Lifestyle blogging is where it’s at! What better way to express yourself than by showcasing your daily interests to the world? As a lifestyle blogger, you’ve got carte blanche to create content that is expressly tailored to your interests. Do you love working with Border Collies on your farm? Chances are there’s an audience of folks eager to follow your blog posts, chime in with their opinions, and share their stories and experiences with you too. For the foodies out there, what better way to express your culinary fancies than a well-crafted lifestyle blog with titillating images of your favorite hors d’oeuvres, entrees, and deserts?
For the travellers among us, lifestyle blogs are the ultimate digital journal. From the pristine forests of the Kingdom of Bhutan in the Himalayas, to the sultry jungles of the Amazon, we can transcribe our experiences and interests into the digital arena for all the world to see. Stay at home moms and dads, intrepid adventurers and thrill seekers, tech aficionados, and film critics alike get to share their personal lifestyle blogs with their followers. From niche audiences to mainstream appeal, lifestyle blogs can impact our cultural zeitgeist in a big way.
If your lifestyle blog isn’t quite living up to expectations, perhaps it’s time to perform a fabulous upgrade.
What Makes A Lifestyle Blog Pop?
Everybody loves great written content, but nothing gets people more interested than engaging video content. As part of an overall digital marketing strategy, video remains hands down the most engaging way to fire up the crowds. No other form of content comes close to the real deal appeal of video. It can be used for advertising and marketing, exposure and conversion, and more importantly from a lifestyle blogger’s perspective storytelling. Fortunately, there are highly effective ways to boost the appeal of your lifestyle blog by revamping your video marketing strategy.
Great Ways to Transform Your Lifestyle Blog
A legendary bodybuilder and Hollywood icon, Reg Park once said, ‘Do you what you love and then get paid for it…’ Never has a truer word been spoken. Lifestyle bloggers are true to their core – they blog about things that are near and dear to their heart. Whether it’s baking, fashion, travel, fitness, country living, or healthy eating, there is always an audience for great content. When it’s crafted to perfection, a lifestyle blog features incredible social influencer marketing potential, not to mention social media sharing opportunities. There are infinite possibilities when it comes to creating a successful lifestyle blog, and it all begins with a passion for what you love.
Video Email marketing efforts are increasingly making use of embedded videos which open and start playing inside email messages. Unfortunately, the erstwhile systems that permitted many of these videos to start playing automatically now block them and flag them as security risks. If you are using email marketing with videos to support your lifestyle blog’s readership, you may wish to consider emails featuring images which open up videos on separate pages. A successful lifestyle blog boasts a growing audience of visitors and thanks to video, you can dramatically improve your CTR (click through rate), decrease the bounce rate, and increase overall levels of engagement with your content.
Read more about how video email marketing campaigns can be used to captivate the attention of your subscribers, generate a growing brand of loyal followers, with high levels of engagement. Lifestyle bloggers who focus on craftingan effective video email marketing strategy can even enjoy additional benefits such as up selling to existing subscribers, boosting sales, and conversions, and ensuring that content which gets put out actually gets digested by audiences.
Personal content is the gold standard. Nothing can substitute for the heartfelt thoughts, ideas, interests, and desires of a professional lifestyle blogger. It must come from the heart and it has to be original. People generally don’t want to read recycled malarkey about a walk in the woods, or how to make a crème brûlée. They want to know about your experiences with your friends and family, with original content. That’s why personal content really resonates with readers. Once you’ve established credibility as a lifestyle blogger, you’re already well on the path to success!
Transmedia narratives involve telling a story about across multiple different platforms in the digital arena. The concept itself was introduced to the world by man named Henry Jenkins who crafted a breakout book known as Convergence Culture. It is certainly apropos for lifestyle blogging because it offers the blogger widespread appeal to audiences across the spectrum. In its simplest form, transmedia storytelling is the process by which content is ‘… Dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience.’ [Henry Jenkins Transmedia Storytelling 101].
In layman’s terms, multiplatform storytelling is about telling your story as a lifestyle blogger by providing tidbits across different media channels, which ultimately builds up to providing the full story. Hollywood blockbusters tend to tell the full story of a work of fiction by providing a feature film, a prequel, and a sequel. Star Wars, The Matrix, Marvel and DC are renowned for their transmedia narratives. This particular narrative is about telling a story through a blog, email, newsletters, and actual experiences where interactions occur between people. It’s an ingenious way of getting bits and pieces of information out there for the world to see.
As you can imagine, successful lifestyle blogging is part passion and part strategy. When done right, it can be an incredibly exciting and lucrative endeavor with far-reaching appeal. By engaging audiences through intelligent use of personal content, transmedia narratives, and video email marketing, it is entirely possible to build a successful lifestyle blog and monetize it too.
About Carson Derrow
