorb and come back again to know more about new concepts.

Straight To The Point

When a blog content address a problem straight to the point directly to its readers with crystal clear solution, then nothing can stop its growth and popularity. People love to read interesting, authoritative and credible articles from its favorite blog rather than finding it out from secondary sources.

Links or references to other sources are acceptable but it’s always better to include your own version of explanation if you are capable of doing it. People would like to hear it from you in your own voice on your blog.

Solid Archive’s Strength

A blog is successful when it can depend on its deep and solid archive strength. So, it is recommended to have a dependable archive of premium blog content that can be referred as major resource of necessary facts.

A successful blog always use its archive’s strength to highlight its best premium blog content whenever required. It convinces its readers to get value from old valuable posts and stay around for more.

So, provide deep or direct links from latest posts to those related archived posts to show your archive strength and valid reason why your new readers should spend more time at your blog to get maximum out of it.

Comprehensive Solution To Real Problem

When people find realistic and comprehensive solution to a real problem from any source then it becomes their most favorite destination.

That’s why, instead of dealing with ordinary and well-conversed topics, try to address complex and obscure problems of your niche and come out with rational and practical solution to those problems. It will be easy for you to get loyal visitors to your blog within a short span of time.

Comprehensively Defined Goals

A premium blog has comprehensively defined goals and blog content should clearly reflect them. It helps your readers to clearly understand what exactly is your blog about. If those goals match with your readers’ needs then it would be easier for them to permanently stay with you and absorb whatever you post on your blog.

Address Multipurpose Issues

Experts recommend that a blog article or post should be capable of addressing more than one issue in different conditions. It essentially means that it can have more than one title and can be referred as the solution to more than one issue relevantly.

For example, this post is not limited to Important characteristics of premium blog content. It also can be referred as Premium blog content strategies or Secrets of blogging success. It actually suggests that a blog post should be capable of addressing multipurpose issues in different conditions and provide realistic solution to each and every issue that is addressed separately.

Easily Searchable Content

A blog is considered as readers’ friendly when it provides its readers with ample opportunities to get as many posts as they wish at their reach. So, ‘Search this blog’ could be a good option for your blog readers.

If your readers are able to search your entire blog content by keywords, titles, descriptions, headings and sub headings, it would be helpful for them to easily find out exactly what they look for. It also helps your readers to spend more time at your blog, know more about your blog content and want to come back to know more from it.

Responsive To Readers’ Criticism

Without readers’ active participation a blog can’t be popular. You would need to encourage your readers to actively participate on your blog with constructive criticism. It could be in your favor or against of you. But, if you provide the freedom of criticism on your blog, only then your readers would open their heart out.

If they agree with you, they refer your post to others and if they disagree it, then also want to show their opinions to others.

Conclusion:

In this post, I tried to address all possible important characteristics of premium blog content that are instrumental in building a successful blog. If you work on implementing all of the above said characteristics to your blog, most certainly you will get the result that you probably looking for.

If you find – I missed some other characteristics that should be addressed in this post, please feel free to recommend them in your comments.

A friend in the business

Debabrata Dhar

Content is the key to success of a blog – it is already proved and thousands of pages have already been written on this topic by many expert bloggers.

They repeatedly told that there is nothing but content that separates a great blog from the rest. It is primarily because of the great content provides quality substance to engage targeted people on your blog and they get value from it.

Secret Of Providing Great Blog Content

If you carefully notice a few of successful blogs of your interest, you will discover that the secret of their success lies in mainly two things -

• They produce compelling and engaging content on a consistent basis over time.
• They use their own unique style that separates them from others.

Now, how do you blog, it will solely depend on you – This may vary from blogger to blogger as each blogger has the right to use his or her own style and new style is always appreciated and effective – however there are some basic principles of producing great blog content that you might consider while producing content for your own blog.

Know Your Strength

Before heading a start analyze your strength. What are the pluses (strong points) do you have that you think worthy sharing with others. Try to list all of them. Build your long term plan and work accordingly based on your strength.

