Blogging is beneficial for businesses in all industries. Not only does it allow you to inform and educate visitors on your business’s products and happenings, it’s also a great lead generation tool.
Ultimately, you’d want for your content to reach as many qualified eyes as possible. Fortunately for you, I’ve put together a list of 23 ways that I’ve been able to get the most out of blog posts I’ve had published for clients over my career.
Think User Experience
You need to ensure that your blogs are short enough to be interesting and to hit the point right on the head (unlike this one). After all, most people get overwhelmed when the content is too much.
To this end, you should only include amazing content that makes for a good read. By so doing, you will be able to attract more people – who will want to go through more of your blog posts simply because they are visually appealing. Use the following easy tricks to ensure that your blog posts look great:
Add Related Images
You can break up your pages so that they don’t look text-heavy by adding images in between your textual content. Images will provide visual relief. As far as possible, use illustrations, graphs, charts, diagrams, and screenshots – among others. So long as the photos you use are copyrighted, you shouldn’t have a problem with the images you add to your blog posts.
Add Short Video
Video content will add audio and visual interest to your web pages. There are many websites that will allow you to embed video content directly into your posts – such as YouTube. Ensure you capitalize on such websites.
Use Headings for Emphasization
If the application you are using to blog offers pre-formatted headings, use it to apply specific text to your posts. This will ensure that your content stands out in terms of how it is organized and how it looks. Headings are also useful for breaking text up, making posts look easier to scan, calling attention to certain parts of the post, and improving your search engine optimization.
Add Lists for Organization
Most of the applications bloggers use offer great tools you can fall back on to create numbered and bulleted lists in your posts. Lists will add white space within your posts, which will provide great visual relief, especially in text-heavy pages.
Color Works for Emphasization Too
Changing the color of the text in your blog posts will improve the visual appeal of everything you write. However, you should not overdo it, otherwise, you will lose the point entirely. Instead, use colors for particularly important text, headings, and hyperlinks.
Think Search Engine Optimization
There are tons of changes you can make on your blog posts that will get you more traffic. These changes will also affect the long-term growth and development of your blog.
Instead of falling back on SEO (search engine optimization tricks) that might get your blog flagged as spam, focus on content that adheres to the following rules:
Keyword-Rich Titles
Whenever you can, naturally add keywords to your titles. Of course, you need to ensure that your titles are relevant, attractive, and intriguing. However, inserting certain keywords within the title will go a long way in improving the rank of your blog posts on search engines.
Build Internal Links to Strong Sites
When you create a new blog post, try to link it to other pages on your blog or older posts you made in the past. If you can, make sure you offer useful and additional content by adding these internal links in your posts. By so doing, you will improve the SEO for your blog and get more page views. It will also improve the user experience on your posts.
Link Placement
Apart from linking internally using keyword-rich anchor text, you need to include these links as early on as you possibly can within the posts. Preferably, search engines will check for internal links in the first third of your blog post. Of course, never forget to ensure that these links are always focused on improving the user experience on your blog.
Keyword Links
As far as possible, never link the same keyword to different URLs. Similarly, try not to link keyword variations to one URL. Instead, be consistent in your linking to improve your search traffic and make your blog more useful to your readership.
Limit Links
Although links are great for improving the rank of your blog, overdoing it could have the opposite effect. Therefore, you should never stuff links in your posts. Doing this will only make your posts harder to read while raising a red flag among search engines that you might be spamming your content.
Optimize Images
Go the extra step and name your image files using helpful titles explaining what the images are about. Where possible, include keywords in the file names.
Write Adequate Posts
You should also ensure that your blog posts are of the right length. To this end, they must be long enough that they will comprehensively cover the topic you are writing about. However, they shouldn’t be so long that they drone on and on.
Be Original
It also helps that you only post content that is original and not lifted from another online source. When you duplicate content, you are going to be penalized by search engines and pushed further down the search results list.
Publish Frequently
The frequency with which you post to your blog will largely affect the traffic you get. To this end, search engines tend to send more traffic to those blogs that constantly update their content.
Focus on Quality
Over and above everything, ensure that the content you post is of the best quality possible. All the efforts we have talked about won’t help you unless the content you produce is of a great quality.
Think Social Media
When people share your blog posts, you will receive more views. This will, in turn, make your blog more engaged and visible. This means that you need to optimize your content and ensure that there are tools to make it easy for visitors to share your posts. To make this happen, follow these guidelines:
Add Meta Data
You ought to make it easy for people to share the content on your blog. Provide them with meta details within your post. This way, when they share your content on Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, it will be displayed nicely on every channel.
Make Image-Sharing Easy
You should also use engaging images on your posts and encourage your visitors to share them on their social media accounts. When visitors hover over the images in your post, they will see options allowing them to share on Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest.
Optimize for Mobile
Today, most people access the internet on their mobile devices. This means that you need to optimize your blog for mobile sharing. This way, your fans will be able to share your posts on the go.
Create Tweetable Snippets
You might want to add ClickTweet links on your blog to allow visitors to share your content on their Twitter accounts.
Experiment with Titles
The titles you use will largely affect how many people read and share your content. Therefore, you should learn how to write compelling titles that will attract readership and sharing.
Re-share Content
After creating new content, ensure you share it thoroughly so that more people get to see it. Remember, your audience will not always be online. However, when you post your content on different platforms throughout the day, you are going to make more people aware of your latest post.
Post at the Right Time
The best time to post fresh content will depend on such factors as the industry, the type of content, and the niche readership you are targeting. You will learn, through trial and error, when it is best to post. Then, use software tools to schedule your content to be shared at different times.
Post Online
After you publish new content, try to reach out to other communities that might want to read and share what you posted. This will generate traffic and get you more shares. Of course, you have to be an active member in these communities before they agree to share your content.
Conclusion
So, there you have it – the top ways to get the most out of your blog posts. Using the above tips, tricks, and suggestions, you are going to win more readers, attract more people, and retain them as your loyal audience.
Remember, the greater your content, the greater the visibility you will want. Therefore, go out of your way to encourage everyone who visits your blog to share the posts and images they liked. This will help you attract more visitors and receive more shares.
In the long run, the success of your blog will largely depend on the amount of work you put into making it look like a successful operation and feel like one too. Chief of these revolves around ensuring that your blog is of the best quality possible, it has a great layout, and uses various cues to make people do certain things (such as share your content). The above tips should get you there.