The internet has allowed all of us to be writers and publish our thoughts for anyone to read. As with all forms of communication, some methods are better than others. Formatting your message is a vital part of this process and if done effectively, readers will stay on the page longer and are more likely to share your content.
Here are 5 tips to help you create better blog posts:
1. Use Images
Sometimes it can be easy to get lost in the text of a blog post and forget to include some imagery to enhance the visual impact of your message. Using good imagery can engage the reader nicely and entice them further into the page.
Imagery in content is also vital for your social media marketing efforts. When you or your readers share your post on sites like Facebook and Twitter, you can control what images display in those feeds. Facebook will look for image files within your content and use one to serve as the thumbnail for that piece of content. You can even control what image Facebook automatically selects by using the og:image meta tag.
2. Interlinking
Interlinking is when a blog post or page has links within the content linking to other posts, pages, categories or tags within the same website. Links like this are great for search engine optimization because it tells Google’s indexing bot to follow links throughout your website, and what your content is about. For the reader, interlinks are useful because it can lead them to other pieces of content on your website that they may be interested in.
3. To Allow Comments or Not
Allowing comments on your blog is a choice every blogger or website owner must make at some point. Allowing comments seems like a pretty minor decision but when you get deeper into it, you soon realize the downfalls of doing so. Post comments are great for helping you to generate content without any work on your part, but they can be a difficult beast to manage sometimes. Anyone can post negative comments, argue amongst themselves and overall may actually have a harmful effect on your blog or website. Moderating comments before allowing them to display on your site can help, but this takes time, and depending on the popularity of your website and content, you may end up spending several hours each week making sure your comment threads are clean and helpful to your readers.
If you manage a company blog, it is usually advisable to disable comments so that you can remain in full control of the overall brand message you are communicating to your website visitors.
4. Use Contrast Within Your Content
Adding contrasting elements to your content helps engage the reader. Contrast can be achieved in several ways:
- Some large text, some medium text and some small text – adding some size differences in your text can help to break up the monotony of long paragraphs. Use larger text for important sentences, callouts and titles. This will allow the reader to know what a section of the content is about and will help them to skip through to something that they might be interested in.
- Bold text – used sparingly, giving some words the bold treatment can help important words or sentences to stand out. However, remember that when all text is bold , no text is bold. The contrast between normal and bold text is what creates the visual aid, so be careful not to use too much bold.
- Color – typically, a modern and clean website design will use text color changes only for things like headings and links. Many people think that using several different colors in a website page will help to highlight different words or sentences. However, just like the bold effect, multiple colors used together ends up actually taking away the contrast that you were trying to achieve.
5. Remember Your Blogging Goals
You hear it so often in internet marketing…”You must be blogging!” and “Write blog posts” ; However, most of the time this isn’t accompanied with the “Why” of blogging. The more you understand about the reasons for creating regular content for your website, the more likely you are to put effort into it and also the more likely you are to understand how to measure the success or effectiveness of it.
Adding regular content to your website is great for search engine optimization, it shows visitors that your website is up to date, active and that you put effort into it. All of these characteristics are part of the makeup of a successful website.
