Rebellious, assertive, ambitious, enduring, bitchy. That’s Madonna for you, and that’s the person that once said, “I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art.” Many people think of pure, unadulterated sin and pop extravagance when they think back on Madonna’s career, and not many realize that she’s now 52 years old. Many people see her madness, the chaos and the pop circus surrounding her every move and word. But what they don’t see most of the time is that she knows exactly what she’s doing and she knows exactly what she wants. She has a rare mastery over the aura surrounding her and the message she exudes. She is in complete control of brand Madonna.

Madonna’s career has spanned decades now and she has been the best female performer of all time even if you don’t like her music very much. She has been to the pop genre what Ali was to boxing, what Sampras is to Tennis; she is a living legend, and there is a lot to take away from the material girl when it comes to ruling your brand and your niche. Madonna has some powerful lessons to teach, and here we sum up 6 of those teachings that can be gleaned from the Material Girl.

Always believe in something

If you don’t believe in something, you’ll fall for just about anything. The simplest way to do this is to take a quick look at your about us page. What have you thrown on there? Is the message you are conveying very feel-good, but entirely forgettable? Is there a message at all in there? You have a powerful way of conveying what you believe in with your blog and you should best distill your message into something you fully believe. It’s your unique selling proposition and this is your raison d’être. Your customers should be able to say why you matter and why they turn to you.

Always come good with promises

Look around and you’ll see that the best of businesses will always look to deliver on their promises at all time. It requires putting in a lot of effort to make sure that they deliver quality again and again, without fail. Madonna claims she has “never canceled a show, ever” and you can translate this into something of meaning for your business. Make every customer interaction and make every product a promise that is fulfilled, and never rest until this is so.

Clarity of purpose

In the music industry, Madonna is famed for her ability to negotiate like a shark. Heck, she even wrangled $5 million out of Pepsi for an ad they never ran. They got the jitters, she didn’t care; she got her pound of flesh from them. There is a clarity of purpose for Madonna that is almost scary. She knows what she wants and she goes after it. Know your goals, and work relentlessly towards it. Setting a goal sets a tempo for your efforts, so get your goals and priorities right and you can deliver on something you want, and you can deliver it your way.

Trample on toes if you have to

Madonna has never been afraid to trample on toes and bloody a few noses if she had. Interest groups, professors, politicians, businesses, they all came the same to her. She doesn’t care if it’s the Vatican taking pot shots at her, and her fans love it. She never backed down from fighting things out and neither should you. Never apologize for who you are if you say something you feel is true. You can’t please everyone all the time. Take criticism on board so much as it makes sense and keep on moving towards achieving your goals relentlessly. If everyone does agree with you, maybe you’re saying something so innocuous that everyone can easily agree with.

Redefine the rules

The only rules that matter are the ones that you impose upon yourself. If and when Madonna does engage her fans, she doesn’t follow the regular rules and you can rest assured knowing that she comes up with unique ways to rip the rulebook to shreds. Rules are there for a reason, but to make the rules suited to your purpose marks out the successes from the failures and Lady Gaga might be the epitome of that today, but Madonna was the original.

I’ll admit it; it’s something that happens to all of us at some point or the other. Maintaining a blog takes a  lot of effort some days and it just doesn’t seem worth it at times. There is the small issue of visibility (or the lack of visibility conversely) of your blog as well as questions about your focus, research and what to write. And it all has to be very engaging while reaching out to readers. How on Earth are you supposed to keep at it? Not everyone has the patience of a Buddhist monk or a Himalayan Sadhu. Over time, I have come up with answers of my own to this problem.

Enjoy yourself

The moment you start treating writing and blogging as a chore, it becomes a chore. Keeping yourself motivated is a lot simpler when you’re thinking about ways to make things fun. In a way, writing a blog post has a lot to do with your state of mind, maybe everything to do with it. If you’re put off by the topic, chances are that will come through in your post. Enjoy yourself and you’ll be surprised how many more topics you can come up and how much more responsive your readers can be.

Baby steps

Never try to bite off more than you can chew at any one time. There is a lot you can do to help your blog reach a sustainable level of success, but don’t get ahead of yourself. The road to being known, if that, is a slow one and you won’t get thousands of readers overnight. Pace yourself instead and focus on doing the basics right, and over time you can add to this by doing things you feel could help spur you onwards. Find out what you have and haven’t done on a weekly basis and focus on improving those results or building on weak areas. Be kind to yourself, or you’ll burn out overnight and give up.

Always plan ahead

Always figure out ways for you to build up your blog’s content and how to reach out to your readers in the best way possible. Keep your expectations and your plans realistic and always assess your goals before you fully commit to them. A well thought out plan should be flexible and clear when it comes to achieving your goals.

Relax

Everyone needs to figure out a way to relax and get some downtime. Maybe you just want to put your feet up or you’ve had a particularly bad day, whatever the case is everyone cannot churn out posts at the same regularity or speed. Make things manageable always and work in time for friends, family or yourself.

Why do we surf channels on TV? Simply because there’s nothing that holds our interest for long. And we can do this with books, radio channels, or websites.

This is the only reason when visitors come to your site, and leave quickly. As soon as they get bored with the design, images, or content, they move their mouse, and CLICK! That’s it! That’s the only time you had to capture your visitors. Are you sure your blog is interesting enough to grab attention of the visitors, and hold them for long?

