The Pareto principle, or the 80-20 rule, is a famous principle that says 80% of the results comes from 20% of the causes.
Many business people have taken this theory and applied it their businesses.
They’ll look at their salespeople and figure out the top 20% performers. Then, they’ll fire the low performing ones and try to hire people with characteristics similar to the top salespeople.
Or they’ll analyze their marketing activities and see which ones have been the most effective. Then, they’ll stop doing the ineffective activities and spend more time and effort on the effective ones.
The Pareto principle can even work with products/services. A business can figure out their most profitable product and then give that product more promotion than the other products.
How This Applies to Blogging
In blogging, you’ll have to do a little bit of trial and error to figure out the best strategies.
When you first start, you won’t know what works because you don’t have a lot of experience. However, as you begin publishing posts and doing a little bit of marketing, you’ll begin to notice certain things working and other things not working. When this happens, focus on the things that work and stop spending time on the things that don’t work.
Let’s look at some practical examples.
Keywords
Check out your analytics program for high performing keywords. You’ll sometimes find that you’re not fully targeting your best keywords.
For example, let’s say you run an online retail store that sells mp3 players. One of your best keywords is inexpensive mp3 players. However, the post that is doing well for that keyword is titled “Cheap mp3 Players”. You should retitle the post “Inexpensive mp3 Players”. This will make your post increase in the search results and you’ll get more traffic as a result.
Also, if you’re getting a lot of traffic from a short keyword phrase (less than 5 words), it’s usually worth it to create other posts that are based on that phrase. For instance, if you have a lot of traffic from the phrase best rated mp3 players, you should write posts like
The Best Rated mp3 Players for Joggers
The Best Rated mp3 Players for Mac Users
The Best Rated Discount mp3 Players
The reason this tactic works is because many internet searchers will add modifiers to the main keyword phrase. Also, longer keyword phrases have less competition so it should be easy to rank well for them.
I advised my friend on this strategy. She had took her top keyword, modified it a little, and published a post based on the modified phrase. In less than two months, her new post was the fifth most visited post on her blog.
Post Topics
Certain posts on your blog will be a big hit to your audience. They will get a lot of traffic and positive comments.
For example, let’s say you’re a wedding planner and you have a blog to attract new business. You write a post about the timeline in wedding planning. The post does really well and seems to meet a need for many couples. You should take that post and do an series of related posts that cover each event in the timeline with more depth.
Social Media Marketing
I’ve already talked about participating in too many social media sites. It’s much more effective to focus on a few sites. For example, if you’re on three forums and one of them is sending much more traffic than the other two, stop participating on those two forums and focus your efforts on the top forum.
Over to You
What things have worked for you?
