Regarding getting more traffic for your website, blogs are one of the best platforms available today. People are keener today to read quality content through blogs on different websites.
Blogs are also a platform that is niche-independent. You can use blogs on any domain and get good results with them. More than 50% of all markets use blogs to get more traffic on their website.
The problem here is that millions of blog posts go live every day. To compete with them, you need to ensure that your blog is more appealing to more people.
Here are a few pointers that you can use to ensure that your blog is engaging to your readers.
Table of Contents
1. Decide on A Word Count
Before starting a blog, it is important to fix the length of the post. Blog length is an important parameter when it comes to readership.
While long posts are good, sometimes readers engage more with a shorter blog. Regarding blog length, no one size fits all, and each niche has its ideal length.
Doing some research about the ideal length of blogs in your niche helps. Check out your competitor blogs and what they come up with.
You can use online word count tools to check the word count.
You can also fix your blog length depending on the kind of content that you are creating. An informative post might require a longer blog to educate the audience.
While something a little casual can be done with a smaller post. It is all up to you and the content you want to create.
2. Content Quality Is Key
Something non-negotiable when it comes to engagement is quality. The better your content’s quality, the more chances it will have to retain readers.
Everything is focused on delivering high-quality content to the readers. Even search engine updates today have the quality of content as a top priority.
The reason is that quality content is much more useful to readers. And there is also proof that users spend more time searching for and reading through quality content.
These days, brands are making content more aligned with their brand image and making storytelling an important part of their content framework.
Readers are keen to read something that tells a story rather than just plain and boring text, and it gets better engagement and comes across as a better method for more traffic.
Content should resonate with the readers; that is the only way you get more people involved.
3. Write for Your Audience
When planning content for your brand or website, ensure that it aligns with your audience. Here, it is important to have a target persona for your brand.
Creating an accurate persona can give you valuable insights into the type of content you can develop. The most important thing to do here is to fully flesh out your brand persona.
- What do they like?
- What kind of content do they interact with?
- Do they like informative posts or infographics?
- These are some questions that can help map out your persona.
Finally, also make sure that you are creating conversations amongst your readers. The subject of any content is good enough to be discussed in the comments.
This creates more engagement and lets brands capitalize on the conversations surrounding the blog.
Your audience and readers decide the success of your blog post. To get the best results, ensure it is tailored to their preferences.
4. Make It Easier to Read
Creating quality content is a part of the blogging process. But quality does not depend on the blog’s information; it also significantly relies on the presentation.
People today do not have much time to spare for tasks and are looking to get the maximum value for the time they spend online.
Keeping this in mind, brands need to make their blogs easier for them to read. A good way to do this is by reducing the average size of paragraphs.
Content with 10-15 sentences in a paragraph looks overwhelming to the average reader. A good suggestion would be to reduce it to 3-4 sentences, keeping the paragraphs compact and making them easier to read.
Another note is that the sentences should be short and to the point. Long-drawn sentences are difficult to read and are not optimal.
5. Improve Page Speed
One cannot stress the importance of this metric enough. The quicker your content pages load up, the better experience it is for the user.
Page load speed is important across all domains. Even if your website doesn’t have a lot of content, loading speed is important.
We can also understand this from a user’s perspective – the quicker the website loads, the more eager a user becomes to read your content.
Slow-loading websites also have a huge problem with bounce rates, and people tend to click away when the site speed isn’t to their expectations.
Page speed also has a lot of bearing on a website’s SEO metrics, becoming one of the most critical parts of the ranking process. If you want your content pages to rank higher, make them quicker to load.
6. Focus on Titles and Intro
If you want more readers for your blog post, you must make the title attractive and enticing. And the same goes for the intro section of the blog as well.
These two elements are important to the rest of the article because they are the first things readers see in the blog post.
One way to accomplish this is by using attractive titles for the readers. Research what titles are commonly used by your competitors in the niche.
Work on these titles to make your title attention-grabbing for your blog post. A good title is worth the effort you put into it, and it can tease people with just enough information to get them to start reading.
Using titles that encourage readers to explore the article is a great way to get more exposure. Several online tools can help you analyze your title and choose the best alternative.
7. Add Proof Through Numbers
When creating actionable blog posts, you must always offer your readers evidence. This is especially true when you’re referencing or stating something.
The more proof you have about your article, your readers will trust your post. Trust is an important mechanic when it comes to content creation.
Trust retains your readership over a longer period, and it can also improve your brand’s authority and get more people through word of mouth.
Any information that you state needs to be backed up with facts. And preferably, this should be from other authority websites. Also, try to use numbers in your articles when possible.
When you write something about improved conversions, rather than “a lot of conversions,” put them into numbers, and these are much more effective and get the message across better than words.
8. Using High-quality Visuals
When writing a blog post, you need to rely on images to break up the monotony of the text. Adding visuals improves the desire to read the blog post by more than 80%.
And not just that, images are much more impactful when compared to plain text. They also have a more than 180% engagement ratio compared to text.
Regardless of your blog’s subject, ensure that you add images where possible. But adding in images for the sake of it won’t win you any new readers.
You should ensure that these images are relevant to your writing. And they should be high-quality visuals and use good high-resolution images for the best results.
Add compression, so these high-resolution images do not affect your load speed.
9. Authentic Internal Linking
Internal linking has become one of the more important tasks for blogs today. For any website, it is important to ensure that readers get to explore related topics through links on the blog.
But something to keep in mind is that the linking has to be done with authenticity. Adding a link to an article to take the reader to another post that isn’t relevant to their interest won’t work.
A good rule of thumb that you should stick to is only adding links when needed. This link could be a blog post within your website or another authority source.
Don’t add too many links to the article. You should remember that the reader shifts focus from your post when they click links, and they might get caught reading the linked post and ignore yours if there are too many.
10. Guest Blogging Helps
Creating content like a blog post for another website is commonly known as guest blogging, and this has had considerable advantages to a brand’s reach and popularity.
Guest blogging can get new people from related niches interested in your website. The same rules for creating blogs apply to guest posting as well.
You only need to remember to pay attention to the tone and type of content on the target website. Matching it will give you much better results and get more people back on your website.
11. Respond to User Comments
Last but not least, if you want more engagement for your blog post, the simplest way to do that is to engage your readers. Make sure you have comments enabled for all the blog posts you upload.
This is where you can generate a lot of content through discussions. Comments are great for learning about different perspectives and getting feedback from your audience.
You can also use the comment section to generate future content ideas for your website.
