New year, new look. The flipping of the calendar from 2015 to 2016 gives us all a chance to restore and rethink. So why not take an inventive look at your blog?
In the current competitive online market, blogging has become one of the very essential tools to promote your business and attract high traffic to your website. The trend is becoming very popular inducing a lot of visits and followers.
Here are five tips that’ll put your blog on the right path in 2016 and beyond – A Guide to a successful blogging for 2016:
- Stay focused
Remember that a blog is a communication tool, not a sales tool. Don’t lose sight of your blog’s purpose as you can include establishing your expertise, sharing your passion or expressing your opinions.
As a blogger, it’s important to write from your gut and to share the ideas that matter most to you. However, the opposite side of the coin is that you need to understand your audience. The content of the blog should be relevant to your target audience.
If you stay focus and choose a creative topic to blog about, bear in mind your target audience or niche. Make your blog about something very specific and you’ll please both the search engines and your readers. Try not to be too general and really focus on one specialist topic and stick to it. Find your own niche and go for it – just remember to stay on focus on selecting your topic.
- Write a catchy headline:
Too often the headline is the most neglected part of writing a blog. People just gloss over it without taking much time to consider it. In their minds, it’s the cherry on top.
It’s one thing to write great content, but it’s another thing to get it read and ranked — which is where nailing the title comes in. Titles are what sell the content. They represent it in search engines, in email, and on social media. The fact is that headlines play a very big role in your blog’s success.
It’s not enough to write the best content you can write you also have to come up with a cool title so that people will click on your website in search results and not on your competitor.
Great headlines are a key to a successful blog as they can..
- Grab your visitors attention
- Increase CTR (click through rate)
- Increase traffic to your website
- Increase social shares
- Valuable Content:
It goes without saying but if you don’t provide something your readers wants, your creative blog will never be a success. Give people what they’re after and offer real value to their web browsing experience. In nutshell, value is demonstrated in the content you publish. If your content isn’t valuable people won’t read it or return to read more. Really think about what you’re putting out there and give the readers what they want.
Always remember, content is the backbone of any blog. Attention-grabbing and informative content is extremely demanded by the market as visitors continuously searching for helpful data. The generation of killer content is prime to accelerate internet audience.
- Think visually:
Be sure that images accompany your words. However, don’t pick just any image. Dreadful or unrelated photos, for instance, will turn off readers.
Vaishakhi Chhotai-Doshi, an established commercial photographer from VBC Photography, advises every blogger to invest time in producing high quality images as these images can make a big difference to the way that your customers perceive you and your business.
She added, good quality imagery complements blog and can do wonders. The content of the pictures should induce your readers to share with their connections and friends. If the blog is useful with valuable content along with less-appealing pictures, your readers might share it whereas your readers will share it hundred-fold if you’ve got attractive photos to go along with it.
As they say “Picture is not everything. IT’S The ONLY THING!!
- Market:
You won’t get anywhere if you just launch a blog and hope that people will come without any marketing effort. You have to actively market your blog and you can do that through a variety of ways. You can start chatting with other bloggers by leaving valuable comments on other people’s blog posts – this will help draw people back to your website. Other useful ways are:
a. Use SEO:
Great content means a lot, but it might not be enough to generate traffic for your blog. Your posts should be optimised for search engines so that you can get free referral traffic from Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Optimisation involves using the right keywords for your industry, good page construction, and high-quality inbound links. It also involves establishing both domain-level and page-level authority, which will help your blog to perform better in search rankings.
b. Social media:
According to surveys, 42 percent of people judge a blog’s quality by the number of social shares it receives. Readers view your +1s, your likes, your shares, and your retweets as evidence suggesting that you’re credible and that you have an admiring audience. If you’re not active on social media, then you’re missing a great opportunity to gain followers for your blog. You’re also missing the chance to connect with other bloggers and thinkers who can become an important part of your network.
Always remember the “social” in social media: Be a friend if you expect to make friends
Conclusion
You can utilise above top 5 tips by keeping as New Year’s resolutions for blogging in 2016. Let us know which resolutions worked best for you by leaving a note in the comments.
If you need our help with setting up your blog or developing a content strategy to create bespoke content for your website, then contact Web Leap team today to see how we can improve and develop your brand and personality through blogging.