5 Tips for Your Blog Posts That Are Not About the Writing
We’ve given tips about writing for the web in the past. This post is about how you can improve your blog posts in other ways.
1. Add GIFs
You know you need great images in your blog posts. (If you haven't already, check out Pxhere and Unsplash for free, non-copyrighted images.)
But have you ever added a gif? They’re fun, and super easy to make at Gifmaker.me or Giphy.com.
Once you've made a few, you’ll begin taking photos with gif creation in mind — and your animations will improve over time.
2. Check Your Sources
When you’re doing the research for your posts, remember to check the sources for information you share.
We all know it’s easy for false or unsupported claims to circulate on the internet.
For instance, you may have read that our attention spans are shrinking — and are now shorter than a goldfish’s. This sounds very important to anyone involved in digital marketing (including promoting a blog). The claim was even reported in major national news outlets, but there’s no scientific evidence to support it.
Let’s all do our best not to spread false or unsupported claims.
3. Add a Fun Quiz
Depending on the topic of your blog, it might be appropriate to create and embed a little quiz into one of your posts.
Are you in the tourism industry? How about a quiz about tourist attractions in your region? If you blog about gardening, you could create a plant identification quiz. If you are an electrician you could create a quiz about electrical safety in the home.
If you already have lots of content in your blog, you could create a quiz about topics you've already covered. Then encourage readers to search for the answers in your previous posts, keeping readers engaged on your site.
If you have a WordPress site, here are a few places to start looking into this option:
- How to Easily Create Viral Quizzes for a WordPress Site
- 9 Best Quiz Plugins for WordPress
- 7 Awesome Survey & Viral Quiz Plugins For WordPress
Fyrebox gives instructions for adding their quizzes to other content management systems.
4. Add Social Share Buttons If You Don’t Already Have Them
You want readers to help promote your blog by sharing the posts they enjoy. If you don't already have social share buttons on your blog posts, consider adding them. There are a number of options.
Here are some plugins for WordPress. If you don’t use WordPress, take a look at AddThis, ShareThis, and Social 9. There are others too. Take a look around and see which ones include buttons for all the social media sites you want, and whose style you like.
5. Add 'Click to Tweet' Widgets
The number of tweets published every day is staggering. Twitter says it’s hundreds of millions. It's hard to be heard in all that noise!
Try getting some of your readers to amplify your voice on Twitter by adding Click To Tweet boxes.
Here is an article that runs through various options for adding "Click to Tweet" on WordPress websites. And here are step-by-step instructions for adding a Click to Tweet box to a Squarespace site.
The basic idea is that you select a short quote that you would like readers to tweet, and you use one of the options to turn it into a nice looking highlight or box in your post. Readers simply click (and customize, if they want) — and your content is automatically shared on Twitter. Helping to get your content out into the world.
Brought to you by Custom Fit Online - a Whistler digital marketing company that offers SEO and content development services, established in 1995.
By Roy McClean