Getting experiment, track and respond

Until you’ve been blogging for a while, it’s hard to predict what kind of posts will work best for your particular audience and industry. And, you may define what works best differently from to someone else: does a successful post for you mean that it’s shared often, that it generates a lot of comments, or that it results in inquiries about the business services you’re offering? Once you’ve identified what a successful post means to you, experiment by writing in varied formats to gauge which types of content work best. For example, trying writing a few of the following types of posts:
Lists
Case studies
Roundup posts that compare different products, services, businesses, brands, or solutions in one subject area.
Posts that experiment with associated graphics: with picture and without, or using photographs versus illustrations.
Video posts
Podcasts
Once you’ve published a few posts in different formats, use your statistics linked to your blog to analyse how they’re performing. Over time, you should be able to see a trend where certain types of blog posts attract larger audiences than others, generate more comments, or attract more inquiries. Once you’ve identified what format is working, create more posts like these and fewer in the formats that don’t work as well. Doing this will help you build momentum for growing your readership: the larger your audience becomes, the quicker your blog will grow since more people will be sharing the content you product.
Besides changing the type of post you’re writing, you can experiment with more subtle attributes on your blog such as the format of your post title, the look and feel of your blog, the length of your blog post, and how much you link to other blog posts or link out to external resources. To help you with this, you can even ask your readers for input into what they’d like to see on your blog that’s not already there. By involving your readers in the testing process, you’re also encouraging more audience participation, which is likely to make them a more engaged audience.