Here are few things you can do to avoid your visitors from touching the web remote:

1.    Right at the beginning, give them something that they fall in love with. For a while, think about those famous TV channels. What is it that keeps you engrossed into it? All the juicy images, colors, and the content? Or simply a boring old guy reading news? If people want fun stuff, give them what they want.

2.    Don’t display junk on your website. Make sure every article you post is proofread and has information in precise manner. Although the type of language you adopt to address your readers depend on what niche you are catering to, make sure you don’t sound too boring.

3.    Information is the most important thing you can give to your visitors. Write about any topic only if you know more than an average person knows about it. Research more about the topic and give them the most useful piece of article they have ever read. Make every article your best one. You also need to make sure that you make the information available easily (by using bullets, highlighting, bold fonts, and so on) to your readers.

4.    Readers would certainly be attracted if each of your blog post has attractive images, magnetic headlines, simple design, and useful content. Your blog should look very similar to the popular TV channel you always prefer.

5.    Make your posts interesting. By interesting I mean adding some humor, punch lines, and twists. If a channel is broadcasting last episode of ‘Lost’, and if another channel is playing a dull, boring program, which is not even funny, which one do you think will be preferred by most viewers?

6.    Be logical, keep you content in flow. You don’t want to be accused of misleading or letting your visitors wander. If you articles are not logical, or doesn’t make sense at all, there are thousand others that does. Don’t be surprised if you lose visitors faster than you gained. Hence, before you post any article, go though it more than once and keep editing until you believe it’s perfect.

7.    Be Creative. Offer something that isn’t offered by others on the web. This certainly is a difficult task. But once you get this ‘X’ factor in your blog, simply watch subscribers flowing in.

8.    Before you put up ads in your blog, think twice about it. It may or may not repel your visitors. Some prefer putting it up after a good number of visitors have subscribed, some put it before their they post even 10 articles. However, this will certainly affect your readership in some way.

9.    Ad is certainly a good way to generate revenue through your blog. Hence, sooner or later, you will place some ads. But make sure you don’t clutter your site up. People don’t like TV channels that are too flashy, or they don’t keep watching teleshopping channels for long.

10.    If you home page is good enough to attract visitors, make sure they don’t switch to other blogs due to lack of navigability. Have a simply blog with links to different pages of your blog o the home page. Have tabs ‘Most Commented’, ‘Popular Posts’, ‘Recent Posts’ and so on. Also, have few links in every blog posts, and at the end of you posts.

It will certainly take time for visitors to crowd your blog, even if you have the best site on the web. However, you need to keep improving it, and have patience. Gradually, you will emerge as a leader. A leader that doesn’t allow his followers to touch the remote.

Try to think just beyond the normal and you will encounter an ocean of ideas to attract traffic on your blog; some heard, some unheard, but definitely not common ones. If you apply this in your daily life, say to save money or improve relations, I am sure you will do much better than the others. However, let’s not make this post a ‘how to be creative’ one and stick to blogging.

So, I tried to think beyond the uninteresting, usual ideas and stepped into the ocean. I came up with 3 unusual ways to attract people to visit your blog. These aren’t very thoughtful ones because you see them daily. However, you don’t use it as a source of promotion of your blog.

Alright. Enough of mysterious talks, let’s discuss the three ways. Okay wait! Remember, I said DISCUSS, and not just listen. I will come back to this point during conclusion.

1. Misspell some words

   Do it purposely. After writing the content of your post, select few words that are commonly misspelled and misspell them. You are getting it, right? Okay. So, do it and watch how the traffic pours into your blog. You will also find numerous comments under your post correcting you. Okay, I know it’s quite unethical to do such stuff just to attract traffic. I am not asking you to do it often. Do it once and for god’s sake, don’t do it if it’s your first article.

   Maybe you will be surprised noticing the traffic directed toward the misspelled blog post. And you will feel like writing another misspelled article. Don’t do it. If this happens a number of times, people will doubt your vocabulary and would never re-visit your site.

2. Video Blogging

   This is an easy one. All you need is a video editing software, a web cam, and a Youtube account. You don’t need anything else, that is, after assuming you have good imagination. A tinge of humor, beautiful looks, pleasant quotes, or unmatched sound would be an added advantage.

   What do you do with this webcam? Switch it on and start talking. The echelon of simplicity or complexity would depend on the niche and obviously you. You can opt to show the demo of a product or a service, if you are a reviewer. Or you could simply talk. Do something that people really want to see. Warning: Don’t start stripping, you may be banned.

   This is far more effective than simply writing text. Such blogs has the potential to reach millions and millions of people through web.

3. Reply to comments, regularly

   If your article is genuinely good, the first-time visitor might or might not revisit your site. However, if he comments, he will definitely revisit the blog to check your reply. If you haven’t posted any reply, chances are rare that he ever want to come again. But if you reply, he will be obliged to return.

   Replying to comments makes the environment quite friendlier and pleases the commenter. Personally, I reply to each and every comment I receive for my posts except the ones with just “great post.” However, I don’t totally avoid them. An occasional ‘thank you’ is the best option.

   Not answering to their questions is possibly the worst thing you could do to your blog. Never do this. Whenever some visitor asks a question, answer them. Even if it means saying, “I am not aware about it. Let me do a research and get back to you.”

Okay. Now this wasn’t a well researched post. I just thought about it for a couple of minutes and started writing. I do believe that these three are effective, in fact very effective ways to attract traffic. Avoid using the first point repeatedly.

Before initiating with these unusual ways, I said let’s DISCUSS. I am sure you might have encountered many such unusual ways that could really pull people to your blog. Let’s DISCUSS them.