13 Ways to Improve Your Luck Blogging

You may need 50 ways to leave your lover, but you only need 13 ways to leave your boring blog in the dust.

Be Authentic, Honest, and Human

• Write conversationally and tell a story
• Be transparent
• Worry less about impressing your audience and more about engaging them
• Inject humor
• It’s okay to be professional AND personal
• Don’t be afraid to show empathy and emotion
• Consider using posts written by employees, customers, and experts

Be Helpful, Instructional, Compelling, Interesting, and Entertaining

• Find the answers to the questions your audience is asking
• Develop an angle by taking a boring topic and asking yourself the 5 Ws (who, what, where, when, and why)
• Use real facts, numbers, and data
• Address the challenges your audience is facing
• Share real-life examples

 Be Accurate and Credible

• Get your facts straight
• Remember, trust is earned
• Give credit to your sources

Provide Valuable Content
You work hard to generate content. Make sure it works hard for you.

Make sure your content is:

• Findable
• Readable
• Understandable
• Actionable
• Sharable 

Be Timely AND Timeless
Work to find a balance between in the moment and advice for the ages. For timely posts, focus on news, trends, and issues. For timeless content (a.k.a. evergreen posts) include topics and information that will still resonate with people, even if they land on your post months after it was published.
 
Be Organized and Concise

• Your blog layout should be clear and skimmable. Data show that internet readers love numbers, lists, worsts, urgency, and promises
• Get to the point—set post-length parameters. Keeping it short improves readability and keeps the reader’s attention. 300-1500 maximum word count is a good goal.
• Break up text and emphasize important sections with bold type, bullets, and numbered lists
• A large percentage of visitors will simply click away from text-heavy posts with little white space and no headings

Use Visuals

• A picture is worth a thousand words, so leverage images on your blog
• Include high-quality, professional-looking, and engaging images
• Images should fulfill the promise of headline and complement the topic
• Consider using video, graphs, and slideshares

Focus on Headlines
The headline is possibly THE most important aspect of a blog post. Headlines are critical to search engine algorithms (learn about search engine algorithms and formatting headlines here).
Headlines should:

• Be clever
• Have an eye-catching title
• Include a teaser line (meta-description)
• Be crafted with search engines in mind

Pay Attention to SEO
Pay attention to search engine algorithms. Increase your post’s value by creating meta-descriptions, maximizing tagging, using keywords, and including in-text links. Learn the ins and outs of SEO optimization here.
 
Stay Within Categories
Each post should fit into an established blog category and play a role in your overall content strategy. (Translation: Stay on topic and keep it relevant to your area of expertise.)
 
Share and Network

• Include social sharing buttons
• Provide a prominent subscribe option
• Create a Call-To-Action (download, sign up for mailing list, comment, etc.)
• Promote on Social Media

 Write Well. Edit. Proof.

• Pay attention to grammar, spelling, and punctuation
• Proofread. Then proofread it again
• Ask someone else to edit the piece

Be Consistent
Implement an editorial calendar to ensure content is being created and published on schedule.
 
Successful blogging doesn’t happen overnight. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, take it one step at a time; the key is to just take that first step.
 
Want to learn more? Check out the resources we accessed for this post:
SocialMediaExaminer.com
BrandsWithFansBlog.com
JonLoomer.com
SocialMediaB2B.com
CopyBlogger.com
Entrepeneur.com
Hubspot.com