Blogging is really popular. Nowadays, it seems like everyone has a blog and they are pretty successful too. But how true is that? Approximately, 6 million blog posts are published every day. But how many of those are successful?
While we couldn’t find a solid figure, we can still guess that not many of these posts find success. After all, only 30% of bloggers report success. But don’t get discouraged though, in this article, you will learn how to become part of the 30%.
We will teach you some blogging secrets that will help you improve the success rate of your blogs. And by success, we mean in every way i.e., better blog traffic, better audience retention, and lead conversion.
If that sounds attractive to you, then let’s go and check out these secrets.
How to Write Effective Blogs
1. Audience Research
The first thing that bloggers do is learn about their audience. However, as a new blogger, you will have a lot of trouble doing that. That’s because you don’t really know who your audience is.
You will have to post some articles just to see which kind of people are attracted to it. Then to gain further information about them, you will have to engage with them. Do that through the comments and encourage them to leave their thoughts behind.
Through this experimentation, you will learn who is your audience, what they want from your content, and what they like or dislike. You will also need to personally visit seminars and events where your audience is likely to be. Through first-hand interaction, you will learn way more than you ever could through a screen.
After you have a good idea of what your audience is like, you will be able to write content that appeals to them and keeps them coming back for more.
2. Write with Brevity
You must have seen a lot of articles and posts claiming that long-form content is better as it is more informative and ranks better on the SERPs. However, that is not entirely true. You see short-form content has a lot of benefits that cannot be replicated by long-form content.
You will understand better once you learn this fact; the average human has an attention span of only 8.25 seconds. This is 25% less than the average attention span 20 years ago which was 15 secs.
This means that most of your audience is simply not capable of engaging with long-form content. To make sure that you don’t lose your audience to boredom, it is better to write small bits of content that are quickly read and understood.
That’s why successful bloggers always summarize their initial drafts to shorten them to a suitable size. You can do it too and very quickly as well thanks to modern technology. Nowadays, creating a summary is as easy as pie.
All you need to do is go online and look for a summarizer tool. A summarizer can automatically create an accurate summary of any given content in just a few seconds. They are highly accurate due to the use of artificial intelligence. Derivative technologies like NLP (Natural language processing) and algorithms for weighing contextual points allow summarizers to create highly effective and accurate summaries.
Short content also benefits from improved dwell time and reduced bounce rate which is good for SEO. This improves your visibility on the SERPs, and you get more traffic on your blog.
3. Search Engine Optimization
Successful bloggers always invest in SEO. SEO stands for search engine optimization. This refers to any activity that helps with improving your blog page’s SERP ranking. There are a variety of ways to improve the SEO of your blog. However, the most important method is to optimize your content.
You see, the cornerstone of SEO is keyword adjustment and the best place to do that is your content. In each of your blog posts, you should adjust the relevant keywords in your blog post title, headings, and of course the body text.
The keywords should be directly related to the content too. For example, if your content is about car maintenance, then your keywords will be car maintenance, car tuning, oil change, etc., etc.
Other things that you should take care of include:
- Add internal links
- Add a meta description
- Create a sitemap and provide it to the search engines (helps with indexing)
- Use the keyword in your URL
- Ensure there is no duplicate content
- Do a site audit to check for broken links and zombie pages and remove them.
Do all of that and your blog will be effective.
4. Liberal Use of Visual Elements
Visual elements like images, graphs, and tables are very useful. Not only do they help with making the blog content look good, but they also have SEO benefits. Images in particular open a whole new avenue of organic traffic due to Google image search.
Another benefit of images and visual elements is that they are faster and easier to understand. You can provide the same information that you would in text in a more palatable form of an image/graph.
This makes things easier for your audience and they keep coming back for more.
5. Call to Action
A blog is not simply a piece of content. Nowadays a blog post is used for implicit advertisement of services or goods. Most people who write blogs want their audience to take certain actions.
Most of the time, the actions are:
- Like the post
- Subscribe to the newsletter
- Register and create an account
Or something else of that nature. These are all the things that are necessary for growing your audience. So, when you write a blog post always add a call to action(CTA) in it to encourage your audience to interact with the content.
Most people will do something that is asked of them, so including a CTA drastically raises their chances of liking the post, sharing it, or subscribing.
6. Proofreading and Editing
Finally, all good blog writers proofread their content thoroughly. You see, the typical first draft of any write-up is always flawed. It has mistakes in punctuation, grammar, and flow of ideas, and even provides irrelevant information.
That’s why blog posts are proofread to identify these mistakes and weed them out. If you want to be a successful blogger then this is something you must invest time in.
So, how can you proofread your content? Here are a few tips.
- Read the blog post aloud to yourself. Check whether certain sentences and words are awkward to say. Remove or rewrite them.
- Have someone else read the content. Ask them if they understood what you were trying to say. Quiz them about the content to test their understanding. Edit the parts that proved to be difficult.
Reading aloud also helps with locating grammar errors. So, you will also be able to do that easily.
Conclusion
So, those were some secrets (well not anymore) of successful bloggers. If you apply these tips in your own blog writing, you will be able to find success. Just remember, you may not see results instantly. So, don’t be disheartened and keep trying. Persistence and consistency is key.
