The world of blogging is immense and covers every sort of topic imaginable. From cooking to financing to water polo, if you can think of it, there’s a blog for it. For those interested in home design, and specifically, how architecture plays a key role in creating unique, awe-inspiring structures, there are some distinct advantages.
Architecture is a fairly focused field when compared to more general areas like interior design or home decorating. There are far fewer experts in the field, and so when those voices ring out, people tend to listen.
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But even if you’re an established architecture blogger, with a healthy readership, there’s always room to improve, and there are numerous ways that you can help your blog stand out even further, improving the information and experience you provide for your readers.
Below, you’ll find three suggested methods that you can use to do just that.
Improve the Quality of Your Content
Since blogs are a written-word medium, and people seek out blogs because they enjoy reading, it stands to reason that, if you’re going to grow your readership, you need to become a better writer.
No, let me be clear: I’m not saying that your writing has to make it onto the NY Times Bestseller List before you can have an effective, engaging blog. I am saying that you need to already be a good writer to start with, and need to get even better to further connect with your readers.
Grammar and punctuation are obvious starting points but look at ways you can improve how you write. Think about word choice, and how you can use metaphors to relate a new topic or technique to something your readers will easily understand, or the power of an anecdote from your own experiences to perfectly illustrate a point.
Read the blogs of others you admire, or successful blogs from other fields, and pay attention to how they express their persona through their writing, how they illustrate key points, and how they engage readers. Don’t ever plagiarize the words and images of others, but instead, understand why they are effective, and incorporate their techniques in your own work.
Aside from words, think about the images you’re using to communicate your points. If you’re still using cheap images that you shoot with a cheap camera or video you snapped on a cell phone with an unsteady hand, look at training yourself in photography, upgrade your equipment for photo and video, or contract some freelancers who can provide visuals for you.
Optimize Your Reader Experience
There’s a saying in online marketing circles – content is king. You may not be trying to market anything on your blog, or your blog may be a steady source of revenue, but irregardless, your content will be what makes or breaks your blog, and that’s why improving your content is the most important thing you can do. But your content will only be effective if your readers can find it easily.
Up to this point, you probably had everything thing you needed to get your blog to a level of quality and ease-of-access that let you grow a healthy readership. However, you’re growing even more now, or you want to, and you’ve built up an extensive archive of quality content that new readers can draw from.
These are all good things, but with that growth of content comes the challenging of finding specific posts or posts that fit a particular theme. If all your readers have is the ‘Newer Posts’ button at the bottom of your homepage to navigate 20 pages worth of content, how patient do you think your readers will be while they search? It’s time you started paying more attention to how your readers perceive your site.
With this potential overhaul in your blog’s design, you should strongly consider investing in new tools and resources to optimize your blog. WordPress offers paid plugins that can help enrich your blog design, and you should consider researching and investing in a few. Implement a search function if you don’t already have one. You might even consider redesigning the layout of your blog to make it easier to navigate, with headers that link to specific themes in your blog.
You also need to pay attention to your domain, and how search engines and readers will gauge your professionalism with your blog’s name. When you started, you may have had to take what you could get, and settle for an open domain on a shared server. Since you’re starting to be taken more seriously with your blog, “helpfuldesigntips4u” looks amateur, and isn’t going to cut it anymore. You need to look at improving your blog’s impression with your domain.
Increase Your Credibility Through Collaboration
One of the most important things that you need to establish yourself in the blogosphere, and continue to grow your readership, is credibility. If you don’t know what you’re talking about, or you present conflicting information about a topic, it will become apparent to your readers, sooner or later, and they will abandon you. To get your credibility higher, always ensure that you have thoroughly researched your topics, and incorporate new voices to expand your blog’s appeal.
As we mentioned earlier, the blogosphere is vast, with many unique voices that offer views and information that enhance the experience for readers across the spectrum. As your blog grows, you’ll want to access new readers in order to continue expanding. To reach those readers, you should strongly consider inviting other bloggers and writers in your field, that have earned your respect, to contribute to your blog.
Humans naturally tend to show more compassion, and give favours, to those who have already done us a good turn. By expressing your admiration and respect for other bloggers, and inviting them to contribute to your blog, you’re extending that olive branch, and allowing that blogger access to your followers, which will help them expand their readership.
Good bloggers will appreciate the favour and will reciprocate by extending the same courtesy to you. You blog grows, their blog grows, the readers get new, relevant content; everybody wins!
Collaboration is also important because, sooner or later, you’ll need to expand the topics you cover in your blog, and you can’t be an expert in everything or even very many things. Collaboration with other bloggers will not only enhance your own knowledge base, but it will also allow your readers to get information that you, quite honestly, can’t provide in a meaningful way. Again: everybody wins.
