Blogging is way more than just typing a couple of words and hitting publish. To be a productive writer, you must take into account many situations. You must get an idea of who your target audience is, how long your post should be and some more considerations. May we reiterate that this is well before you even jot down a letter?
A blogger is essentially a marketing person, advice giver, guru and more, all rolled up into one. Here are the main pieces to the blogging puzzle.
1. Put Yourself in Your Readers’ Shoes
Once you have crafted the perfect post, or at least the post you think is perfect, read over it as if you were the audience. I personally recommend reading the post aloud. It may feel awkward in the beginning to hear your own writing, however once you get used to it, you’ll find it a great technique. This also means identifying spots in the post where the idea could be more elaborated. For example, if the article is a how to, there may be points where you may know a certain term or idea but the average user may not. Elaboration is the key.
2. Get Them Through Title and Keywords
Title and keywords are like the accessories of a good article. Think to yourself, would you rather read an article that gives off the whole point of reading it or that entices you to want to read more than the title. The title is what draws the audience to your article in the first place. In addition, keywords are sort of a behind the scenes title. These are the words that the audience uses to find the article. Make sure to keep keywords specific, few, and high quality. A bunch of broad keywords will actually cause the search engine to not pick it up. Keywords doesn’t cause search engine priority; views and popularity does.
3. Call to Action
The only job readers have isn’t just to read. A successful article is one that leads your readers to do more. At the end of the article, you can do something as simple as asking them to comment or you can ask them to check out your website on social media and around the Internet. Another wise tactic is to point them to a related article that they may find interesting. As a result, you’ll not only get more views, but dedicated viewers.
4. Picture Perfect
The icing on the cake of a perfect article is a nice, high quality photo. You don’t have to post an album on each article, however a clear and related photo is a nice way of finishing off an article. There are tons of photos available on Google, however some aren’t available for use by others. If you are worried whether you can use a photo or not, you can always take advantage of stock photos. They may cost you a little, but you’ll not only get a better quality selection, you won’t have to worry about copyright issues either.
5. Timing the Release
Unlike movie releases, you don’t have to worry whether your publishing calendar clashes with that of some big bloggers. Just ensure that you publish yours at the right time.
The date and time of when your article is published can affect who sees it. The goal of an article is to get a good hold on views first off. This will keep your article public to receive more views later on. If the article falls by the waste side in the beginning, then it would be as if we weren’t giving the article a chance at it’s full potential.
While it differs between websites, the best times are in the beginning of the week. The first few days of the workweek give you the best view potential. Anything after Wednesday isn’t really the best potential. Holidays and the evening are usually not good times either.
If you follow the tips above, you may find yourself with a productive, popular and profitable article.
What other tips do you find are essential to a good blog post?
Some great advice there. I tend to publish posts at the weekend because it’s the only time I get to write. I think I’ll save them as drafts and try your suggestion of posting them on a Monday.
“Call to action” is one I like the most. On my affiliate sites, it’s really important to increase convertion rate. But we must be careful with it. Be wise with it. Overdoing doing it will make your visitors get annoyed.
Its all much harder than it sounds, especially the “call to action” part 🙂
The bloggers that know how to do that are the ones I like to read usually. Of course, if they cover a topic I am interested about.
Thanks for posting.
All of your tips are on target. Thanks.
Great post! I’m a new blogger and appreciate the tips, there is truly so much that goes into publishing a successful post. I’m surprised to hear that blogs posted at the beginning of the week have better viewing potential! I’ll definitely remember that one. 🙂
Excellent advise! Blogging can only sometimes be writting a few words and pressing publish. To draw in readers takes hard work!
I am not a accustomed to blogging but usually write articles whenever I get time. However I think following your above tips I could grab massive audience to my blog.
Simple and effective tips. I’d like to add that the content should also be cohesive and coherent. No one can determine if the content written is of interest to the reader but if it’s well structured, it will help. Adding graphics/pictures is definitely a must in today’s world! Particularly like tip number 5 – timing IS key.
I also think that it’s important to give longer posts some kind of structure so they can easily be skimmed; just like you have the headings in this post. We don’t want to see a wall of text with paragraph after paragraph, we want some headings.
Will take this into account for my own blog.