5 Ways to Provide the Fresh Blog Content Your Fans Crave

We’ve all seen a teenager open the refrigerator for the thirteenth time hoping miraculously that a pizza has appeared where only broccoli lay before.

There’s a marvelous scene in one of the Crocodile Dundee movies where someone points out that his hotel room has a television. He turns it on saying, “I’ve seen television before.” As the I Love Lucy theme fades in he says, “Yup, that’s what was on”.

Can you imagine if the food in the fridge really never changed or if the show on television was actually always the same?

There are some activities in life which hinge on variety, newness, change, to keep our attention. Eating the same foods over and over again gets boring fast – even pizza.

The single greatest reason for potential fans (which means potential purchasers of your book) to visit your website is to find something new.

Well, do they?

There are billions of pages on the internet. It is naïve to believe that anyone but your mother is so interested in you that after finding the same content at your website three weeks in a row they will bother coming back again.

Advertising will not solve this problem. Spending money for exposure will only amplify what people can already see. And what they see is the same thing every time.

The best search engines emulate human behavior. There used to be a certain perverse logic in writing for the search engines. I can tell you as a web professional with over 16 years of experience that today the best way to attract search engines is to write for human beings.

And human beings thrive on what’s new.

Blogging is the easiest marketing you can do. If you find blogging too difficult, I assure you that you will find all of marketing too difficult. This leaves you two choices. Give up or find a way to blog.

I do not advocate the former. Let me help with the latter.

While I blog daily here at Someday Box and recommend blogging three times a week even for beginners, writing something once a week is enough to keep visitors coming back. Less than once a week and I don’t believe you’ll capture them.

Here are some bullet points to consider that should make blogging once a week easier than you’re imagining:

1. Posts do not have to be long; in fact, shorter is better, which is a lesson I’m trying to teach myself. To this point this post has been about 400 words. You could write half that and be just fine.
2. Writing how you feel is far more important than writing what you think. Your fans want to connect emotionally, not intellectually.
3. That means that what you write about doesn’t have to be specifically about your book, specifically about you, specifically about your writing process. Virtually anything can be connected to one of those things by how it makes you feel.
4. “Writing” does not have to mean sitting down and typing at the keyboard. Experiment with recording your posts using your cell phone or software on your computer. Experiment with video. If typing 200 words is unpleasant, you won’t do it. There are other ways.
5. Regularity and persistence are what will keep readers coming back. People are desperate for emotional connection and if they can come to your blog once a week and get 200 heartfelt words, they will not demand brilliance. They will happily let you trickle what you believe into their minds and those who believe what you believe about the things that are important to you and your writing will become fans because that’s how it works.