Welcome to lesson 10 on blogging.

I am now entering into the mid phase of the blogging course – content creation. Before I begin, ask yourself these questions: 

Have you wonder why other blogs of your similar niche are doing better than you? Have you wonder why your content is not attracting any traffic? Do you want the answers to the 2 questions?

 These are common problems that bloggers faced but yet many did not realize. I am one of the victims in my early days of blogging. I failed to realize that content is the soul of a blog. Learn from my mistakes and avoid it in your progression as a blogger.

This lesson I will be covering on what is quality content, importance of quality content and tips to improve quality of content. This knowledge on quality content is vital for the survival of any blog on any niches.

 

 

What is quality content?

 

There are many different definitions on this term. But I love to define quality content in a simpler way - Providing unique educational value to your readers. Write the content based on your own ideas to be unique. If you copy content from other blogs, you will definitely lose out in terms of quality and value. And this is also the reason why blogs of your similar niches are doing better than you. At the same time, focus your content based on your readers and not search engines.

 

 

Common Mistakes In Content

 

1) Irrelevant content

 

Post articles that are relevant to your niche. This is especially so when your blog is new. You need to cherish every opportunity you have to build up on your credibility. If you post articles that diversify from your niche, the chances of having your first time visitor coming back again is very slim. Avoid this “killer” mistakes if you want to progress on with your blog.

 

2) Wrong audience

 

Blog owners are becoming more and more focus on improving SEO. As a result, they start to write for the search engines instead of their readers. In such articles, you will notice a keyword that is being used repetitively so that it could be rank higher on search engines. The article will lose its value no matter how unique the content is. However, with Google introducing the use of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) into their algorithm, this mistake would be eliminated. I will devote an article on LSI later in this coaching blog.

 

 

Importance Of Quality Content

 

1) Credibility

 

Your blog becomes a trusted source when you produced quality content. Through your content, you can build up your reputation and credibility. You will eventually establish yourself as someone who has great knowledge on the niche you are covering.

 

2) Increase readership

 

You will retain a large portion of your visitors and convert them to your readers due to your quality content. This is a very good source of traffic you can leverage from. For example, if you have build up a base of 500 RSS subscribers, you should be able to get at least 10 of them linking to your articles as additional resource/reference for their blog. Through quality content, you have build up another traffic stream to your blog.

 

3) Increase search engine traffic

 

Quality content is important for ranking high in search engines and so are backlinks. Referring to lesson 8, quality content can increase the number of backlinks built. When you have many incoming links to your article, that particular article will rank better which improve your traffic from search engines.

 

 

Tips To Improve Quality Of Content

 

1) Variety of content

 

There are different ways in which you can bring your content across – Video, podcast, images, E-book etc. A variation of format in delivering you content makes it more interesting and engaging to your readers. I am learning to produce videos at the moment and you should expect the first video coming into ABloggerBlog this weekend.

 

2) Improve copywriting skills

 

Never underestimate the power of copywriting. This is a skill that needs time and practice to master it. When being used correctly, it will make the articles more interesting and compelling.

 

3) Make your content simple

 

Try to shorten your sentences and make it reader friendly. Use simple words that are able to convey the true meaning of the sentence. You need to consider that your readers might not be native English speaker and using simple language will minimize this problem.

 

4) Write your experiences

 

Include in your experiences to make the article more lively and interesting. Your readers will be able to learn from your mistakes and avoid repeating it. Isn’t this providing educational value to your reader as well?

 

 

Example Of Quality Articles

 

1) “How-to” articles

 

These are articles that teach readers how to do something. “How to build a computer?” is a quality article. These category of articles are well-liked by readers and will definitely have educational value.

 

2) List articles

 

You can do a list of points for a topic. For example, “10 tips to lose weight.” These articles are easy to read and yet at the same time provide educational value. You can include your own experiences in to make the list more interesting as well.

 

3) Definition articles

 

You can produce an article on the concept of a new term, clearly explaining what it means. Explain it in layman terms so that it is easily understood by the masses and avoid using technical terms to explain definitions. Quote examples to give a better foundation on the definition.

 

4) Q&A articles

 

Compile a list of questions from your readers and publish it under one post with your explanations. This becomes a learning platform for your readers. At the same time, you are also building relationship with your readers.

 

5) Review Articles

 

You can write a review on a product or services that you have used to bring awareness to your readers. Be honest about your review and not just focusing on selling the products to them. Portray the pros and cons of the product before justifying on why you think your readers should or should not get the product or services.

 

6) Interview

 

You can do a podcast interview with experts of your niche to provide additional information and resources. Podcast interviews been going relatively well for blogs and I do recommend you to do this. I don’t mind being your first interviewee if you asked me.

 

 

Additional Resources

 

1) Entrepreneurs-Journey

2) Improve the Web

 

 

These are some examples of quality articles and there are still more. Put on your creative cap when writing content and that content that you produce could be one that is unique and at the same time quality.

 

Be prepared to sacrifice an hour or more a day to produce content for your blog. Like I mention earlier, the more you practice on writing, the better you get. You will need to spend a lot more time when I introduce you to copywriting.

 

 

Tasks for lesson 10

 

1) Produce at least 3 quality articles for your blog weekly.

2) Start producing videos or podcast to add variety to your content. I have included the resources you can use for producing videos and podcast in here. Scroll down to lesson 10 resources to download the tools.

 

Subscribed to my blog now to get updates for every of my coaching lesson. Next lesson will be introducing to you on copywriting skills.

 

Wei Liang

ABloggerBlog.com