Have you ever read a blog that really tripped your trigger?
It’s different with a blog than with chapters in a book or even articles from a magazine. Becoming really involved with what you’re reading in short form – to the point that you’d follow links for even more information or share the post using social media – well, that takes a bird’s eye perspective from the author.
Inspiring your audience to be enlightened, validated, or maybe even informed requires writing engaging material on your subject matter and remembering to add several ‘secret ingredients’ that will make your post excellent.
The secret ingredients may or may not surprise you, but they’re necessary for your audience to:
- find your blog,
- actually read it,
- share it, and
- respond to it.
After all, that’s the point, right? Your expert FREE opinion on something masterful and helpful will encourages the sale of your products and services, so do your best.
I’m going to give you 20 ways to make sure your blog post is excellent, and I won’t charge you a thing.
- Write for humans (not search engines) using keywords or phrases in your title and intro sentence. Write conversationally. Pretend someone is in front of you.
- Link your post to others on your site that support it, and to landing pages.
- Use anchor text in those links, appropriately matching phrases to keywords used in the page you’re linking to. Make it easy for your reader to navigate.
- Use pictures or images within each post. Studies show eyes will stay on the page longer.
- A blog can be a video, and your anchor text link can be below in a sentence or paragraph.
- Write in short paragraphs because we tend to scan, rather than read long blocks of text.
- Delete and replace all smart quotes to eliminate useless characters showing up in your newsletter subject lines when your post is published for RSS.
- Spend more time on your title than the post. You want it to grab the reader’s attention.
- Take the time to upload your picture or image correctly from your computer. Yes, you can hot-link it to a URL, but next week that picture may no longer exist in that location, and all you’ll be left with is an empty box.
- Give your picture or image a relevant title and capitalize the first letters. It’s a title.
- Use image alt text in sentence format, beginning with a capital and ending with a period. This is respectful of the blind community using electronic readers, and it’s also good SEO.
- Use as many tags as you can, and choose one category.
- Let your original post sit at least 24 hours and re-read before posting. Trust me.
- Read it out loud. Change anything you stumble over. Delete the unnecessary.
- If your images were originally found online, make sure they’re commercially licensed and give a photo credit link at the bottom of your post directly to the photographer’s photo stream.
- Make your call to action clear, matter-of-fact, but friendly. Tell your audience exactly what you want them to do.
- Use social media sharing buttons, like AddThis.
- Go tweet yourself. Seriously. Tweet about four times the first day your post is published, then back down.
- Don’t be afraid to have a differing opinion from others. Don’t be rude, but controversy to some degree inspires conversation.
- Don’t be concerned that you’ll lose business to another company if you link to a related business within your text. Link to those who really add interesting detail to your material. Your readers will love that you made it easy for them, and the object of your link will likely return the affection. Once again, link.
On a side-note, when you meet others at networking functions and acquire someone’s business card, visit their website and view their blog. You may see that a linking relationship exists that would benefit your website. It will be easy to approach them since you’ve met, right?
Now you have no excuse, go write excellent blog posts with confidence! Do you have something to add to my list? Share, I love it.
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