Nine Tips for Optimizing Your Blog Posts

Blogging can help your business’ marketing and sales efforts in numerous ways. You can increase the benefits by blogging frequently and posting compelling content. Here are nine tips for making your blog the best it can be.

  1. Sharing – There are several ways to make your blog easy to share. Sharing increases the readership of your posts and drives traffic to your site. Social media buttons are an effective way to share posts. Use buttons that create links to social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter. Viewers who like your content can pass the blog along to their personal social networks. Another tactic is to syndicate your posts so that they reach interested viewers.
  2. Visual Elements – Always include at least one visual element in each post. This can be an image, video, artwork, etc. Not only are the visual elements intrinsically interesting, they break up the text-only blocks of your post and make it easier to read. Try to size visual elements in proportion to their relative importance and to the length of the blog.
  3. Titles – Headlines should create immediate interest in your posts. Titles should be direct and clear, like the title of this post. They may announce, in a simple and concise way, a series of tips or how-to’s on the topic of choice. They might signal a controversial or sensational stance on some subject, or herald the latest news for your business, industry, or topic. It is best to include a keyword in the post’s title.
  4. Formatting – Your content should have eye-appeal. You need to break up long paragraphs into shorter blocks, making use of bold and italic fonts to add emphasis. Subtitles help guide readers through the material. Present multiple items through numbered or bulleted lists. You can vary font sizes and even fonts to make selected material stand out.
  5. Calls-to-Action – Include a link to a landing page in each post. The landing page should have a call-to-action that offers something of value, such as free trial memberships, informative e-books, or special deals. In addition to in-text CTAs, place them in sidebars and footers. By encouraging further interaction with you website, you can generate leads and potential sales.
  6. Instructions – Make your blog valuable by instructing viewers on actions they can take to solve their problems or further their goals. Actionable steps and clear takeaways will increase the chances that readers will share your posts with others.
  7. Draw Connections – You can often make your points through literary devices such as analogies, metaphors and similes. By comparing two different items in a way that highlights their commonality, you make your content more accessible and reader-friendly, expand relevance, and generate increased interest.
  8. Have Fun – Even serious topics need not be boring. Think of entertaining and timely ways to present your ideas. Sober topics need points of levity to keep them from losing readers, and light topics present many opportunities for interesting content. Jokes, stories, puns, etc are often effective ways to lighten up your fare. Include visual elements that create a chuckle or an ironic smile.
  9. Don’t Be Shy – State your facts and opinions in a definitive voice. You want readers to perceive you as an authority on your topic. Other sites will link to yours if your blogs are authoritative, and this in turn can boost your search engine results.

By optimizing your blog, you’ll have an easier task of promoting it and extracting its maximum value, whether monetary or influential.

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Copyright 2015 Eric Bank, Freelance Writer