What’s the best blogging strategy to get your blog posts seen? SEO or Viral?  I’m not going to lie, this is a long post but might just be the determining factor of your success as a blogger so please read on…

I recall when I first started blogging I would pour my heart out and not get a single like/comment or follow. I just wanted to share and inspire but didn’t know how to reach my audience. As such, I thought I would share a little perspective…

Blogging Strategy Understood

To answer the question of what the best blogging strategy is, it’s important to know why you want your content to be seen (and I mean long-term).

What is it that you’re looking to accomplish?

Do you want to promote a business, sell a product, inspire people, just be heard…? or is it a combination or something else altogether?

Whatever your motivation is, your decision on an appropriate blogging strategy will really depend on how specific your target audience is and how quickly you want to see traffic to your post.

To help illustrate, I’ve included a list of pros and cons for both strategies below.

While there is obviously a degree of overlap on both, I’ll review them in isolation for the purpose of this list and then summarize at the end. Please keep in mind that the goal should always be to build an audience that trusts and enjoys your content. For this reason you should always focus on providing value.

Blogging Strategy – Viral Approach

This strategy is one that many attempt and few truly succeed at. Essentially “viral” posts are something people want to share. It could be something funny, something outrageous or something compelling. Regardless, it will be something that people want to share and interact on.

Pros

• Relatively quick to implement
• Free
• Can take off in an instant
• Typically allows for a more open approach to topic matter (SEO requires more initial planning)
• Allows for a broader audience that just like to hear from YOU because they like YOU :p

Cons

• The majority of the traffic you’ll receive is at the time of initially sharing (may be short lived)
• Visitors of a viral post may not ever see your blog again
• It can be challenging to know what people will respond well to and want to share (always a good idea to ask people to share your posts, btw 🙂 )

Please note that all posts receive some form of viral attention… even if that form is none! Think of it as a degree of viral attention. There are many bloggers that experience a slowly growing audience over a long period of time simply by posting on their blogs and slowing gaining awareness through the WordPress community as well as through sharing on social medial (eg Facebook/Twitter).

This is a great approach, it just might take a while and require a lot of consistent effort to develop a following.

However, if you continue to focus on quality, your audience will continue to grow. It’s inevitable! … and you might just luck out with a sensational post that goes explosively viral!

Blogging Strategy – The SEO Approach

In the SEO (search engine optimization) blogging strategy, the goal is to get traffic from people who are searching for specific phrases on Google, Bing, Yahoo etc.

To be successful at this, you’ve got to think of who your target audience and figure out what they are searching for. Once you do that, you can structure your post around a specific keyword phrase. Visit www.googlekeywordtool.com to see what people are searching for on your specific topic.

Here are my thoughts on this approach:

Pros:

• You can get highly targeted traffic to see your content
• You can get traffic for years after you create your content
• You can get enough traffic to crash a server :p (my favorite)
• Can get a consistent flow of NEW visitors to you blog

Cons:

• Posts will take a bit more work to create because there is a specific structures and keyword content is required
• Can take three to six months before your content will show up on first page of Google
• There is a learning curve and it is on-going
• Both on-site and off-site optimization can be required
• There can be costs involved to do off-site SEO

I’ve often referred to this approach as “Digital Real Estate” because it allows a person to build an asset that will produce traffic for years to come. It is a more serious blogging strategy but one that can allow for a lot of freedom in the long term once you have mastered it, and monetized it (I’ll get into how in a future post)

Blogging Strategy – Final Thoughts

No matter what strategy you pick it will be important to know why you want your traffic to visit your blog. You’ll need to tell them what to do once they visit your content.

Do you want them to be a customer of your business?  Or maybe you just want to spread the word? Be sure to let them know! Please share this if you’ve found it valuable!