Improve Your Blog

Improve Your Blog – Watch TV

September 11th, 2007 · by Dean · No Comments

To be a successful blogger you need some marketing know how. Watching TV can be a great place to hone these skills. Why not spend a couple of hours watching TV, sounds pretty easy! It can be anything from TV commercials to a documentary. You’d be surprised what you can learn from this.

One of the things I’ve noticed is how programs often show little teasers about what is coming up later on in the show. The idea is to keep the viewer ‘hooked’ rather than switching to another channel. If an hour long program shows all the best content in the first 10 minutes, how is it going to keep the viewer entertained for the remaining 50 minutes?

Some times I find this annoying, you can end up having to wait 50 minutes to watch the piece you’re interested in! But these tactics have the desired effect, they keep you watching.

You can employ a similar tactic on your blog. If you’ve got a great article to blog about you could think of a couple of strategies:

Spread Out Your Good Content

If you have a long list of great articles to blog about, don’t publish them all at once, otherwise you could run out of ideas on what to write next. Spread these articles out over a few weeks or so, intermingled with other posts.

This provides an opportunity to build up anticipation for future articles. You could finish off an article by saying that you will go into more detail in a later post, or that you will be writing a related article next week. This encourage visitors to come back for more content.

Keeping a couple of posts in reserve can be useful too during those times you hit writers block.

Consider Writing A Series

If it is a lengthy topic, covering several subject areas, you could consider breaking it into a series of smaller articles. This keeps each article smaller and easier to digest for your visitors. It also builds anticipation as your readers look forward to the next article in the series.

I’ve used this technique on this blog before and it has proved popular with readers.

Watch Some TV Commercials

housework Here is a little experiment to try. Watch all the adverts during a commercial break. When the commercial break is over see how many of the adverts you can remember. When I tried this only a couple of adverts stood out. These were either funny or had a strong audio and visual element to them. The remaining adverts just blurred into one which I couldn’t remember anything about.

You could apply the same technique to your blog. Maybe showing a picture like the one above is not the best idea but you get the general idea. Something a bit different is more likely to stick in the mind of your readers. I’m sure your imagination can devise some great ideas

There are so many blogs out there that you need something to stand out from the crowd. Perhaps writing the odd funny or off-topic article on your blog, or doing a video or audio podcast could spice things up. An unusual or striking web site design might be another way to get your blog to stick with your readers.

Is there anything else we can apply to our blogs from watching TV? Let me know in the comments section below.