One of the most common complaints I often hear among newer Christian bloggers is that they can’t seem to get traffic to their blog. When I take a look at their content, it becomes apparently clear as to why. They aren’t providing a “help” through their content. When people search the internet (type something into the Google search box) they are looking for some sort of answer. Your blog content needs to provide an answer to something they are searching for.
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What is Your Help?
While it is totally OK to have a personal blog where you journal pieces of your life, this is not the type of blog that will produce organic traffic. A personal blog is really only meant for sharing life stuff with family and friends and you must continually provide them the link to your newest post (or via your email list). The general public (and I mean this in the nicest way possible) doesn’t really care about your general daily life.
What were the last things you typed into that search box? A dinner recipe? Help or resources for living with a chronic illness? A Bible study? Why do husbands cheat?
When you write a blog post, you must write it in a way that provides some sort of answer or solves a problem. And you need to ensure you are writing it for a keyword that people are actually searching for.
Knowing Your Target Audience
Do you have a target audience for your Christian blog? If not, you really should sit down and decide on the very specific person you want to help through your content. Writing to “all Christians” isn’t really helpful. When you have a very specific person in mind, you will know exactly what he/she needs and can write content around that. Your blog content should fill in the Who, What, How.
- Who are you writing to?
- What are you helping them with?
- How are you helping them with it?
If you aren’t able to clearly answer these questions yet with your content, you probably haven’t yet really defined your target audience.
What help are you providing with your Christian blog? Are you answering the questions others are searching for on Google? Click To Tweet
Examples of a Defined Audience
The key to getting consistent organic traffic and building a loyal following is to continually write about topics specific to a particular audience. The following are some of the amazing Christian women bloggers that are part of the Kingdom Bloggers community. Each one of them provides help, encouragement, and support through their content to a very specific audience.
- His Dearly Beloved Daughter writes to Christian women who’ve experienced infidelity in their marriage. Everything she writes about is directed to this woman. She answers the many questions a woman in this situation might be having or feelings she might be feeling. She answers the questions this woman might ask Google.
- Wendy from One Exceptional Life is a quad amputee who writes to help others lean on God through their trials. She provides encouraging words as she highlights her own journey of losing both hands and feet and finding peace and happiness in this new season.
- Erin from Lullaby Lark writes to moms of special-needs children to help them find hope and healing through Jesus and to encourage them through this season of life.
- Tiffany from Hope Joy in Christ writes to Christian women, specifically about topics of living with anxiety and also about having a successful marriage.
- Christi from Resurrecting Marriage helps those struggling in their marriage. She answers the questions women often ask Google when their marriage is on the rocks.
- Fleda from Women Ministering has created an amazing site that provides resources and encouragement for women in ministry.
Blog Posts With Help
When writing a blog post, think of the topic you are planning to write about. If someone were looking for this topic, what might they be asking or wanting to know about it? Whatever you are writing about needs to add value to someone’s life in the way of an answer, encouragement, support, or literally “how to” do something. Always keep your target audience in mind when thinking of how to offer that help. Write about it in a way that speaks directly to them and not just in a general nature.
For example, if you had a target audience of young Christian women and wanted to write about recognizing the tactics of the enemy, you would provide specific examples of how the enemy attacks them in that season (social media, dating, gossip, etc). If you were writing to an older audience, many of these tactics might play out in a different way. Always speak to YOUR blog audience!
Let’s say you were writing a post about living with anxiety. Instead of simply writing about the struggle itself, talk about a particular thing that is impacted by your condition and talk about ways that you address it (the “how”). Or maybe writing about how to lean on God through the struggle. This is what someone with anxiety would be wanting to know (speaking from experience as someone who took to the internet searching for help with mine!). Writing about this topic for a mom of young children will vary from writing about it for a young single woman because the way in which the condition impacts their lives will vary.
Another example might be for writing about the topic of infidelity in your marriage. For the most part, someone who is going through this doesn’t just want to read more stories about the hurt. They are looking for help from other women who’ve experienced it and for advice or guidance on how they got through it.
How about someone who writes about having a special-needs child (or adult family member)? How are you coping and making it work? That’s what others would be searching for. They already know how mentally and physically exhausting it is because they are living it. What they are seeking is encouragement along with helpful tips that others going through it have used to lessen the stress.
List Posts are a Goldmine
When you search for something online, do you often find yourself more enticed by list-posts? These are posts with a title like “8 ways to….” or something like that. A title like that gives the impression that you are providing them actionable steps for accomplishing or overcoming (whatever they were searching for). I’m not saying every single post needs to be a list-post, but you should have a couple of them for each of the main categories that you write about.
Another benefit to having a few list-posts is that you can use them as “base posts” to link additional content from. For example, if you wrote a post about 5 ways to study the Bible, you could then write 5 additional posts (one on each of those ways) and link back to the base post. This is a great way to build that SEO-juice needed for search engines to index and rank your content.
What is Your Help?
Being a Christian blogger is such a wonderful and exciting way to connect with more people and show them all about God’s love. In order to reach (and keep) them, however, you must write in a way that answers their many questions on a given topic. Write in a way that offers help to the new mom. Encouragement and tips for someone living with chronic illness. How to stay close to God as a young person today. How to apply the Word of God to the daily struggles of life today.
I highly recommend that you take the Defining Your Ministry Avatar (free) course. This will help you really define it as well as do the necessary research for finding out what they need.
Once you’ve really narrowed and focused down your target audience, you’ll be able to write for them much easier. Before drafting a new post, always ask yourself “how will this help my audience”? If you can’t answer that question, maybe it isn’t something that needs to be written.
As Christian bloggers, we truly have the power to bring more people to knowing Christ. But in order to do that (through our content), it is imperative that we understand how all this online stuff works!
Be sure to also read:
- How to Format Blog Posts for SEO Success
- How to Optimize Your Christian Blog for Pinterest Traffic
- 8 Tips for Writing Click-Worthy Blog Post Titles for Your Christian Blog
Thank you for these helpful tips and blogs. Be sure I’ll visit them to learn more.
LeeAnn, you are always so helpful and thorough with your blogging advice. It has been so helpful for my blog to narrow down my audience and figure out how to actually help them.
The idea of customizing almost any topic into something helpful, specifically for my target audience is great! Sometimes we forget that step, in our hurry to share something. But our goal needs to be serving. Our Christian blog audience won’t come back unless we are helping them with something.
LeeAnn, You teach in a way that’s easy to understand and I have learned so much from you. I had no idea how much I had been doing wrong until I took your BootCamp and I’m Grateful for that.