A blog is essential for any business website. A great blog that attracts a lot of readers and features high-value content can make a world of difference and help you convert many more customers. Yet what does a great blog look like? What separates the wheat from so much online chaff? In this guide, we’re going to show you how to make your blog a cut above the rest with practical and actionable blogging tips.
Put these tips into practice and you can improve your SEO, get more visitors to your website, and create highly shareable content.
Are you ready to find out how to improve your blog and reap these rewards? Then read on!
1. It All Starts With a Strong Headline
Journalism and blogging have a few things in common, first and foremost, they depend on the headline for clicks. If your blog title is uninspiring, you aren’t going to get as many readers.
For example, a blog that’s titled “how to fix common electrical issues” won’t get as many clicks as one that’s titled “zap! Five electrical fixes that offer shocking results.”
When creating a headline, strong language, clever use of wordplay, and specificity about the content are vital.
2. Utilize Your Blog to Harvest Emails
A blog is a vital part of your marketing funnel. If you make use of popups, you can use them to harvest emails, which you can then use for direct marketing.
So, how do you get people to hand over their emails? The best way is to offer access to an ebook or a newsletter in exchange for them. When someone gives you their email address, you’ll email them a link to the content.
3. Break Up Your Content
If your blogs look like walls of text, many readers will lose interest. We only have a limited attention span, so trawling through huge amounts of text often makes us switch off.
So, how can you write longer blog posts? The answer is to break up your content. Keep paragraphs to three sentences at most, use bullet points or numbered lists, and add images.
Make sure that your content is formatted into small and easily digestible chunks.
4. Update Your Blog Regularly
We crave routine, so updating your blog regularly is vital. We’d recommend that you update your blog at least once per week, but if you can update it twice or three times per week, don’t be afraid to do so!
However many times per week you can update your blog, you need to do it at the same time every week. If you’ve posted your first blog on a Wednesday evening, post your next update next Wednesday evening.
People are more likely to come back to your blog if they’re sure to see new content.
5. Optimize Your Blog Posts for SEO
You should make sure that you optimize your blog posts for SEO. Yet what does that actually mean?
The first step that you should take when optimizing for SEO is keyword research. Find out what brings people to your site and those like it: what are the most important keywords for your industry?
Try to include these keywords in your content. Scatter them into your intro, the body of your article, the conclusion, and headlines.
You should also make sure that any images you use have SEO-friendly titles and metadata, so that search engines make the most of them.
Putting these tips into play can boost where your blog article ranks in the search results.
6. Use Calls to Action
Tell your audience what to do. Now, stripped of all marketing context, this might sound like bad advice: won’t it annoy your audience or come across as rude?
The answer is no. You need to tell your audience what action they should take, whether it’s to get in touch with you, share the post, or comment on your blog. You may have noticed that we used a call to action in the intro, telling you to read on.
Giving your readers a prod in the right direction is vital and will meet with positive results. Always include a call to action in your intro and conclusion.
7. Adopt the AIDA Structure for Your Intro
Your introduction needs to hook your readers. It needs to make them read on, or it’s failed. This is where the AIDA structure comes in.
Standing for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action, the AIDA structure is incredibly useful. You should grab the reader’s attention with an interesting stat or a common problem, interest them by discussing how to solve their problems, build up a desire in them to read on, and then make them take action by reading on.
8. Edit Your Post
You need to make sure that you thoroughly edit your post before you publish it. If you publish a post that’s littered with spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, or other issues, it makes your whole company look amateurish.
You should use tools like Hemingway Editor and Grammarly to find issues in your writing.
9. Use Exit-Intent Popups
Exit-intent popups are popups that detect when someone is going to leave your site. To do this, they’ll track cursor movement, inactive periods, and other metrics to establish whether someone is planning to leave the site.
If they are, you can use a popup to offer a great deal on your products or services, or offer them some other incentive to stay on your site. These simple tools can make a massive difference to your conversion rates.
Make Use of These Blogging Tips and Grow Your Audience
If you use the blogging tips that we’ve given you, you’ll be able to grow your audience and convert a lot more of your readers! While you can do a lot of these yourself, popups are a little harder.
We’re here to help you. If you want to take advantage of popup technology, our products make it simple. For more information or to try our product for free, click here!