Blogging as an industry has become more lucrative than ever before. From a market size of around $50 billion in 2019, it’s expected to grow to over $400 billion from 2021 to 2025, according to Reportlinker. Now is a fantastic time to start a blog and join this booming industry.
As long as you’re a decent writer, are passionate about your subject matter, and can keep informed on the best practices of blogging, you can definitely run a successful blog. If you’re someone who’s been trying to get your blog off the ground, check out these tips to improve your content and create more conversions.
Optimize Your Article Structure
Making your blog posts more readable is the first barrier towards success. You likely know by now to break up your text into shorter, more self-contained paragraphs. This portions the content into “bite-sized” pieces, as it were. A good way to enhance this is by making the first or second sentence of every paragraph informative and intriguing.
Most readers tend to skim through articles before fully committing to reading them, so it’s best to play to this tendency by putting enticing information in places where rapidly scanning eyes would catch them. A more deliberate way to do this is to use highlights, meaningful excerpts from the full text that serve as the “elevator pitch” of your post, sprinkled throughout between text blocks in larger, more noticeable font.
Most articles that do this usually do it with direct quotes from people they’re interviewing, but you can highlight just about anything you find to be noteworthy. Other readability tools you can use are bullet points and images.
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Analyze Your Audience
As a blogger, you may think you already know your audience well, especially if you deal in very niche topics. But there is always more to learn, and you might discover something useful by keeping a close eye on your analytics. Using tools like Google Analytics, you can find out the things your audience likes and dislikes. These are vital statistics that you would do well to inform your writing process with.
Aside from employing an analytics tool, comment sections are also a great way for gauging engagement and audience approval. This would give you a more direct and interactive way to find out how your content is faring among your readers. However, it is usually not representative of the larger audience. Still, it can serve as a good barometer to accompany your analytics.
Write Content With Viral-Worthy Characteristics
The key components here are audience excitement, retention, and shareability. Contrary to what some may believe, it’s entirely possible to drum up excitement without having to resort to sensationalism. All you have to do is to generate the right questions in a reader’s head. This will lead to a satisfying conclusion whatever the actual content of your article is, and the reader will come away not feeling cheated like they would with a sensationalist article.
It does take some mastery. Even headlines are an art in and of themselves. But once you do master the art of making your article more viral-worthy, you’ll be able to hook your readers in without invoking too many negative reactions.
This is seduction in its purest form. It does not involve deception, because you’re giving your audience what they want anyway. You’re just stoking their appetite for it. Apply this principle to your headlines, subheadings, and the progression of your article. The best ones often read like self-contained stories, with an interesting intro, rising action, and satisfying resolution. Pair this with strong brand authority and you will be able to grab a reader’s attention and hold onto it for the whole article.
Law firm blogs are perfect for patterning your own content after, as the most successful ones are fantastic at conveying authority and delivering information that the readers truly want. Consult a copywriting guide to learn the basic principles of building brand authority. As for shareability, the important thing is achieving the appropriate length.
Shareability tends to increase with the length of the article but try not to make it too long. 2,000 to 3,000 words is a decent length, but around 5,000 will likely lead to the best results. More than that is likely to be overkill unless it is warranted, or you can structure it well.
Build Your Articles On Solid Ideas And Practical Utility
A great way to showcase your familiarity and expertise with your subject matter is by building your content on a solid foundation of knowledge. Find concepts that worked well for other experts and bloggers of your niche and build on top of them. It’s best if you do this for subjects that aren’t as covered as the most topical ones. If your article becomes popular, you could be a trendsetter.
Besides this, it is important to root your articles on practicality. Knowledge isn’t very useful without application, after all. Make sure to write in such a way that the benefits one can glean from your article is clear.
This also makes the article more shareable, as people like to feel helpful by directing their peers to useful information. You can drive this home with a direct call to action, such as telling your audience to share the post, or some other action relevant to what you talked about.
Balance SEO With Audience Experience
Search Engine Optimization is considered by many to be a necessary evil. It tends to subtract from the overall experience your audience gets from reading your article, but without it, you’re disadvantaged when it comes to appearing on search engine results. A lot of inexperienced or negligent sites and bloggers just fill their posts to the brim with SEO.
Trying to game the system by cramming as many SEO techniques as possible does make you show up more on search engines, but only at first. Now, user experience is also measured when deciding placement on the search engine hierarchy. Meaning you’ll have to strike the perfect balance to stay near the top of the results.
Now you can overcome SEO issues when writing your blog posts and maintain a perfect balance with a help of tools like SEO content editor.
Blogging as a business is booming because it’s got the edge of being more personal and attuned to its audience. Play to this strength well, and your blog will never dry up.
