On the weekend I wrote a post here at ProBlogger titled 9 Lessons You Can Learn about Blogging by Watching Me Sell My House which was a post that I hesitated to publish for a day or two before putting it up on the blog because I wondered if it might be a little off topic.
While it was about blogging – it was also somewhat personal and if anything more focussed upon the topic of real estate than anything else.
However as I felt it contained enough ‘blogging related tips’ that I decided to go ahead with it.
The response from readers was very interesting.
The first wave of responses was from regular ProBlogger readers who made comments and linked up in a fairly typical fashion. I think giving a little insight into my personal situation was appreciated.
The second wave of responses was very interesting and a little unexpected. About 24 to 36 hours after publishing the post I noticed a second wave of incoming links to the site – from real estate blogs and other related topics (for example this one from Decorating Diva). What interested me about these secondary linkups was that they picked up the ‘off topic’ components of the article as their primary focus.
While I did know that some real estate bloggers follow ProBlogger – I hadn’t expected them to link up to my post on blogging. However using real estate as the illustration to teach about blogging was enough to generate interest in the post (which seems to have triggered other blogs to link up too).
I guess the lesson is that a little ‘off topic’ posting – or at least using another topic to illustrate your main topic – can help to attract a different kind of reader to your blog.
I wouldn’t suggest doing it in every post – but throwing in this type of post every now and again can be worth considering. The key is to keep it relevant to both your regular readers as well as potentially new readers.
