How to Make Your Audience Fall in Love with Your Blog

1. How to Make Your Audience
Fall in Love with Your Blog
Geraldine DeRuiter | http://everywhereist.com | @everywhereist

2. My name is Geraldine. I run a travel blog.

3. With a surprisingly strong following:

4. The blog has received a lot of attention
(no one is more surprised than me)

5. I’ve been blogging for 5 years and written
nearly 1,200 posts.

6. Good blogging is all about love.

7. You can fall in love with
anything.

8. With an activity.

9. With a place.

10. With a message.

11. With Jeff Goldblum’s abs.

12. What does
it mean to
fall in love
with a
website?

13. Does it have to be
useful?

14. Usefulness doesn’t necessarily equate to
love.

15. We love lots of
things that aren’t
useful.

16. Does it have to be
informative?

17. Being informed is
important, but I
don’t love
everything I’ve
learned.

18. There’s a difference between USING a site
and LOVING it.

19. Love is different.

20. It can’t be replaced.

21. It can’t be replaced.
Probably.

22. It has the potential to
last.

23. GoFugYourself
is a site I love.

24. I’ve been reading it for
nearly 10 years.

25. There are
few things in
ours lives
that last
decades.

26. Average length of
time from marriage
to separation in
Australia is 8.7
years.

27. I’m invested in the writers.

28. There is no
replacement.

29. You can’t buy that sort of
loyalty.

30. Loving a person is
difficult. Loving a
blog is easy.

31. Figure out what you love.
What can you write about everyday?

32. If you are passionate
about something,
you are uniquely
qualified to write
about it.

33. What if you don’t have a choice?
Find a way to make it work.

36. Legal
explanation
s +
Comics
=
Love
Via Nathaniel Burney’s Illustrated Guide to
Law

37. Pop culture
+
Stock images
=
Love
Via Shutterstock’s Blog

38. Statistics +
Online dating = Love
Via OKCupid’s OKTrends Blog

39. Find the intersection:

40. Easy for me to say, right? My blog is about
travel.

41. Confession: travel is not my greatest love.

42. This is. (Cake’s a close
second.)

43. My earliest posts are just about travel.
They suck.

44. This was the first great post I wrote.
It’s about Rand … and travel.

45. The only way to find out what works is to
experiment.

46. I tried
everything.

47. Some posts
would work.
Others
didn’t.

48. There are dozens of potential reasons why.

49. Was the title
compelling?

50. Did I promote it? Where?
Via Bit.ly

51. Did I pick the right time to post it?
Via Followerwonk

52. Was it the photos?

53. Did I rank for key
search terms?
(Maybe on
accident?)

54. Success is complicated. Not even the
“experts” have it all figured out.

55. “OkCupid doesn’t really know what it’s
doing. Neither does any other website.
It’s not like people have been building
these things for very long, or you can go
look up a blueprint or something. Most
ideas are bad. Even good ideas could be
better.”
-Christian Rudder, Founder of

56. Give your audience
someone to connect to.

57. Make an About page.

58. Have a point of view.

59. Not everyone will like you; that’s okay.

60. If you express an opinion, people will want
to share it. Even if they don’t agree.

61. Use photos.

62. Include
pictures of
yourself.

63. These give your
audience
someone to relate
to.

64. And helps
to create
an on-going
narrative.

65. Consider including photos of your loved
ones.

66. When this happened, I cared:

67. Subtlety can be
powerful.

68. Even if your
blog is about
other people,
you can connect
with your
audience.
"What happened to your arm?"
"I was walking down the stairs and looking at the
stars."
(Amman, Jordan)

70. “I knew you’d stop me
one day.”

71. Let people find you.

72. Look at the sites
that send you
traffic via your
analytics tool.

73. Some referrers
send traffic that
really engages with
you

74. Tools like SimilarWeb can show you where
successful bloggers in your field are getting
traffic.

75. Respond to people.

76. Just reaching out a
little can mean a
lot.

78. Emilio Estevez follows me on Twitter.
I’m now a fan for life.
BAM!
You can be someone’s Emilio Estevez.

79. Be relatable.

80. Be imperfect.

81. Mistakes
=
great stories.

82. Use a conversational tone.

83. Share stories about yourself.

84. Be transparent.

86. If you are, you can
ask more of your
audience.

88. DON’T tell people
how much like
them you are.

89. Don’t ask for too much.

90. One
Two
Three
Four
Limit calls to action.
Five
Six
Seve
n
Eight

91. Be patient

92. An audience won’t show up overnight
(at least, not a lasting one).

93. Don’t write for the audience you have. Write
for the audience you will have.

94. I have addressed my audience directly as
“you guys” in more than 70 blog posts.
6 times in my first year of blogging.

95. Eventually, they read those posts.

96. Create evergreen
content inspired by
what’s happening
now.

97. Be the thing you’ve been waiting for.

98. You need
to do the
rest.
Luck can
get you
part of
the way
there.

99. If you search for
something online
and don’t find it …
MAKE IT
YOURSELF.

100. Now I rank #2 for
“brain surgery
recovery.”

101. Don’t be afraid
to be yourself.

102. There’s a payoff.

103. If these tips don’t feel
right to you, don’t do
them.

104. If something
doesn’t work,
change it.

105. You are amazing.
There are people out
there, waiting to love
you.

106. “Those who truly love us will
never knowingly ask us to be
other than we are.”

107. How to Make Your Audience
Fall in Love with Your Blog
Download: bit.ly/fallinloveblog
Geraldine DeRuiter | http://everywhereist.com | @everywhereist