Now Reading
7 Ways for Your Underdog Blog to Beat the Competition

7 Ways for Your Underdog Blog to Beat the Competition

With thousands of blogs vying for the same audience as yours, you need to find a way to edge out the competition.

Some go the high road by spending hundreds and thousands of dollars on ads so their blog will predominantly appear in search results and social media news feeds. They’ll also allocate that budget to launch a sophisticated link building strategy that will attract more organic traffic. Not to mention, other blogs will be willing to go through a major cosmetic lift by creating beautiful animations and interstitials to enhance the user experience.

As an owner of a rinky-dink blog, there’s no way you can compete against your competition’s deep pockets and technical know-how. However, don’t raise the white flag just yet – there are ways that you can still withstand their onslaught of killer blogging campaigns.

Below are various ways that you can tweak your blog and have a fighting chance against your well-funded and excellent blog and deliver an upset against them.

1. Produce better content

At the heart of every successful blog is great content. Other blogs may look and feel attractive to the naked eye, but these are mere bells and whistles that play second fiddle to the reason why people visit blogs in the first place. You can start by mastering a content framework that works the best on your blog. One of these is the Skyscraper Technique, but as effective as this framework is, there are case studies that also prove that the technique is not applicable for every site.

2. Promote like hell

Following the Pareto Principle of 80/20, you should promote your content 4x of your time compared to writing it. For example, if you write the post the entire day, you need to spend the next four days promoting it. What you want to achieve is to deliver your latest content to your audience residing in different online channels, whether it’s social media or online communities. For starters, you can submit your content of the sites found in this post I wrote.

3. Repurpose your content

Double down on your content by transposing it into a different format. The thing about content repurposing is that some of your readers respond better to certain types of content. For example, if you have a value-packed post that didn’t gain traction with your audience, maybe it’ll attract more attention by turning it into a podcast, infographic, or how-to video.

4. Update your content

Over time, your blog posts lose efficacy because the information is outdated. To keep your post relevant to your readers and fresh to search spiders, you need to revise the content and include the latest information regarding its topic. Also, you need to indicate in the article that the post has been updated and mention the date for the benefit of the reader so they can be sure that the post contains the most recent data.

5. Republish your content

By leveraging the power of web 2.0 properties, you can multiply your reach by building a following on sites like WordPress.com, Medium, Quora, and others and then broadcasting your latest post on those platforms. While this practice is frowned upon because you are duplicating your content, as long as you link back to the original source, you’re in the clear in relation to SEO. Also, you need to give yourself two weeks before republishing your content on web 2.0 properties to give search spiders ample time to index your content.

6. Share on social

Social media is difficult to penetrate due to the noise coming from other users that drown out your posts and updates. However, you can cut through the noise by finding the best times when the post will be published on social media platforms for maximum engagement. Also, you can re-promote your posts after a week or month, or even years! The idea here is to keep sharing your content as long as they are evergreen and continue to provide value to your audience.

See Also
Remove Unhelpful Content

7. Change your theme

How you present your content to your visitors is crucial. You need to find a blog theme or design that will showcase your posts in a compelling and convenient way for readers. Normally, blogs and news sites use a magazine-style theme where all the latest and best posts are laid out in front of readers. If you are not using this type of theme and you are using a WordPress theme, you can choose from the many free themes from Colorlib to spruce up your blog.

Conclusion

In case you didn’t notice, most of the suggestions above are content-related. Let’s face it – you don’t have the firepower to go up against your competitor. However, what you do have is a better understanding of your niche and the knowledge of your audience. Therefore, you need to put these to good use, and what better way to use them  than on your content.

Eventually, the cream will rise to the top. As long as you keep producing stellar content on a consistent basis and promoting them like your life depending on it, then you will soon be rewarded with thousands of blog traffic!

Related posts:

Create Credible Posts Every Time: How to Do Article Research

30 Incredibly Useful Tools You Need to Grow Your Blog

View Comment (1)
  • This is a good read for those who are losing motivation. Blog startups are especially vulnerable because they might not have the audience they expected at first. It’s important to not quit no matter how hard it is, as long as you have your goal in mind.

Scroll To Top