Blogs are a great way to draw attention to your site and capture the interest of potential customers, users, or clients. But, although we’ll never be able to determine the true overwhelming size of the internet, we do know that a new blog is created every half a second! This staggering statistic unfortunately means that you’re competing with A LOT of other bloggers out there.
In this post we hope to pass on some of our knowledge about creating powerful, engaging blog content so that you can stand out from the crowd and wow your audience. We’ve broken the process of creating a blog down into three easy-to-follow steps: establish, decorate, and promote.
Step One: Establish
We assume you already have a blog topic in mind (if you don’t, that’s okay – just bare with us!), but it’s important to remember that the most powerful blogs are the ones that can withstand the test of time. With this in mind, the first thing you should do is become omnipotent within your chosen subject. You need to be confident in the fact that each time you sit down to write a blog about your chosen topic it will be original and informative. It might be a question you’d like to ask yourself now, whether your blog is about football, IT solutions, or cute things cats do, are you confident that you can write 100+ fresh articles on this subject? If not, then get researching!
Once you’ve become king or queen of your blog topic the next thing you need to do is establish how often you are going to update your blog. There are tons of conflicting stats out there about how many times you should blog.
Daily? Weekly? Monthly?
There are just as many of these so called ‘stats’ about what day, and even time, you should blog.
Monday morning at 8am for the most views? Thursday evening at 6pm for the most social shares?
Instead of putting your trust in statistics that were probably collected from a minuscule portion of the millions of blogs on the internet, put your trust in your users and yourself. You’ll learn from experience about how many times you should blog per month. Here at Keyword Eye, we have found it most beneficial to blog once per week. And as for when to blog, that’s entirely up to you too! But, we advise that once you choose a time and day for posting you stick to it because consistency really is the key to improving search engine optimization, and gaining more readers. Most blogging platforms have great schedule features so you can write your blog when you’re free and then schedule it to publish at your chosen date and time.
Step Two: Decorate
The key to creating engaging blog content is to make it more than words. Statistics prove that blogs with relevant images obtain 94% more views than blogs without images, and posts with videos get 267% more links than normal posts!
Check out our hero image above. This is a relevant image that sums up our blog post and is a feature that we always include because, along with a catchy blog title, it makes our article much more clickable. Now, we’re not all illustrators (I know I’m certainly not!), but images such as ours can be outsourced for a surprisingly small amount. However, it’s not all about an eye-catching title and image, once people click onto your blog they should be greeted with an article that is as equally engaging.
First and foremost, blogs are a written medium, but visuals give them more appeal. Plus, if you’re embedding videos from external sites like YouTube then you’re link-building at the same time as entertaining, and informing your users. In fact, it’s been shown that blog posts incorporating videos attract 3 times as many inbound links as those without. As with the hero image, any embedded images and videos should always be relevant to your blog, if not, you could be at risk of damaging your SEO. Check out this short video below as an example:
Step Three: Promote
It’s all well and good following steps one and two to create a brilliant blog, but if you don’t know how to promote your blog then your hard work may go unseen.
Social media is a great way to promote your blog, so it’s shocking that less than 20% of small and medium-sized business websites have a link to a Facebook page, and fewer have links to Twitter and LinkedIn. If your chosen blogging platform doesn’t have one already then you can easily download a social plug-in, like this one here:
Social plug-ins are great because they encourage readers to share your blog as they can do so with the click of a button. As you can see above, they also record how many shares you have had across different social media sites. This is useful because it allows you to see which blog posts have been more popular than others. You can use this information to write blogs that appeal to what your readers most enjoy.
Another great way to promote is by creating an outreach plan. Outreaching is the process of contacting other bloggers that you are interested in creating a relationship with, possibly even collaborating with. The best bloggers to reach out to are those that write about a similar topic to your own, but are not competitors. Outreaching is a great way to promote yourself because it allows you to share readers with another blogger, and it also gives your readers fresh content from a different writer. Outreaching is a tried and tested process as studies have shown that 62.96% of people feel that multiple authors add more credibility to a blog.
So there you go, you should now be fully equipped to create powerful and engaging blog content!