Nine Ways To Make Your Blog Posts Exceptional
Nine Ways To Make Your Blog Posts Exceptional
One of the first things that anyone who spends much time reading various blogs will notice is there are a lot of really poorly written posts out there. This isn’t to insult the authors of those posts because I am sure many of them are more than qualified to write about what they cover. The trouble is that due to various reasons including boredom, burnout, or just poor writing skills, many bloggers have posts that are either poorly written or just painfully average. Bloggers wanting their blogs to succeed should try their best to make each post they write exceptional. Here are some tips to help get that accomplished.
1. Keep Your Audience In Mind
It doesn’t matter what you are writing about or what your blog’s niche is, when you are creating content, you must keep your audience in mind. There are a number of bad things that can happen when your writing strays from your audience. You not only risk losing the readers that visit your blog regularly, but you also have a chance of losing the focus of your blog which could impact your ability to gain new members.
2. Take Your Blog Post Titles Seriously
You should pay a lot of attention to what you title each specific blog post. The blog post title is what your readers first see whether they are looking at the post itself or a list of links to past, featured, or related posts. The title of your blog post also usually ends up as part of the URL for that particular post and in that case what you choose to title it can have an effect on the traffic coming your way from search engines.
3. Be Sensational!
When posting content day after day or week after week, it can be hard to keep things fresh and interesting. Some of the most popular posts on even the most famous blogs have sensational titles. These types of titles don’t have to accompany every post you make, but it may be beneficial to your blog if you occasionally do something that stands out. There are a number of strategies that you can take to do this including doing a top ten (or even a top nine!) list, stating a negative about something everyone else is being positive about, being sarcastic or ironic, and more. These type of posts, when properly titled, have a way of gaining popularity and becoming a magnet for future traffic.
4. Include A Question
Some of the best blog posts out there have an active list of comments following them that have been placed there by the readers who have come by. A great way to kick start comments is to occasionally end your post with a question. This not only serves as a good way to encourage comments, but it also can make your readers feel as though their opinions and thoughts are valued. A question can also lead to a comment by one of your readers that you can then expand upon in a future blog post. Using questions in blog posts is a very effective way to get those posts noticed and also to encourage your readers to interact with you and each other as well.
5. Know Your Grammar
You didn’t like studying it in school and you probably don’t like to have it corrected now. Many bloggers don’t think it can, but the grammar you use can alter how effective your content is. Even the most correct and logical ideas and philosophies can be discounted should your posts consistently exhibit poor grammar. It would be a shame if some of your best content was never appreciated because the poor grammar you exhibited proved too big of a distraction.
6. Share Your Opinions
This tip is often presented as putting yourself into your blog. This is very good advice because the readers of your blog can go anywhere online and find dry factual information. Make your blog and the content you create standout by voicing your opinion on a variety of subjects. This can be as simple as endorsing certain methods of doing something or products to use, or as aggressive as commentating on current events or theories put out by other bloggers and industry sources. Sharing your opinions with your blog readers can be a great way of making a more personal connection with them.
7. Proofread
Few things can cause people to lose faith in the words you write like finding a number of misspellings, typos, or factual errors. To build a blog that is trusted, your readers need to not only trust the information, but the person writing it as well. When you make what many see as mindless mistakes, your readers could lose faith in how knowledgeable you really are. The importance of proofreading and correcting your mistakes cannot be understated.
8. Use Photographs, But Use Them Wisely
It is basic blogging, but many people don’t take the step of adding photographs to their blog posts. It isn’t always the most convenient thing to do as a lot of bloggers feel they don’t have access to photographs of their own. The truth is though that there are a lot of photographs available at free stock photo websites that can be used on blogs as well as for other purposes. Adding these photos to your blog posts is a fairly simple process and can greatly increase their level of quality.
9. Research Something – Go In-Depth!
If you want to create a blog post that gets recognized and cited by others, one sure way to do it is to go above and beyond the call of duty. The truth is that most blog posts are by design short and to the point. This is the perfect way to communicate to your readers in most cases as most people don’t wish to invest large amounts of time when they come to your blog. Every now and then though, you can emphasize your qualifications and enhance your reputation by creating an incredibly in-depth study on whatever the subject of your blog is. By presenting more information than your readers would ever expect to find, you are showing them that there is something about your blog that they cannot find elsewhere.
