By Carole Hayward
Has your blog become stagnant? Is your content uninspired? It’s important to take stock of your blog and strive to continually improve. Here are six tips for building a better blog.
Six Tips to Build a Better Blog
- Reassess your goals. Why are you doing a blog? This is the most important question that you should ask yourself. Ask it often. If you don’t have outlined goals for what you want your blog to achieve then it’s highly unlikely that you’re achieving much of anything. Take time to reassess your goals. Are those goals the same as when you first launched the blog or have your goals changed?
- Track your progress. You might be tracking your number of followers but it’s equally important to track how much your followers engage with your content. Are people reading your posts? Are they sharing them? Are readers clicking through the links? Are they reading multiple posts on your blog to learn more? It’s time to ask yourself some hard questions. Each blog platform has tracking tools. Maximize them.
- Audit your content. Read through your posts. You might realize that some of the posts aren’t quite as quality as you originally thought when you posted them. Do the posts align with your stated content goals? Are you staying on topic with what you have told your readers that your blog is about? What are your most popular posts? Which ones elicited the most reader interaction and discussion? Once you know what you have done, you can refine your content strategy moving forward. Check out this article about doing a content audit for your blog.
- Invite new voices. A great way to spice up your blog is to publish contributions from other writers. You can curate a guest column, asking writers to contribute one post or you can invite a writer to submit a series on a particular topic. This will help to diversify your content. Check out these tips for hosting guest bloggers.
- Incorporate more images. One easy way to improve your blog is to spend the effort, time, and even money to find photos, infographics, and illustrations to use with each blog post. Invest in a stock photo account such as Shutterstock, iStock by Getty Images, and Adobe Stock Photos. Don’t overlook free images. Search on Google images for photos that work with your content; next select “Search Tools”; and select “labeled for reuse.” Sites such as Pixabay and Pexels offer free image options.
- Use videos. Short video clips provide a great way to enhance your content. You can easily load videos from YouTube and Vimeo onto your blog platform. Be sure to watch videos all the way to the end before posting! Keep clips short to make them impactful. Here’s some more tips for using videos to liven up your blog.
Also, if you want to see how your blog is performing, just ask your readers for feedback. You should always want your blog to be better and soliciting honest feedback that will help you do that.
Do you have blogging tips you would like to share? Add them to the comments below.
