As a content writer who has written over 750 blog posts, I’ve learned a thing or two writing and promoting blog posts. I’ve authored subject matter ranging from digital marketing, to sports to politics and current events and everything in between. I’ve had blog posts with tens of thousands of visits and then I’ve had some that barely had 100. There isn’t one recipe for success and you truly never know which blog post is going to go viral. With that being said, here are the top 5 blogging tips I have learned during my time as a blog post author.
1. People Don’t Read Every Word You Write
With people’s short attention span and love for being on their phone jumping from app to app, it’s hard to keep their attention for a long period of time. When you write a blog post and it looks like a Shakespearean soliloquy, you’re going to get one of two responses. I’m happy for you or I’m sorry that happened to you.
People are skimmers. They don’t read a complete blog post. They skim the post until they find something that catches their eye. And if your blog post looks like a huge listing of words with nothing to break it up then you’ve lost your reader and probably for good.
How do you break up a blog post? Easy. By adding headings to the content. The fonts in headings are usually bigger and bolder than the normal paragraph font. It stands outs. Your skimmers or readers will skim your post and if your heading stands out they’re more than likely to actually read it.
As for the paragraphs of the content themselves, it’s not like you’re writing for an English class in college. You don’t need ten sentences to form each paragraph. I know its five but I’m just trying to prove a point or be sarcastic because I’m traumatized by my college English professor and I use sarcasm to cope. Anyways.
You can write two or three sentence paragraphs. You can even write a one sentence paragraph. The point is if the majority of people are on their mobile devices and the screens are smaller and your paragraphs aren’t broken up into smaller ones, those readers are going to leave your blog post to see what Taylor Swift is up to.
2. Your Blog Needs a Cohesive Theme
Your blog needs a theme. It’s not a flea market offering everything under the sun. You can’t be a one stop shop for every subject matter.
You need to have one theme and your blog posts need to be related around that theme. If you have a blog about politics, don’t post blog posts about which celebrity is dating who. People don’t want to wade through other blog posts that aren’t related to politics. If you say you’re a politics blog author then write about politics and political related posts only. Save the gossip for TMZ or MediaTakeOut.
And if you’re skimming this blog posts, make sure to check out my 5th blogging tip as it goes further into by what I mean for a cohesive theme.
3. Promoting Your Blog Post
There are a lot of new or even seasoned bloggers who think that once they post their blog post, the masses of readers will come flocking to their blog post like Jon Snow in the Battle of the Bastards in the Game of Thrones.
Promoting your blog post doesn’t start and end when you post it. You have to think like Puff Daddy and Bad Boy Records in the 90’s when it comes to blog post promotion, “Can’t stop, won’t stop. Bad Boy for Life.”
Well everything except the Bad Boy for Life part.
Just because you post it once on social media doesn’t mean everyone is going to see it. Do you know how much noise, nonsense, ads and bots people have to navigate through just to see a post or tweet of someone they follow? If there needs to be a new TikTok Challenge then I recommend a challenge of users trying to find actual content from the people they follow, accompanied by a weird dance of course afterwards.
You need to be tweeting and retweeting your blog post every day multiple times. You need to be going to the comment sections of related blog posts and typing in comments that speak to what that author wrote as well as leaving a link back to your site so others can read your take.
Shout it from LinkedIn. Pin it to Pinterest. Tumble it in Tumblr. Make reels and stories on Instagram. Out of all my top 5 blogging tips, this has to be the most important one to achieve success with getting people to read your posts.
Remember what Puffy said on every track he produced, “Can’t stop, won’t stop.” Don’t stop promoting, and like Journey, Don’t Stop Believing.
4. Be Consistent With Blogging
Have you ever gone to a job interview and the HR person or hiring manager asks about the gap in your resume? Of course you want to tell them something creative, but sometimes I prefer honesty like saying, “Because I didn’t feel like working.”
Well people reading your blog posts can be similar.
No one is going to wait months for you to post new blog posts. Like avocado toast, people have to have new content. They don’t want what’s old, they want the good stuff. The new, shiny blog post.
Coming up with new blog posts isn’t easy. There are times having writer’s block than there is time typing away like you’re Hemingway.
Hell, even I struggle with coming up with new content. It can be more time consuming coming up with content than it is to write it.
So how can you be consistent with your blog post writing?
By creating and using content calendars. Content calendars help you plan out a month or more in advance of what you’re going to write and when you’re going to post it.
You don’t need three or four blogs post a week. Well you can if you think having more content means better SEO rankings, but that isn’t always the case.
You can space out your posts to maybe one or two a week. Just as long as you’re consistently posting.
And if you’re just starting out being a blogger, writing consistently will help you develop your style of writing and even help discover your voice within your writing. My voice has sarcasm to it, with a hint of nostalgia for the 80’s and 90’s within my references.
Often when we write, we want to portray ourselves as someone else. Maybe someone more authoritative on the subject matter or someone to be taken seriously. The best part of writing is you can be whoever you want to be just as long as you’re true to yourself.
5. Your Blog Posts Need to be Like Voltron
I grew up in the 80’s and Voltron was, to me, the greatest cartoon ever. Thundercats were a close second. If you grew up in the 90’s Power Rangers would have been the comparable comparison. Anyhow back to the lecture at hand.
The reason I used Voltron as an example is that all your blog posts need to come together and build this, in theory, a giant superhero where when all the powers are combined it becomes unstoppable.
I’ve already mentioned a cohesive theme prior and with all your blog posts having similar or related content you need to make sure you’re linking to your other articles in your blog posts. By linking to other articles, you’re giving your readers other opportunities to read more of your work. And not to mention using internal links is great to help with your SEO rankings.
And if you’re blog has content silos, for example How To or Tips and Tricks, you need to be making sure you link all of those together so your readers can take a journey through the silos of your related content. You want to keep your readers engaged and you want them to keep them on your site. And by offering them related content to read you give the impression to your reader that you’re a subject matter leader or expert and they would be more inclined to keep coming back to your site for your latest blog posts.
I know I offered my top 5 blogging tips, but there are so many tips that newcomers to blogging can use.