“A dead blog is a broken dream.”
(Danny Iny – Firepole Marketing)
Blogging is hard. Sometimes it can be really hard. The crushing disappointment and obligatory tantrum that follows your pitiful first week’s stats is one that all bloggers have to face. Every blog starts at nothing and it’s only through hard work, a lot of patience and some failures that you’ll start seeing the stats that most of us actually want.
But if only there was someone who could make all the hard work a little easier?
Enter… The Freddy Krueger Of Blogging
Imagine being able to get your hands on ready-made tuition from someone who grew his blog from nothing to one with over 23,000 visitors a month, in just 2 years. Enter Danny Iny from Firepole Marketing (otherwise known as The Freddy Krueger of Blogging).
This is a guy who has written over 80 guest posts for some of the world’s biggest blogs: Copyblogger, Problogger and Smashing Magazine, to name a few. His guest blogging strategy has brought him:
- Thousands of comments
- Tens of thousands of Tweets, likes and shares
- A position as one of the leaders in the marketing world.
Danny has acheived this in little more than 2 years and what’s more, he can write his dynamite posts in as little as 1 hour.
Luckily, Danny’s such a nice guy that he regularly gives advice away for free, most recently in his webinar on Tom Ewer’s Leaving Work Behind blog.
How The Hell Does He Do It?
As part of his webinar (which I strongly recommend you watch at Tom’s website here), Danny laid out his structure for an awesome blog post, which goes roughly like this:
- The Headline: get your readers interested.
- The Hook: convince them to start reading – what pain are they experiencing, or what pleasure are they not experiencing?
- Problem: go over the problem in more detail – what’s causing their pain?
- Root of the problem: what’s really going on?
- Solution: how can the problem be addressed?
- Implementing the solution: what should your readers do next?
- Engagement-building question: invite your readers to comment or share your post.
- Byline: who are you?
Danny Iny’s Blog Structure – In His Own Words
After watching the webinar I was keen to learn more about Danny’s blog structure and jumped at the chance of an interview with him. Here’s more about his strategy from the man himself:
CG: Which has been your most successful use of this blog structure? Why do you think this was?
DI: Easily one of my most successful posts was 21 Ways to Create Compelling Content When You Don’t Have a Clue, on Copyblogger, and it’s because I spent so much time researching the blog to see what the audience wants, and what headline structures they’d respond to.
People think that good writing is about inspiration, but it’s not true – not if you’re approaching it like a professional, at least. Good writing comes from research into what the reader will respond to.
CG: What’s the secret to a perfect hook?
DI: It’s all about connecting with the experience of the reader. The hook is the part of the post that has to grab their attention, right at the beginning, and the best way to do that is to either describe the pain that they’re currently experiencing, or the pleasure that they want to be experiencing, but aren’t.
Don’t try to get creative and talk about the problem, possible solutions, your ideas, or anything like that – just describe the pain or the pleasure in explicit, visceral, gut-wrenching detail.
CG: What makes you bookmark a post or think “this blogger has something special”?
DI: It’s the headline, the hook, and the sub-heads; I read so many blog posts that usually, I just skim – if the headline, hook, or sub-head don’t grab me and get me to read the rest, then the blogger hasn’t done it. When they get me to actually read the whole post, that’s when I know they’ve done a good job.
Want To Learn Danny’s Strategy, Right Now?
So, how do you create the posts that will work hard enough to get you traffic of Danny Iny proportions? As well as his webinar, Danny also offers his Write Like Freddy training. His curriculum promises to help you take action and bring in more traffic, more subscribers, just by putting some thought into your guest posting strategy.
What do you think of Danny’s blog structure? Will you be signing up to the course? Let me know in the comments!
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