Blogging is a cornerstone of any successful content marketing strategy. Businesses and individuals have been using this format of content delivery for generating traffic, link-building, SEO, and more, ever since its inception.
The following tips were compiled by interpreting various experts from the blogosphere.
1. Help the Consumer
A consumer typically browses online either to find answers to common questions. Companies have started noticing this habit, which prompted them to provide more informative and educational services through their blogs, instead of using them solely for self-promotion.
By turning themselves into great listeners of consumer demand, companies have found a veritable gold-mine of ideas for content.
If consumers are asking a particular question all the time, by answering it through a blog-post, a company stands to gain measurable increases in their overall blog traffic, and the added brand loyalty won’t hurt either.
2. Update Your Design
People who visit many blogs on a daily basis have grown used to specific blog designs and styles. Most of the time, these designs tend to be less appealing and less creative than for other websites. This is because blogs are usually understood as content-first platforms. But why settle for this?
In reality, blogs can undergo a facelift to fix their appearance much more accessible than a traditional website. Thanks to numerous free themes available through platforms such as WordPress, a boring, ugly-looking blog can quickly adopt an irresistibly eye-catching look. For bloggers who don’t feel tech-savvy enough to implement changes like these on their own, letting a creative web design company manage the looks of your blog might be the best solution.
3. Think Mobile-First
More than half of internet users are accessing the web from a portable device. So the chances that your readers are accessing your content during their commute to work, while sitting in a waiting room somewhere, or even while working out, are statistically significant. So in addition to enhancing the looks of your blog through modern design, make sure that it displays equally well on mobile devices.
This requires the implementation of principles of responsive design, which include resizable window frames, touch-friendly user interfaces, compact image sizes, and more. The days of browsing the web from a desktop are slowly coming to an end, and bloggers with an eye on the future would do well to adapt to a mobile-first online environment.
4. Invite Guests Often
If you are struggling to meet your content schedule, inviting guest bloggers can help fill out the content gap. Consumers enjoy quality content no matter the source, so asking industry experts, staff members of your company, fellow bloggers, and other online influences, for a blog-post will likely be met with approval.
Hosting guest content can help your blog by offering your visitors a fresh point-of-view. Working with guest bloggers will also expand your online network, which might bring you more guest-blogging opportunities in the future. Finally, if the guest blogger has a sizable audience of their own, some of them might migrate to your blog as well, thus expanding your customer base.
5. Optimize Content for SEO
Blog posts are a great way of generating organic traffic through search engine optimization. If your content appears more often near the top of search engine result pages, more people will naturally come across your site as a part of their daily browsing experience.
There are some steps to implementing SEO in your content strategy. Start by identifying your current audience, as well as figuring whether they match your desired target audience. Follow it up by creating content that is appealing to the latter. Be sure to include relevant keywords which match the interests of your target audience. Over time, if your content is up to snuff, your blog will become a source of authority, which means other sites will be linked to it more often, further enhancing your SEO efforts.
6. Use Custom Media Content
Stock content is no longer cutting it online. With so much stock photos, illustrations, tunes, design templates, etc. available, blogs are having a hard time setting themselves apart. The solution? Create your custom side-content. Besides adding a dash of personality to your posts, custom content is often more useful to your audience because it can provide more specific information for their queries. Custom infographics are a great example of this, as they allow you to create a handy summary of the information in your blog post.
With image and video search becoming more prominent in recent years, custom content is turning out to be essential for furthering your SEO strategy. So make sure your custom content is appropriately tagged and described.
7. Use Subheading to Your Advantage
Choosing the appropriate subheadings for your blog posts is crucial for a good UX. They help visitors find relevant information at a glance. In contrast, when readers come across a dense, text-heavy post without appropriate subheadings, they will be extremely likely to bounce. So to leverage subheadings to your advantage, you have to integrate them seamlessly into your posts, while also making them visually appealing. Use short, common phrases written in easy-to-read typefaces.
Subheadings are also a great way to improve your SEO efforts. Search engines parse the content of your blog by reading HTML markup, so the proper use of heading tags is crucial for getting indexed and ranked appropriately.
8. Build an Email List
An email list is a great way to reach to an audience without going through middlemen such as Google or Facebook. So start working on an email list for your blog from day one. There are some ways to draw in email subscribers, and they are best when used in tandem. Start by adding mailing list pop-ups and subscription boxes to your blog, carefully fine-tuning to find the sweet-spot which is efficient but not intrusive.
Follow it up by providing an opt-in box to any forms you might have on your blogs, such as signing up for products and services. Finally, use your existing user contact data to send out invitations to your mailing list. As for what to send through the mailing list, weekly roundup emails, daily newsletters, and targeted emails are the best way to go for most blogs. If you wish to make the most out of your subscribers, it is time you stop making some mistakes while building your email list.
9. Add a Touch of Personality
Searching for information is what initially brings people to blogs, but what makes them stay is the personality of the blogger. While corporate websites have to adhere to strict standards when it comes to written content, blogs have much more leeway regarding themes, attitude, and writing style.
Enterprising bloggers leverage this fact by writing in a more personal, informal style, which makes their content more appealing to the average person online. In this sense, the fact that opinion came from a particular blogger is more important to people than the opinion itself. The reap the benefits of the user desire for personalized content, be sure to adopt a writing style that matches the tone of a friendly conversation. A blog is not a news outlet, so you don’t have to conform to the same standards.
10. Keep an Eye on Metrics
The success of a blog is in part determined by how well you measure it. Blog statistics can help you learn how your overall strategy is performing, allowing you to make adjustments on the fly. Regarding data, global traffic, SERP ranking, ad revenue, etc. are essential, but you should not neglect to measure the success of individual blog posts as well.
Keeping track of like/dislikes and shares of your posts will give you an idea of how your audience feels about your content in general. Comments, positive and negative, are also a great way to find specific issues people have with your content, which makes correcting them much more straightforward.
Nice tips on blogging. This blog is helpful for persons who are developing business through blogging The traffic and leads come through the blog.