Tony Messer
August 2, 2017
Blogging has been around for a good few years now and having a blog is a great way for businesses to feed their existing customers plenty of fresh information to keep them engaged. It is also a proven way for prospective new clients to build confidence and trust in a company and encourage them to purchase goods and services.
Having an experienced blogger onboard is a great advantage because they can craft interesting and useful posts that keep the company prominent, relevant and up-to date in the minds-eye of their target audience. However, even the most established of bloggers can question their own methods. They will always ask themselves how they can make their blog even better.
It is true that there is no end of helpful guides and articles online to help people who are new to blogging. But what is there out there for an established blogger who is looking for more information to help them improve their efforts and help them to reach more readers? Not a lot, unfortunately.
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Take Your Blog To The Next Level
If you are looking for some tips on how to freshen up a well-established but stale blog, or you want to update your knowledge about improving your reach, we have some tips that especially aimed at you.
Mobile Friendly Optimisation
If you are an avid blogger, then you may already be working on a platform that includes a responsive design. It is getting harder to find old-school blogs, but we are sure there are still some lurking around out there!
If your blog doesn’t render well on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, then you are potentially missing out on many thousands of readers. Did you know that mobile traffic averages between 40 – 60% of blog visitors across all industries. If your blog doesn’t read well on these devices then potential new readers will be more than happy to visit your competitors site.
Not only this but the bounce-rate you generate from people trying to access your blog and failing will most certainly lead your website to being devalued in the eyes of Google and other search engines. This means your site will not rank very well in searches for your chosen keywords, and your site may well drop from view.
When was the last time you gave your blog a health-check? It is worth going through your blog, including all of the sub pages, to make sure it reads well across all mobile devices. A site that has a responsive design will always rank better on Google and other search engines and always above those sites with only desktop optimisation.
Social Sharing
Every blogger worth their salt will understand that they need to circulate and share their latest blog posts to Twitter and Facebook as well as other social media sites where they have a presence. But do you actually do the opposite with your social media posts?
It improves engagement greatly when you can link in your most recent social media posts and updates within the footer of your blog. This is a great way to demonstrate to new visitors to your blog that you are also very active on social media. People want to be fed fresh information, so knowing that you are actively updating and engaging with customers, clients, followers and blog readers is really encouraging. It will make them want to come back regularly to find out what is new and engage with you on your other platforms.
It is easy to link in your Twitter and Facebook feeds. There are lots of simple plugins on your blog that can help you with this. There are lot of plugins that can help with social bookmarking too, so when you put out a fresh post, make sure your new content is shared to bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon and Reddit.
Email Alerts
Mailing lists are still an important factor in keeping your blog traffic high. Encouraging first time visitors to join your mailing list to receive new updates is a great way to increase your blog traffic. Having a prominent joining option is crucial here. If you have your email sign-up form buried on a page somewhere, there is no guarantee that people will see it. The last thing you want to do is to make people go on a search for your mailing list sign-up option. The chances are they will get bored of searching for it and wander off to another site, or will think your site is too disorganised and difficult to sign up to and will leave in search of another blog that is easier to sign up for.
Many bloggers opt for a pop over sign-up option that encourages people to join up for alerts without having to do anything more than enter their email address and confirm their subscription with a simple click of a link on a confirmation email. You need to make your sign-up option is as prominent as possible without it being an annoyance to your blog visitor.
Once you have a mailing list, you can simply send out an email alert to it that contains the links to your most recent blog posts. You should be able to find a few plugins to choose from that will make this an easy task for you to do.
Internal Links
Once you have attracted the attention of your readers, ideally you will want them to stay on your site for as long as possible to read more. Make sure that whenever possible you include links on your blog posts to other related posts on your site that they may also be interested in reading. Your older posts will contain links to other posts, so round and round they go!
The more your blog visitors read the more likely they will find some content that they would like to share with their peers who have the same or similar interests. If you give them plenty of information to choose from then they are more likely to return and also attract in new readers through sharing your blog posts.
