My Tips for Effective Blog Posts

Are your blogging efforts not producing results or engagement as you expected? Are you losing motivation to keep blogging? Hang in there, these feelings are common and there are ways to tweak your posts for better results.

In this article we are going to give you 6 actionable tips for effective blog posts – tips that will get your posts more exposure and better engagement from your readers.

What’s the Point of Blogging?

Whether you have never written a single blog post or you have written many, we’re willing to bet that this question has crossed your mind at some point…What’s the point of blogging? This was something that we thought about when we first started out with our blogging efforts, but has since become a faint memory.

We are HUGE proponents of incorporating effective blog posts into an online marketing plan. However, before you can start getting results from your blogging efforts you need to believe in the opportunities that exist from a solid strategy. To get you thinking positively about blogging we’d like to share some of the personal experiences we have had with our efforts and those of some of our most active blogging clients.

Top Reasons to Blog

Blogging can….

Build trust and respect with your prospects and customers
Build trust and respect with your peers and competitors
Help your website / blog rank higher in the organic results
Retain your current customers by providing free online resources
Give you content that can be re-purposed many times over

…all of which WILL lead to more business – if you stick with it!

Effective Blog Posting Tips

If you’ve read this far, then you obviously understand the benefits of effective blogging. To keep you motivated – and to help you start seeing results from your blog – we would like to share some actionable tips for effective blog posts. All of the tips listed below are ones that have made up some of the elements of our most effective blog posts – posts that have also helped to build our business.

Top Tips for Effective Blog Posts

Use a Great Title

The title of your blog post plays an unbelievably crucial role in its effectiveness. People love to scan titles – whether on Twitter, in search results or via their RSS reader – to select which articles they want to take time to read. If your title is too long, too vague or not something that people would search for, then the chance of it being seen or read diminishes tremendously.

TIP: Treat your blog title like your title tag – include a primary key phrase and something actionable to increase click through rates.

Start with a Simple Introduction

If your title is the hook that initially grabs your readers, then your introduction is that first crank on the reel that starts to draw them in. A short, but well-written introduction can mean the difference between someone bouncing from your article within seconds of landing on it. Keep your introduction short, sweet and simple.

TIP: Treat your blog’s introduction like your meta description – work in your primary key phrase(s) and something actionable to encourage readers to continue reading.

Provide Useful Content

The title and the introduction are essential to bring readers in, but the body of your article will determine whether or not your blog will actually deliver any results. If you cannot deliver content that provides solutions, useful information or creative angles on existing information, then your blog post will probably not be shared or commented on.

TIP: Use images, videos, block quotes, charts and infographics to break up monotonous bodies of text and give readers multiple pieces of your content to share and comment on.

Optimize it for Visibility

Great content usually needs very little help to be seen and ranked by the search engines. However, with on-page optimization being so simple, there’s no reason why you can’t take a few minutes to improve your post to help search engines properly index and rank your article.

TIP: Use alt and title tags on all images, use header tags for all headlines and sub-headlines, and use internal links (to promote other posts and pages of yours) and external links (to support your information).

Make it Easy to Read

Even the best information will get missed if you do not make it easy for your readers to consume. Well-formatted posts will allow your readers to make it through your entire article and not miss those little gems that you almost buried in blocks of text.

TIP: Use bullets, sub-headings, bold and italic text and line breaks or rules to create a good reading experience for your visitors.

End with a Strong Conclusion

Most poorly written blogs fail to properly conclude articles, which leaves the reader with little enticement to engage with it. Ending an article with a recap of the main takeaways will encourage the reader to save, share or comment on the article.

TIP: Use a call to action at the end of every post to increase engagement – especially if you’re looking to get more comments, shares or inquiries from your posts.

BONUS TIPS

These may be common sense to many of you, but you’d be surprised by how many bloggers forget these little, but effective elements…

Make it easy for readers to save and share your posts with social media action buttons (at the beginning and/or end of each post).
Allow readers to leave comments easily with a commenting feature.