How To Find Out What To Write on Your Blog

I assume that if you started to write a blog you want to have more and more readers coming to your site. I know that's what I want!

The phrase "I started a blog just as an online diary." is just silly... If you want a diary (even online) then you can simply write emails to yourself. There's noo need to make your diary public unless you truly want that. If your blog is not private and it's a diary then you should admit that you'd like some strangers to stop by and read your posts. Seriously! You want readers!

I started this blog for a few reasons:

• to write about my passions: climbing, mountaineering, mountain biking and other outdoor activities
• to promote extreme sports and to make people want to go outdoors
• to promote my outdoor apparel business - Highball Action Sportswear
• to connect with fellow adventurers and nature lovers
• to practice my English writing skills

So if you started your own blog to write about your hobbies then it should be easy for you to add content on a regular basis. You can write about past experiences and still deliver value to your visitors. But there's an issue here - don't write too much about yourself. No one really cares about what you did and what you accomplished! Now don't get me wrong! If you want to make friends and share your life online that's okay but perhaps that's all you'll ever get. Building a high traffic blog is a totally different story.

There are millions of bloggers out there and only a bunch of them are successful. And by successful I mean having lots of visitors (thousands per day or more), having other bloggers link to them, having blog sponsors and earning a living or even making a business out of it. So if you write only about you and about what you did and what you ate... then I for one won't be reading your blog. I simply don't need to know all that.

What you can do instead is blog to teach. People love blogs because they know that behind that text there's a human being, just like them, not a corporation or a news agency. Blogs are written by the people for the people and popular blogs are powered by the passion the blogger puts in his/her writing as well as by the community that builds around that particular blog. Share your personal stories but try to also share your expertise on a particular topic that your blog is built on. If you know what are the common problems in your industry then blog about the solutions to those problems. Give advice, give answers and reply to the questions in the comments!

In order to have a sense whether you're on the right track or not, I propose you do a little experiment:

• Don't write anything on your blog for two weeks
• After that log into your Google Analytics account and look for: top 5 visited pages, top 5 keywords that brought you traffic from search engines

Now you have two options:
1. You can either write new posts on the same topics that those top 5 posts are about
2. Or you can update those posts with more information on that topic

By doing this you become a reactionary blogger - you will only write what people need and want to read! This can easily be made into a system so you can have a permanent pulse of what your visitors want to learn about:

• View your top 5 posts and top 5 keywords every week
• Write more on those topics making sure you include those keywords in your headlines and posts
• When you consider the top 5 topics are saturated with content, move on to the next top posts and keywords and repeat the process week after week (Example: take the posts placed on the 6th to 10th place and write more related content)

Of course you can still write personal stuff on the blog but don't exaggerate as this will rather push readers away from your site - especially those who "Google" for specific information about a certain problem they have.

On Highball Blog for example the top 5 keywords that brought in traffic last month were:

• fingerboard training
• Chris Sharma girlfriend
• highball bouldering
• gopro hd mp4 editor
• highball T shirts

Consequently, I kept my writing on those topics: climbing, bouldering, hangboard training, video editing GoPro HD clips, free print designs for extreme sports T shirts.

I can conclude this by saying you don't have to follow my advice step by step but you can try to view your blog through a reader's perspective. Would you visit and read your blog often?

Happy blogging!

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