Blog Content – Every Business Needs It !
It is fascinating to know that more than 4 million blog posts are being published every day. This comes from more than 600 million blogs out of the 1.7 billion websites on the internet. Take note that this statistic is just from the year 2021 alone. What more can you expect this year? The pandemic is also partly to be blamed for this rapid growth in numbers. In addition to that, creating a blog nowadays is just as simple as counting numbers.
While publication is undeniably easy, making your post or your blog content more visible online is quite a challenge and a journey. Boosting readership or generating large web traffic is not something you can achieve instantly unless you managed to build a fan base or better yet a well-established community that follows your content. There are many ways that you can do to effectively boost your website traffic. The majority of it falls under Search Engine Optimization (SEO), a process that allows you to effectively improve both the quality and quantity of the traffic that you generate to your blogs.
Find Your Niche
The first thing you should do when creating blogs is to identify your target audience. By identifying your audience, you also identify the niche you want to prioritize. What are the topics you are comfortable to discuss about? What are the interests you can proudly share with others? What are the ideas that can easily pump you up and allows you to write content easily and wholeheartedly? You cannot just write a book about finance without having enough knowledge about it and you cannot simply write blog content about travel guides without being a passionate traveler.
Take note that your blog content reflects your personality and readers can tell if the article is written by heart and with full sincerity. It is important to find the right niche so you can easily set your goal. Once identified, you can start promoting your content to the right platforms and to the right community. You can easily target people that share the same interest and passion.
Quality Content Vs Quantity
Regardless of the niche you picked, it is important that you establish a high standard for your content. Quality is indeed superior to quantity. Make sure that you are writing your content not for yourself but for your readers. Writing quality content is one of the most important aspects of Search engine optimization. Take note that quality is not just about writing a good idea but how these beautiful ideas are being laid out. Therefore, the content must be easy to understand and easy to read. Put yourself into your reader’s shoes. What is the information needed to be relayed? What are the details they should never miss? How can you make sure that once they have landed on your page, they will get all the info they want without switching to other pages?
Technically, content should be easy to understand yet must be properly structured. Readability is an important factor to engage more users. A poorly written article is less likely to attract potential followers and this will also create a negative impact on your webpage ranking. Ideally, you must proofread your content before publishing or take advantage of grammar-checking software or website plugins to help you secure a good readability score. Good quality content always equates to an increased number of readers, thus generating more traffic.
Engaging and Visually Appealing
Technically and grammatically perfect content may still not be enough to attract readers if it lacks the appeal. Engagement plays a major key in generating additional website traffic to your blog. Readers who will find your content engaging will most likely follow and return. Refrain yourself from writing lengthy articles in a way that it loses the main idea you intentionally want to convey. Do not input too much or too less information or it might drive their attention away. To make it more engaging, you can ask your readers some questions or you can link your old blog posts if you find them extremely relevant to the new article you publish. Not only it increases engagement but it also effectively adds more pageviews.
Let’s admit it, long articles are boring and less engaging. You can, however, incorporate your articles with images to make them more visually appealing. Travel blogs, for instance, will find images extremely beneficial as they can help readers visualize the place just by looking at the photographs. The same thing goes for fashion and lifestyle blogs. Just make sure that you add Meta tags to your content so the search engines know what your content is about. A catchy title might also boost your website traffic but make sure that the content is equally engaging and high in quality.
Reliable and Trustworthy
Whether you are running a Food blog, a Finance, or even a Digital Marketing website, it is important that your content is reliable enough. Articles must be supported with facts that are thoroughly researched or they must come from your own personal experience. You can’t just add a new recipe without even trying it yourself and you cannot provide financial advice without spitting facts and details to prove that they are truly effective. To make it short, your content must be reliable enough that readers can confidently absorb and share it with others.
We cannot also deny the fact that blogs are an effective platform as an additional source of revenue. Some bloggers are now taking advantage of various sponsored campaigns and get paid by simply publishing content that they do not write. While these are undeniably tempting, be mindful that your blog reflects your identity, personality, and credibility. Publishing content that goes beyond your niche will only make your blog less trustworthy.
Make Your Blog SEO-Friendly
Once you have effectively applied all the blog traits above, you might also consider taking your blog to another level by making your content more SEO-friendly. If done correctly, SEO-friendly content will not just make your blog more visible on top of the search engines but also makes your site more profitable. While this process is too technical, some SEO practices are very easy to learn and easy to apply. For instance, writing a well-written article is good and ideal but incorporating your articles with the right keywords and inputting the right amount of inbound and outbound links is five or ten times more effective in generating more traffic.
Updating your old post is also an effective SEO strategy. Since search engines often prioritize new content, it is ideal to update your old articles to keep your blog current and fresh. You can also take advantage of various plugins like Yoast to ensure that your content has a good SEO score before publishing. You can also generate more traffic to your blog by integrating your content into your social media pages and other online platforms. Use a thumbnail that is eye-catching and easily shareable.
Creating your own blog is undeniably easy but writing a good article, and maintaining the same quality is truly a challenge. It does require time and effort to produce high-quality content and nothing can be more rewarding than when you finally see your content on top of the search engines.
Photo by Samantha Borges on Unsplash