By Tom Blake
Blogs no longer require a formal introduction. They are an integral part of most online businesses (if not all!). Blogs not only keep your users engaged and boost your brand; they also help you enhance your visibility online. This is perhaps why websites that publish blogs regularly have 434% more indexed pages!
However, let’s not ignore the fact that a large number of blogs are not optimized properly, and therefore, fail to garner all the attention that they might deserve. There are many successful and popular blogs that get millions of views every day. But this might not always be true. Any beginner in the field of blogs will tell you how hard it is to get views or likes in their articles.
Most of the times, we come up with good and eye-catching articles and content for our blog and expect it to be an instant classic, with shares and comments rolling in from every side. But soon we learn the harsh truth that it isn’t so.
But believe it or not, there are many small tweaks and tricks that make sure that your blog gets the comments and shares that it deserves. Let us look at some tips and tricks that can help you increase the effectiveness of your blog in 2017.
1. Review and Refine Your Content Plan
Like all things, a strong blog that will stand the test of time has to be built on a strong foundation. In this case, your foundation is your content plan. You should fully understand and analyze your target audience and be able to write for them and not for yourselves.
It is important to choose topics of value and importance to attract more readers. Constantly providing content that talks about education, entertainment, lifestyle and the likes draw audience easily. One way of finding topics that will engage your audience is to find what they are reading about in your competitor’s page. There are many tools that can help you in choosing the correct content and keywords for your blog including the likes of Google Keyword Planner, Ahref and others. Make use of such tools to strategize properly & get a help from a search engine optimization professional.
2. Improve Your Landing Page
To build relationships with your audience and to make sure that they are not occasional visitors, it is important to have a lead generation strategy. Your best chance of doing this is with the help of your landing pages. A good landing page needs to have a lot of features or aspects to fully grab the attention of your audience. This includes the headline, description, CTA among many other things. Your landing page should be attractive and should compel your visitor to browse the website further.
3. Build Content That Can Stand the Test of Time
You cannot always expect your new content to attract a stream of steady traffic. This is why building good and evergreen content is important for the survival and improvement of your blog. Content should be such that it offers information that stays relevant even after a long period of time. You can make sure that your articles stand the test of time by choosing the best keywords that have a good rank and low competition. You should also be as exhaustive as possible and try to fit in as much information and data as possible. You can make sure that your article doesn’t lose its relevance by updating it on a regular basis.
4. Know Where to Promote Your Content
Simply creating a good and attractive blog is not good enough. It is important to make sure that your blog reaches the correct people. Even though older and more established blogs have better chances and resources when it comes to promoting the content, you can still harness the value of social media to your advantage. You can also improve your outreach by starting a blogger outreach campaign.
There are many tools that you can use to look for influences, including Ninja Outreach, Traackr, Follower Wonk and others which can turn extremely valuable to your blog.
5. Keep Track of What Works and What Doesn’t
For your blog to be successful, you should begin to treat it as a business that needs constant maintenance and care. Use your blogging milestones to keep an eye on your blog. Further, make use of tools like the key performance indicators that can help you find what’s working and what is not. The most important KPIs to look for in your blog include the page traffic and the traffic source, the bounce rate and social media shares. There are also other important indicators, including the click-through rate, the SEO ranking, the number of email subscribers and others.
If you wish to succeed in the field of blogging, it is important that you optimize and improve your blog. Take care of the above-mentioned points and improve the reach of your blog to boost traffic and the profit that you make from it.
What are your views on this? How do you optimize your blog and make it effective? Do let us know in the comments.
