Blogging. That is, providing valuable content to our readers for free. It’s a cornerstone of content marketing. However, are the posts that you’re producing effectively helping you build your audience? No worries. If you need a little help in upping your blogging skills, I’ve got 5 things you can do to improve your blog posts right away.
Okay, let’s get started.
5 Things You Can Do To Improve Your Blog Posts
Create Better Titles
The first thing you need to accomplish is attracting readers to your blog. Creating strong titles for your posts is really the #1 thing you can do to bring the masses to your site. Because, there is too much competition out there. I covered this more in depth in a recent article, Blog Titles – The Most Important Part of Your Post. Again, this one of the most important things you can do to improve your blog posts.
Add Photos
Every post needs at least one photograph. Because, we’re visual creatures. That means, if we land on a post and there’s nothing visually interesting or entertaining… yeah, we’ll be moving along.
Make sure you add at least one photo. If the article is short, that might be all you need. But, if it goes much beyond a couple hundred words, it would be better if you added one or two more.
Add Subtitles and Bullet Points
White space is so important! Because if a reader lands on your page and is greeted by nothing but blocks and blocks of text, they’ll feel exhausted before they even start reading. A page with nothing but paragraphs makes the reader feel that there is a lot of work ahead.
Instead, use subtitles and bullet points to break things up a bit.
- Visually, the post just looks better.
- This helps the reader quickly understand what the article about by just reading the title, subheadings and bullet points.
- Subtitles and bullet points will make the content look more easily consumable. It’s not just a wall of paragraphs.
You will definitely improve your blog posts by using more subheadings and bullet points.
Keep the Focus on Your Audience
Have you ever heard of the cocktail party analogy; how it applies to blogging? If you went to a party and all you did was talk about yourself; how great your life is; maybe even try to sell stuff to the other guests… man, you would be the loneliest guy or gal in the room.
The same thing applies to your blog. If all you do is make your story about you, it’s not going to be too interesting after a while.
Instead, stay focused on your readers and their needs. Make your story about them. In other words, provide content that’s valuable; something they can use; solve their issues; answer their questions. Do that, and not only will they stay; they’ll have a reason to come back.
Yoast SEO
This one is quite a gem. If you’re using WordPress, there is a powerful, free plugin available called Yoast SEO. This will be one of the most important plugins you’ll ever install on your site.
With every post and page that you create, Yoast SEO will guide you in making it better.
Here are a few ways this plugin will help:
- You can create custom post titles for google without messing with the post title you’ve created for the humans. Therefore, your readers won’t feel like your post was written for a search engine rather than people.
- Yoast allows you to create custom description text that shows on Google’s search result pages.
- This plugin gives you 7 different indications on how to increase the readability of your post.
- You will see warnings if there’s something you could improve upon.
- Yoast tells you how well the post is doing for different keywords that you’d want the post to be ranked for.
- It tells you how many times you’ve used your keywords and let you know if you’ve used them too much, or not enough.
Installing Yoast SEO is one of the best things you can do to improve your blog posts. They’ve got a premium version available, but even if you just use the free version… man, it could actually help you improve your writing skills. Who wouldn’t want to be a better writer?
Okay, Let’s Wrap It Up
In conclusion, there are many ways to improve your blog’s posts. But, if you just did these 5 things it would make a big difference.
One last thing; the Yoast SEO plugin really is a power tool to help your site do better with SEO (search engine optimization). It’s one of the main reasons why WordPress is such a better platform than some of the alternatives out there. WIX or SquareSpace won’t give you the same level of SEO.
If you’re not using WordPress now, I seriously suggest you think about it. Actually, scratch that. Just switch to WordPress. Let me know if you need help with that.
