Updated: 2/10/2018
Nothing is worse than looking at your blog or new piece of social content and knowing that it's going to fall flat.
If you're struggling to find new ways to improve your content, create beautiful and engaging content, and improve the perceived value of your content to your readers.
These steps, tools, and resources will help you knock your future blog posts out the park!
How Do You Create Better Blog Content?
- Use more images in your blog posts using information collection tools like Evernote.
- Use Pinterest to find additional blog post subtopics in order to make a more complete blog post
- Use Answerthepublic.com to find the actual questions and topics your readers want answered
- Use Grammar-check and proof reading tools and services like Wordy and Grammarly.
- Embed Multimedia in Your Posts
Upgrading Your Content is Actually Pretty Simple, But I Struggled At First Too
I was so bad at creating content that I actually started outsourcing my content to writers when I launched my first site. I didn't know much about conversion rates or content strategy and back then cheap Iwriter content would suffice and I would just jack the keywords from another blog in my niche and "out-SEO" them.
It's actually a pretty viable strategy that I employ today, but I the problem was that I wasn't passionate about any of the content which made the content suffer and I couldn't figure out why conversions fell off until I started paying attention to blogs outside my industry and started noticing commonalities in their successful sites.
So I compiled an actually list of tools and resources to help enhance the quality of your content quickly.
How Does Adding More Images Help You Develop Better Content?
Readers are skimmers and visual people. Dense text will turn off readers and the old rules of grammar "kinda" out the window when your audience are reading tweets, Facebook rants, Pinterest, YouTube, and recipes. You have a few seconds to capture readers attention and strong visuals and graphs help improve the readability of you content.
A really handy tool that I use to capture and annotate images easily is Evernote.
Evernote is the quickest tool to help incorporate images into your blog content. Check out Evernote.com
Evernote is extremely powerful and helps capture images from the web extremely fast. I also use it to fact fine and compile images to add that punch to my blog post and explain visually aspects of my blog post that may be slight complex.
Evernote Pro Tip: Improve your SEO by saving your image file name as a synonym or related keyword of your main keyword and use another synonym for your image alt text.
How to Curate Content Easily
Another big challenge for content is figuring out how to fill in the holes while you are creating original content. Pinterest is essentially a curation tool and idea swiss-army knife. You can use Pinterest to source images and find additional content. However, Pinterest is also a goldmine to find sub-topics to expand and enhance your blog content.
Curating Content Is Much Easier if You Use Pinterest as your starting point.
At first I thought I had to create all my own original content in order to deliver value to readers however, sites like Pinterest and Tumblr prove us wrong every day. Not every post will save the world but each post can provide value and curation and commentary can become valuable pieces of content.
Pro-Tip: Google Likes Listicles. Despite some of the bad wrap long form bloggers have against Listicles, they can get you some longtail SEO traffic so give listicles a try. They also kill on Pinterest.
How To Generate Blog Ideas
Answer The Public can help your blog content improve by providing you a list of questions that people are asking about your topic. Just go to AnswerThePublic.com, enter you keyword, gather your the list of questions, and answer them within your blog.
Pro-Tip: Use the question as subheadlines in your blog post to help target longtail terms.
image: AnswerThePublic.com, Q & A Research Tool
Use Grammar and Punctuation Checker Software
Using good grammar will help reduce the confusion. Not only is your blog public-facing, but it's being compared to at least 9 other search engine website result in Google. If your content doesn't read well, it will lose the battle for attention. Delivering value doesn't always mean having a innovative idea, but it can also mean delivering a clear message.
Tools like Grammarly and services like Wordy can help proofread your content and are worth checking out.
How to Embed Tweets Into Your Blog Content
Tweets from authoritative accounts can add additional value to your blog. Buzzfeed and Billboard do this in order to create listicle about breaking news or trending topics. Below are the steps to adding and embedding tweets into your blog.
Upgrading Blog Content Conclusion:
Now you know how to improve your blog content by adding more graphics, leveraging Pinterest and Answer The Public. Grammar and Punctuation Checkers and embedding tweets will also add value and it actually is very simple to to implement. Improving your content is a process and will get better overtime but at least now you have tools and resources to give you a headstart.
Improving Content and Traffic FAQs
You attract more readers to your blog in multiple ways. You can easily gain more readers by publishing more content, re-optimizing existing content on your business blog or main website, and depending on your business leveraging Facebook, Pinterest and LinkedIn Paid advertising options to drive more visitors.
One big opportunity that a lot businesses miss is improving the SEO of pages and blogs that are already ranking and driving traffic in Google. A simple way to do that is to interlink from your power pages to other power pages. You can use Moz or Ahrefs to identify your power pages and add links to pages that need attention.
Another SEO quick win is to target longertail keywords in your content. So don't just target the main keyword but use a tool like SEMRush or KeywordRevealer to find longtail keyword to help attract more readers.
What are The Advantages of Blogging for Businesses?
There are many benefits to blogging for businesses:
- Blogging is relationship and trust building marketing activity. Readers will see view your business as an expert and thought leader in your industry instead of just a service provider.
- Blogging can preemptively answer customer questions and respond to customer feedback quickly and publically
- Blogging can be a qood way to share customer interviews and testimonials in story form which can convey the benefits of your product or service without a direct sales pitch.
- Blogging can also be used to leverage SEO target keywords and longtail keywords that are not transactional but are influential in the conversion process.
- Blogging can help you build your email subscriber list.
How To Get More Subscribers to Your Blog
You can get more subscribers to your blog in several ways:
- Add a sidebar banner with a valuable Lead Magnet (Free Download) to your sidebar
- Add a pop-up with w free download for subcribing
- Make hyper-targeted valuable posts that are in a series, but are only available to email subscribers and offer a subscribe option
- Contribute and share valuable content in industry related Forums and add your hyper targeted blog post title in your Forum Signature.
- Create page or post specific downloadables that enhance the current post with new more detailed information that your blog post.
- Use blog subscriber tools like OptinMonster, ThriveThemes, or even consider switching to CMS blogging platforms like Hubspot or WordPress which makes even easier.
Can you repost blog content?
How to reuse blog content?
how to structure blog content?
how to find blog content?
what makes good blog content?