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Increase your blog traffic and readership with one giant LEAP!
As I sat in church today listening to a guest sermon about leadership, I found that the more and more he spoke, the more and more I could be applying these principals to blogging. Now I know I should’ve been paying more attention in church, but you never know when inspiration is going to strike and I couldn’t help myself.
Start with a giant LEAP
The way to become a good leader, as he stated, is to apply “The LEAP Principle”. As you may noticed by this point, LEAP is more than just a word. It’s an acronym that stands for:
- Cultivate Love
- Generate Energy
- Inspire Audacity
- Provide Proof
So what do any of these points have to do with blogging? As you will soon see…PLENTY!
Cultivate Love
One of my favorite quotes from the movie Dogeball:
L for Love!
It doesn’t matter what you are blogging about, whether it’s your pet cat or latest recipe creation; music or monster trucks; technology or trains; you have to love what you’re doing. Not only that, but you have to Create Love in what your are doing. You should definitely love what you are blogging about, otherwise why are you blogging? But on the off-chance you don’t love your subject matter, you should make others love it, or love reading about it. How do you make others love it? One of two ways (if not bother):
- They’re at your blog because they already love the subject matter.
- If they only like the subject matter, make them love the way you write about it.
Point number 1 above, you don’t have to work to hard because they already love the topic. However, this ties directly into point two. If they don’t love (or even like) your writing style, they’ll leave and find another source of information where they do. If they only like the subject matter, you can convert them into regular readers if they love reading your take on the topic. The best ways to do this, you ask?
- Humor
- Satire
- Commentary
- Opinion
- or just plain good writing
Generate Energy
As the speaker put it about being a leader:
“Are people more excited when you enter the room, or when you leave it?”
You should feel this way about your readers. Are they more excited when they enter your blog, when they’ve found a good source of content? Or are they more exciting when they leave your blog, happy to get a way from a bad source of content? Your visitors shouldn’t have a feeling of “I’m glad that’s over” when they’re done reading, assuming they stay long enough to finish an article. They should be excited to leave only when you have empowered them with your information. Your visitors should always take something away from your blog. Even if it’s the tiniest morsel of information or advice, give them something. If you provide an informational, advice, or how-to blog, your visitors should leave your blog ready to change the world if you have cultivated the energy in them.
Inspire Audacity
The word audacity means:
boldness or daring, esp. with confident or arrogant disregard for…conventional thought, or other restrictions.
(source)
Inspire your readers to do something different, against the norm, out of the mold, etc. Don’t do the same thing everyone else is doing. Strive for greatness in a way no one else ever has before. Be unique. Take Chances! Take Risks! I’ll quote a bible verse that the speaker used to emphasize this point:
Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might; for there is no work or device or knowledge or wisdom in the grace where you are going.
Ecclesiastes 9:10
Now obviously this has a slightly different meaning in the bible (I’ll let the biblical scholars share the meaning and the voice this was being spoken with), but if you apply that mantra to your blogging it means: In anything you do, give it your all, give 100%. There is no gain or reward in the way you are currently doing things (settling for mediocrity).
Provide Proof
Regardless of if you’ve cultivated love, generated energy, and inspired audacity up to this point, no one will believe you without the proof. As they say in WoW
Screenshot or it didn’t happen
If you are giving them information, back it up with proof (facts). If you are providing a how-to, show proof that it works. For instance, I recently wrote about the benefits of blogging every day.
My proof was that I showed screenshots of my analytics graphs showing the 416% traffic increase (plus I gave other numerical stats) that I received because of this. I see Darren Rowse do this in many of his posts on ProBlogger.net. If he’s giving people advice to try, he’s backing it up with proof why it does (or will) work.
Take a (flying?) LEAP
Next time you post on your blog, remember The LEAP Principle. If you apply these ideas to your content and really make it come through in your writing, people will want to come back for more…GUARANTEED! If I love the topic I’m reading about, I feel the energy to make a change, the audacity to try something new, and have the proof to back it up, I’m going to milk that source of as much information as I can. I feel empowered!
As mentioned, this post was inspired by a guest sermon at church. If you would like to write a guest post for us, visit our ‘Write for Us’ page for more info on how you can have your articles published on our blog.