If you overlook your strength at the start, you might loss your control in the middle. Natural tendency of a new blogger is to achieve quick success by any means. It prompts him to run after all possible sources of traffic, revenue and contacts. In the process he might loss his focus.

If you know your strength, you will be in full control. If you have control, you can organize your plan, set your goals and can work accordingly to achieve them. You will be always in right direction and never get lost in the middle.

Otherwise you will loose your control putting yourself outside of your comfort zone. This situation is not ideal for a new blogger to grow and build.

Become Expert On Your Topic

Why do people visit certain blogs?

People visit certain blogs where

• They find value
• They find relevant and quality information
• They find proper solutions to certain problems
• They find fresh new idea
• They find motivation
• They find direction
• and you can add more in the list …

A blog gets continuous flow of targeted visitors if it provides all of the above consistently over time.

So, whichever niche topic you decide to blog about, you need to provide all of the above to your tageted audience. It is possible if you are expert in that topic. A bunch of articles on scattered topics don’t help you in any way unless they are useful to your targeted audience.

So, it is recommended that you spend some time to research on topic that you like or want to contribute on your blog. Examin which content you really appreciate as a reader. After investigating, if you find that you could come out with more improved version and easy to acceptable solution with proper analysis and clarification and justify your contribution to be benificial to your readers, then go ahead. Be ready to start your long blogging journey.

You as a blogger should publish information that people enjoy reading, get solutions to their problems, get fresh new idea to motivate themselves and get proper direction towards their success. Above all, you should work like an institute dedicated to educate real people on your own domain.

Look At Your Content From Your Reader’s Point Of View

Put yourself in place of your readers. Try to find out what as a reader you want to get from your blog.

• Do you enjoy reading your own content?
• Does your content useful?
• Do you get inspired?
• Does it really educate yourself?
• Is it able to solve a real problem?
• Is it able to provide fresh new idea?
• Is it able to translate new thought process?
• Does your content encourage interactions?
• Do you want to come here again to see how the next post is going to solve another issue?

If you get positive answers to all of the above questions, then you are on the right track.

Build Expectations In Your Visitor’s Mind

As a blogger your task is not just producing great content randomly. Come out with strong, interesting and engaging content with clear solutions to specific problems.

If you need a series of blog posts rather than a single post to explain a certain topic on your blog, do it without hesitation, it would be even better for your blog. Your reader will be eagerly waiting for the next post of the series to know your next idea. As a result, it will build expectation in your readers mind. Your visitors will be looking forward for more and it will improve repeat visits to your blog.

For example, lets take this post.

It is the 2nd post in the series. This series is dedicated to Blog Content Strategy. In the previous post I explained how to select great blog topics and this post is all about how to write great blog content. Similarly I will come out with another aspect of blog content strategy in the next post.

So, from this example, it is clearly evident that you will get not just detail understanding of blog content strategy but also my point of view on it. It will surely create your expectation and you will eagerly wait for the next post to come.

This effort not only create great blog content relevant to the topic but also attract same visitors to repeat his or her visit to my blog.

Create Blog Content For Your Readers, Not For Search Engines

People like good content, not keywords stuffing. If your content is full of keywords, it will not be an interesting, problem solving and mind blowing content. It might rank well in major search engines, but people will refuge to consume it.

So, create your blog content for the benefit of your readers not for search engines. They are all human beings and your content should focus on providing real information to them. Keywords will come in natural way into your content if you concentrate on producing content for real people.

Don’t Be Just A Blogger, Be A Curator

Blog is not just about writing good content. I already told you that a successful blogger is percieved as an expert in his domain. If he is not, he has to be. Otherwise people will not listen to him.

As a blogger, your task is not just to edcate your people or provide interesting fresh new content but to give away little more to them.

Random knowledge is not going to do any favour to your readers though they are good and informative. You should also provide complete guidance to your readers. They will know from you what is the next to learn that is appropriate and what are the things that need to be learnt so that they get proper direction towards succes in your own domain. If you can do it, your succes is inevitable.

Just think beyond blogging, educate your people on your blog for the future to come.

Your friend the business

Debabrata Dhar