Does Your Blog Have A Hook? By Yaro Starak

Today’s blog traffic tip is a technique you can apply to your blog, and if implemented well, will achieve the following:

- Make your blog a destination point
- Increase your blog’s “stickiness”
- Bring traffic to your blog regardless of how (in)frequently you update
- Consistently attract incoming links

Best of all, you only need to implement this technique once for it to work well. If you do it twice, or thrice, your blog will be well on it’s way to becoming a superstar in the blogosphere.

Sounds like a miracle technique doesn’t it? Well read on to find out what I am talking about…

THE HOOK

If you are at all interested in pop music you will be aware of what is known as the “hook”. The hook is the element of a song that is just so catchy it makes you want to hear the song over and over again. It forces people who otherwise should not be singing to sing along while listening to the track. The hook is angerously powerful.

In terms of blogging the hook has the same characteristics that it has in music. A hook brings readers to your blog over and over again. It’s addictive, fun, or valuable and unique.

HOOK VS PILLAR

So what’s the difference between a “hook” and a “pillar”, the technique I talked about in previous articles and the core concept behind my course, http://www.BlogTrafficSchool.com?

A pillar is generally easier to produce and most successful bloggers will produce multiple pillars each month, some each week or even every day. A hook on the other hand is something so compelling and unique that you are lucky if you pull it off more than once a year.

You could think of a hook as a pillar on steroids. It has all the same characteristics but everything is magnified with a hook. It takes more work to pull off a successful hook, but the rewards are significant when done right.

Still confused?

Essentially a hook is something, and it can be a blog article, but often it’s a piece of software or a digital download, that provides tremendous value. The idea is this one resource brings in traffic to your blog because it helps a lot of people.

Word of mouth spreads a hook all over the place, with hundreds of bloggers linking to it, and people sending emails to tell their friends about it. A good hook comes up in conversation as the accepted way to get something done - as the best solution to a problem.

HOOK EXAMPLES

The professional blogging site, Performancing.com, released a plug-in for the Firefox Internet browser that allowed bloggers to post articles directly from their browser without logging into their blog software. This one piece of software is unique and very valuable to the whole blogging community and therefore was a hook for the Performancing blog.

The team behind Performancing no doubt worked hard to get the software designed right, it would not have been created over night. Their hard work paid off and when their plug-in was released they enjoyed a huge flow of traffic, exposure and incoming links. I still read blogs that mention the performancing plug-in when they first discover it. This demonstrates the long, ongoing traffic creating effect of pulling off a successful hook.

Performancing has gone on to release many more great tools for bloggers, including Performancing Metrics, a statistics tracking service for blogs, the Performancing Exchange, a place where bloggers and blog employers can advertise blogging jobs, and the latest, Performancing Partners, an advertising system designed to help connect blog publishers with advertisers.

All these services are hooks - they are not easy to set-up, provide tremendous value, leverage community and make Performancing a destination blog.

COMMUNITY BASED HOOKS

I’ve talked about the importance of building community at your blog in previous newsletters. Another form of a hook is a forum where all the fans of a hobby congregate and talk or trade. If that forum is hosted as part of your blog, then it is a hook, bringing people back to your site every day.

A forum or a chat room, a classifieds section, or a bulletin board, are all community services that can make your blog into a destination point and help your traffic grow without you directly creating the content - the community does the work for you.

It’s not by any means easy to build a successful forum or community service. It takes a while to gain traction - it’s about as hard as it is to build traffic to a blog, so if you decide to go down the path of building a forum adjacent to your blog as a hook strategy, be prepared for some hard work.

Try this article to get you started with your forum building:

How to Build a Popular Forum Community in 5 Steps
http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/41/building-a-forum-community/

DON’T BE DISCOURAGED

Remember a hook is a challenging technique to implement well. Most sites that have good hooks are the result of a team, or special talents. To build software or create a resource that is truly unique takes resources, timing, strategy and a good dosage of luck too.

In my career online I have created maybe one or two truly successful hooks. One was a forum(MTGParadise.com) that people started trading cards at so they kept coming back to trade, the other is my blog Entrepreneurs-Journey.com, which has the hook of my entire back catalogue of articles to help people build an Internet business. Both these two hooks took at least a year to build up to the point where I could really call them a hook.

Building a hook takes time. Keep at it for the long haul but make sure you see HOW the hook will work, don’t just assume it will work. You need to see the psychological pull, the addiction or fun or value that your service or content or resource provides. If you don’t have that, it won’t work.