Even when you forget to link to another blog post or page, you can find a widget or plugin that you can customise to pick out relevant keywords from your post and link to other posts with the same keywords, and display this either within your blog post or at the end.
Engaging With Your Readers
It is important that you allow readers to comment on your blog posts for a number or reasons. Firstly, it encourages engagement and conversation between you and your readers, but also will encourage other readers to enter the conversation. This is great for keeping your blog fresh and the constant updates from comments will keep your blog post high in the search engines.
Another good reason for allowing comments and conversations is that personally engaging with your readers makes them happy. If your readers know that there is someone responsive at the end of the blog that is willing to engage and acknowledge their efforts to post comments, then they are more likely to build a relationship with you and return regularly for more interaction.
Quite often you can get fresh ideas for follow up posts from reading the conversations and suggestions given by your readers in the comments. This can be quite inspiring, especially when you are struggling to come up with fresh ideas for creating new content for your blog.
Getting Social
Every good blogger knows that to be successful these days you need to have a solid social media presence. This doesn’t necessarily mean running around like a headless chicken trying to write fresh blogs and manage multiple social media accounts across different platforms. It will save you a lot of time and effort to research which social media platform your target audience is most likely to hang-out on and build a stronger presence there above all others.
There is no harm in posting your freshly written blog posts across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other sites to show people that your blog is active. It can actually help to build up your incoming traffic from these sources. But if you know that the majority of your readers hang out on Facebook, then make Facebook your primary focus for engaging with people. Spend time replying to comments and acknowledging them by thanking people for their input and suggestions etc.
Don’t forget to be a follower yourself! It can help greatly to actively follow your fellow bloggers in the same industry or who share your interests. If you interact with them and build up a friendship, it can often mean that they will happily share your blog posts with their readers and social media followers. This can also increase your blog traffic, but the traffic coming in will be from your target audience that will already be interested in what you have to offer. If you are generating an income from your blog, then obviously this is a good strategy that is likely to increase your conversions.
If you can look at ways of forging strong partnerships with your fellow bloggers in your particular niche, then you will be able to increase your reach even further. By each partner sharing and featuring each others blog posts on their own site, and also including links to your social media, then you will be driving a whole lot of new traffic to your blog and social media sites that are going to be hungry for your information.
Set Up A Routine
There is a fine balance between feeding your readers a regular supply of fresh and interesting content and either over or under posting. Bombarding your readership with too much information all at once can become intimidating for the reader and may put them off reading your blog. On the other hand, too little information sent out weeks apart can be too sparse to maintain their interest. They would most likely go off to find another blog to read with a better balance and information feed.
This doesn’t mean that you have to sit down and write your own content every single time. You can vary your offerings by posting content from other bloggers in your network that you have partnered with or ones that regular share your work to their followers. At the end of the day, you are never going to increase the reach of your blog or increase it’s traffic without providing fresh content on a regular and sustained basis.
Consider using a planner or calendar to schedule your new posts. After a few weeks you should check your analytics to see the best times to post for maximum engagements and tweak your schedule to ensure there are fresh posts going out at your most busy times for increased impact. You will be able to keep tabs on when fresh content will be needed to be prepared and also be able to tailor your content to the type that is of most interest to your readers.
Post Optimisation
Most seasoned bloggers will admit that they can get carried away with their writing. They are more than happy to become immersed in their writing to crate fantastic quality blog posts, but will quite often forget to optimise them. Unless each post is SEO ready, your writing may miss your target audience completely. This may mean a loss of potential new traffic to your blog.
Ensure that you also put some effort into optimisation of your work. Your pages should be crawlable and your posts should carry keywords within your post-title as well as within your text. Your permalink structure is a very important element for traffic generation and page ranking. Don’t forget to keyword your image tags. Google image search can also bring in a lot of potential new traffic using this trick.
Conclusion
Although these points have been aimed at an established blogger, they can also be implemented by those just starting out with a new blog too. If you are starting from scratch, then it is always a good policy to start as you mean to go on. Using these tips can vastly improve the quality of your already established blog, or help to build the solid foundations of a brand new one.
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