Whether you’re blogging for fun as a hobby, branding yourself, or marketing your products, your blog can always be pimped up. The time will come where your mind will hit a wall and you’d think you have no new ideas or thoughts to offer the world.
Sales are down and your blog rarely gets the number of readers it used to. Now don’t go rushing to a strangers chat hoping to find answers. The truth is, the answers are already hidden on your blog, you just can’t see them. There is so much you can do with your old posts or small tactics you can follow with your new posts to drive more traffic to your blog.
Here are a few tips to follow that will significantly improve your blog without necessarily even spending more money.
- Show your Personality
Your readers want to believe there is a human behind that screen; they want to connect with you and believe you actually know and have experienced what you’re preaching. So don’t be afraid to mention something personal and use your own writing style even if it’s not the usual.
During a particularly difficult transitioning period, you may want to focus your intentions on building resilience. — Nicole S. Urdang, MS, NCC, DHM
- Use Categories or Tags
Categories are a neat and clear way to display the general topic of your blog post and tags are used to be more specific. You should add a Categories widget on the sidebar to always be displayed for the reader. Everyone loves an organized blog that’s easy to navigate around.
- Make Sharing Super Easy
If you don’t already have social media buttons at the bottom of each blog post, you should probably start adding those. Add share buttons for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn…etc. Also, consider adding a “tweet this” option after quotes so users can easily tweet them.
Writing does not help our brains to remember information. It remembers the information for us, making it available to our brains when we wish to be reminded of it. — Kate Distin Ph.D.
- Add Visual Content
Spice things up a bit and break out from the usual informative texts. Add an image when referring to something or a slideshow or video to explain something instead of writing it. Don’t bore your reader with endless words and make your blog fruitful.
- Optimize your Content
Use keywords in your post to make it rich and to have it easily appear in searches. Since Google has added synonyms into the ranking, you can use the Thesaurus to find synonyms for keywords and use them in your text. For example, if you’re writing about bookstores, you can also mention bookshops or vendors. This will increase your chances of appearing in organic searches and boost your blog.
- Share again and again
Once you’ve published your post, you go ahead and share it on social media channels then wait for results. Some bloggers don’t like to share their posts more than once because they feel like they’re nagging for users to read it. This is far from true, yes, if you post about it every day it will be irritating but you can use a smart strategy around that. For example, share it on Facebook when published then once again towards the end of the week with a different summary, or share it on Twitter three times a day, each with a different message.
Studies have shown that sharing your post more than once doubles your blog traffic from social media. If they’ve missed it once, they’ll see it the second time.
- Keep on Networking
Never stop networking, and if you’ve never started then you’re really late. Networking is vital to promoting your blog and leaving your mark in the blogosphere. You need to always stay up-to-date with your readers’ comments and engage in discussions. Reply to emails and social media. Getting to know your readers will give you better ideas to improve your blog and write new posts. Also, get to know other bloggers like you. Go comment on their posts or give them feedback. Overall, you need to be social.
Creating consistent online content can help grow your practice faster than almost any other marketing or networking activity. —
- Encourage Guest Bloggers
Through networking, you should have a nice list of bloggers in your niche that you’re on a friendly basis with. You can ask them to write posts on your blog or share your posts on their blog or social media in exchange for doing the same.
If you’re a start-up blog, you can even offer to pay influential bloggers to write on your blog which will help promote your blog and increase your readers.
- Recreate Old Posts
Do you have any old posts that were a big hit? Great! Bring those back and update them to a better and newer version. You can add images, a new perspective, or more info and then publish it again.
- Stress on Call-to-action (CTA)
While writing your blog in more than one section, mention that they should share this with their friends or leave comments with their opinions or feedback. Don’t be shy and ask nicely and sweetly. No – demand to be heard! Make an eye-catching CTA message at the end of your post too.
These are just a few hints on how you can improve your blog and make it more productive, as long as you’re always trying something new and putting work into your content, your blog will shine brightly.