Use Free Reports To Increase Blog Readership.
If you are a blogger you do a lot of writing. Your content is the life blood of your blog's traffic and readership. Your blog's posts are the lead factor that brings visitors in and turns visitors into regular readers.
Now you're already writing all of this content for your blog, it would be pretty cool to find ways to re-purpose it to get even more use from it.
Re Purposing All That Great Content
This is where the free report comes in. By offering a short free report covering the same topics your blog covers you can allow the report to be released from other places and lead anyone who reads it back to your own blog. Since the report is covering the same material, the people who come to your blog through it are targeted and specifically interested in what you are blogging about.
The best part with this technique is that it doesn't have to involve any real extra work for you. You already have written all of the material you need to write free short report. You won't have to actually write a bunch of new stories to make your report, you can just use previous blog posts from your archive.
Pick and Choose, Then Publish
Simply select a few archived posts from your blog from the same category. You want them to be closely related so that they make sense together in a report format. For instance choose four or five articles reviewing similar services or sites, or even a handful of articles that discuss different aspects of the same service or site. Combine these articles into a new free short report.
Getting It Ready To Go
Use a free pdf maker tool to compile the posts into a complete free short report and make it available for visitors to download. Be sure to add an announcement at the beginning of the report that lets people know that they are welcome to put your short report on their own blog to let their own readers download it too.
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Thats an excellent point
Thats an excellent point Stephan. Not only are you giving people a preview of what your blog has to offer, you are giving it to them in a structured format that helps them put the pieces into context, which can be helpful if they aren't (we hope) already a regular reader used to your writing.
Thanks for such an insightful remark.
Plus, when you write a
Plus, when you write a report like this, it helps your readers put things in order. A blog is good for what it was meant to do, but not necessary good for step by step tutorials. A report lets you put articles in step order instead of reverse chronological order.
Hi Caroline and
Hi Caroline and Fred!
Thanks for stopping by and thanks very much for taking the time to post a comment I really appreciate it.
I understand what you are both saying as far as making sure the report is a good report and offering "meat". I absolutely agree that the report needs to be a good report to be of any value to the potential readers and thus to your blog.
That said, I have two reasons for suggesting that you really do use just posts from your archives (assuming you have enough posts in your archives).
First, this means that in order to have a great report you have to have a great blog. If you pull the material directly from your blog, you will need to have a blog with good content. This also means that people who click through to your blog will be presented with the same writing style and quality that made them click in the first place. If you "add meat" and "give it extra polish" that you would not give your blog, people arriving at your blog will be expecting something more than they find. You want people who like the articles in the report and will become loyal readers of the blog when they find exactly what they expect. The best way to do this is to simply let them download and sample a small portion of your blog itself in the form of this free report.
The second reason I suggested this method is that because they have already done the hard work of creating this content, doing it this way will enable some people who would never create additional content to experience the benefits of distributing a report to promote their blog. If I had written that you need to write five or ten brand new articles and give them extra polish, many people would not even try. The fact is that a report with just a few past articles from your blog will generate a lot more new loyal readers than no report at all will, and that is the goal of this post.
But by all means if you have the energy, resolve and resources to generate whole new content about your blog's topic and publish it solely as a free report that's a great thing to do. Just be careful not to make it too different from what readers will find on the blog, and realize that it's better to use five or ten previous posts and try this idea out than to do nothing at all because you can't come up with the extra content.
Thanks for the observations, and I hope this makes the direction I was going in a little more clear.
Dane, I think free reports
Dane,
I think free reports are a great way to increase traffic to your blog. Everyone likes something for free. However, I agree with Caroline that the report needs to be great. This free report will have a tremendous effect on your reputation. If you turn out something less than A+, it will be hard to attract those reader to come back to you blog.
Another benefit of a free report is that it gives the impression that you are an expert on the topic. You will immediately become an authority resource on the topic covered by the free report.
I think this is a good idea
I think this is a good idea but I would suggest adding a little bit more "meat" to the report rather than simply packaging together a few old blog posts, otherwise wouldn't the reader simply be able to read your archives?
If you have thousands of posts and you have some truly excellent content that would stand well in a book form then that's fine - John Chow did this to great effect. But if your blog is small or newer then you need to give something more than just a few old posts.
Always think about the value you are giving, in anything that you do.
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