Are You Staying on Topic – or Losing Traffic?

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What’s your niche? If you’ve been writing your blog for any more than a couple of weeks then you should hopefully be able to answer that question pretty easily. But how many times have you actually stopped to review your work? As you blog, you will naturally learn new things and grow. Like-wise your blog will continuously evolve; this is perfectly normal, and it’s certainly not a bad thing.

The problem comes when you start to meander and lose focus: As you build your blog you will of course think of new subjects you want to cover, but if you stray too far from what you set out to write about you might be leaving your loyal readers behind and perhaps ruining the hard work you put into your SEO in the first place.

How to tell if you’re on target

Think about your blog from a readers point of view… Or if it’s easier, think about how you explore other peoples blogs. Both new blogs (that is, new to you) and blogs you are familiar with.

Personally, when I find a new blog, it is via a post that I am directed to courtesy of one of the many blogs I read regularly. I will read the post, and if I like it I will explore that blog a little further. This generally starts with a look at the home page, where I will scan down the most recent posts. If I have enjoyed a post, I will generally look for other, similar posts that look interesting to me, and if I find any I will read them too. If I don’t find any in the most recent however-many posts, I will usually leave to get back to whatever I was doing.

You can see how not staying on topic might lose a reader in this instance. If you are writing good posts, that attract new visitors, but you later leave that topic behind, you might well miss the opportunity to gain many a new reader.

How to make money @ blogging

The best way to make money online from blogging is to build a loyal readership. Having 1000 dedicated readers who trust you and come back often is far more lucrative than having 10,000 visitors who come and go, or worse yet never come back. Staying on topic is key if you want to keep your readers. Branch out into related topics sure, but remember what your core niche is, and always try to relate back to that topic.

Your readers will probably be happy to read something a little off topic every now and then, it helps keep things fresh. But whatever topics you explore, make sure that a new visitor can see exactly what your blog is about as soon as they arrive… otherwise you may not get the chance to show them.

So next time you write a blog post, read it over afterwards, think about what you have been writing about lately. Ask yourself if the topic is a good fit for your audience. Finally, ask yourself if there are any topics that you haven’t talked about for a while. If you abandon an old topic in pursuit of new ones, remember the readers you might be abandoning too.

This is a guest post by Mark of thebusinessnomad.com