How One Blogger Grew Her Readership by 500% with Help from Three Practical Writing Tips
In this episode we continue our Blogging Breakthroughs series, this time with a story from my friend Kelly Exeter.

Kelly is a regular speaker at our events, has contributed ProBlogger content as a guest writer, and has been a guest on this podcast several times.



Today, the story Kelly shares is a great companion piece to the “How to Become a Prolific Content Creator” episode.

Her blogging breakthrough is about going from someone who is a good and proficient but bland writer with a plateauing audience to someone who writes with more personality and in a way that's magnetic to readers. A lot of readers.

To get to that point, Kelly was willing to find someone to critique her writing. We all know it can be difficult to accept criticism, but it’s well worth doing.

Sometimes you write something that has good information and is well written, but doesn’t connect with people. It’s too vanilla. It isn’t read, commented on, or shared.

The problems Kelly experienced are probably things many bloggers can relate to.
Kelly describes three practical tips to improve your content:

Messy drafts: Hand-write random ideas, previous stories, and tangents (some may not make it into a post). Form core idea with developed personality
Don’t sit on the fence: You don’t need to be confrontational or controversial. But you do need to define your stance. Just be you
Write the way you talk: Have faith in your voice, and let your personality shine. Use quirks, funny words and expressions you use when you talk in your content

By improving her writing, Kelly increased her reader traffic from 2,500 to 15,000 a month – a 500% increase. It also helped her make about $100,000 in off-blog income.
Links and Resources for PB 257: 3 Writing Tips That Helped Kelly Grow Her Readership by 500%:

Kelly Exeter
Success Incubator
FinCon

Further Listening

How to Become a Prolific Content Creator (an Interview with Kelly Exeter)
My Mid-Life Crisis and the Power of Being Vulnerable on a Blog

Courses

Starting a Blog
ProBlogger Pro – 31 Days to Build a Better Blog

Join our Facebook group





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Darren: Hey there and welcome to episode 257 of the ProBlogger podcast. My name is Darren Rowse, I'm the blogger behind problogger.com. A site dedicated to help you to create a great blog and to build profit around your blog. You can find at problogger.com where you'll also our eBooks and more importantly probably our courses, our starter blog course for those of you who haven’t yet started, but also our 31-Days To Build A Better Blog course which is ideal for those of you who are early in the blogging or even intermediate, and advanced bloggers that need a bit of a kick start for your blog. Just look for the courses tab at problogger.com.

Today, we're going to continue our blogger breakthrough series of podcast with a story from my friend, Kelly Exeter. Kelly is going to be familiar to many of you because she has regularly spoken at our events here in Australia. She has contributed guest content on the ProBlogger, the blog but also has been on this podcast a number of times.

I interviewed her back in episode 193 on how to be a prolific content creator. That was a hugely popular episode, one of the more popular interviews that I've done. You can find a link to that in today's show notes. Today she's going to share a story that I think it's a great companion piece to that interview that I did. I do encourage you to listen to both if you haven't listened to the previous one or if you want to relisten to it, too.

Today, Kelly is going to share a story about how she went from being a good proficient, but a bit bland writer whose audience had plateaued,