Being generous
One of the easiest ways to grow your blog is to be generous by promoting other people. When you promote others, they promote you; it’ s mutually beneficial. Call out and link to businesses and influential people in your market who are doing something worthwhile. You can use other businesses as an example for your readers to learn from. Following are eight ways for you to create generous pieces of content.
Profile
post
Write a profile or bio of an influential person in your niche. You don’ t have to ask his or her permission first, but you can if you want. Be sure to notify this person via email, phone call, or social media that you have profiled him or her. This way, the influential person will have an opportunity to share the finished post with his or her audience and point people back to you.
Crowdsourced post
In this post, ask three or more experts in your industry the same question and aggregate the answers into a single article. For example, if you’ re in the fitness industry, you might reach out to top physical trainers and ask them to outline their favorite cardiovascular workout. Then aggregate the responses of the experts into a single post to create an article with multiple opinions.
The content from a crowdsourced post is top notch, easy to put together, and will be shared by many of these influential people. Not to mention, this type of post draws large numbers of the influencers’ followers to both your blog and your site. In our experience, when you get ten influencers to give you about 100 words each on a single topic, you’ ve got a powerful blog post.
Interview post
For the interview post, reach out to influencers in your market and create a post around the questions you ask them. You can write the post in a typical newspaper or magazine style, or simply list each question asked and give each answer verbatim.
Even the most influential people are surprisingly willing to give you an interview— even if you have a small audience for your blog.
The easiest way for an extremely busy influencer to give you an interview is through an audio recording. Text interviews are time consuming, and video interviews can be technically challenging, often requiring the influencer and the interviewer to be in the same location. With audio, you can record the interview over the phone or use a tool like Skype.
Link roundup post