Through purposeful craftsmanship, it is possible to make each and every post you make to your blog truly exceptional.
So, what about this list? It’s a top nine list after all, what do you think should be added as the #10 way to make your blog posts exceptional?
It Just May Be Time To Scrap Your Blog And Start Over
Blogging is a fun and sometimes profitable pursuit that many people do. Most bloggers have more than one blog that they operate and often still operate the first blog they ever started. It isn’t uncommon however for a blogger to have learned so much and developed their skills so well that their first blog is no longer up to their standards. There are solutions to what to do if this is the case.
If your blog generates traffic but isn’t profitable and looks unprofessional, your choice is pretty clear. Either continue with this losing proposition that is also a waste of your valuable time or scrap it and start over. Starting over doesn’t have to be as scary a thought as it may seem though. If your blog is bring traffic, making that traffic work for you with a new and more professional blog just makes sense. People are already visiting your blog, that traffic is an asset you have but because of the condition of this blog and what you didn’t know when you started it, you are not properly capitalizing on that traffic.
Many people dislike the idea of scrapping a blog and starting over because they have an emotional attachment to that first blog. Sometimes people like to keep their first blog as an illustration of how far their skills have come. While this is understandable in some cases, it doesn’t make sense when you can improve your income by scrapping that blog and starting over. Often you don’t have to scrap the entire blog, you can preserve the content and the posts, only scrapping the design elements and overall setup of the blog.
While experienced bloggers are often very successful in their online money making ventures, odds are that they didn’t start out that way. Every blogger has a first blog and there is no way that it exhibits the same sort of professionalism and polish that there current blog or blogs do. That original blog may not be currently in the shape that they can be proud of, but it does most likely still retain some value in terms of traffic or content. To not redo that original blog to some extent just doesn’t make financial success at all.
Blog Tip: Have Passion, But Don’t Forget Knowledge
One of the most popular blog tips you’ll read online is to be passionate about what you are blogging about. While this is true, being passionate is not enough, you must also be knowledgeable about what it is that you are blogging about. People come to your blog to find out things that they do not know about the subject you are blogging about. If you are not well informed on your subject matter, the visitors to your blog will know and they will not be coming back.
So yes, while it is true that you should be passionate about your subject matter, you must also know what you’re talking about or you will not be giving your readers any reason to come back.
Get Free PR2 Links For Your Blog
Promoting your blog is one of the most important, and sometimes most difficult, things you can do. You can get free PR2 links to your site by submitting your site to this source of free pixel ads. If you have multiple sites, you can submit them all too. It’s always nice to find free places to advertise your site.
What Is The Best Permalink Structure?
One of the most important things that a blogger using Wordpress as their blogging platform needs to do when setting up the mechanics of their blog is to decide on their permalink structure. The permalink structure of a blog dictates what the links for individual posts look like. With the default structure that comes with Wordpress, the link for an individual post may not be exasctly what the blog author desires. Using the default permalink structure, the title of the blog post will not appear in the link for the blog post and this is not good in terms of getting individual posts ranked in search engines.
What other options are there though when it comes to varying the permalink structure of a blog?
The default setting will make the URLs of your post look like this: yourdomainname.com/?p=123
Through the admin panel, the following optional configurations are available:
Day and name, so your post’s URL will look like: yourdomainname.com/2008/07/11/post-name/
Month and name, so your post’s URL will look like: yourdomainname.com/2008/07/post-name/
Numeric, so your post’s URL will look like: yourdomainname.com/archives/123
But, Wordpress also allows you to insert a custom structure. Using the custom feature, you can assign a different set up to the URL’s of your blog posts. The set up that we use here at ItsABlogThing.com is: yourdomainname.com/category-name/post-name
In doing this, the URL for the individual post will end up having the domain name, the category that describes what the post is about, and the post name in it. This is but one way to go about having custom URLs through Wordpress, many also prefer to have the URL be just the domain name followed by the post name which is also a good way to go. The best permalink structures to use allow the URL to describe exactly what the page or post is about. The only way to do this is to alter the permalink structure that comes as the default setting with Wordpress.
