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How To Improve Your Blog

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How To Improve Your Blog

Ever since the digital world has been introduced to us, we’ve come along in a short amount of time. When blogging first came about, it wasn’t about making money. Instead, it was a platform to discuss topics close to the writer’s heart or using it as an online diary. Nowadays though, so many people have managed to craft full-time careers out of their blog, and it’s only growing more popular as time goes on. If you have a blog, it’s important to keep your blog updated so here’s how you can improve your own blog going forward.

Improve Your Photography

Stock photos are great, but there’s nothing like your own photos to draw in the reader. We’ve seen through YouTube, as an example, that thumbnail photos are important to attract viewers clicking on it. So the same can be said for blog posts. Not only do you want engaging content but a good, quality photo that points towards what the blog post is, will be hugely beneficial.

And with technology today, it’s easier than ever before to improve your photography with the help of a decent phone and the right photo quality. There’s also plenty of courses and workshops that you can go on which can give you the experience you need to take your photos to another level.

Know Your Audience Better

With so many software and data measuring platforms out there, it can be quite easy to find out more about your readers. Getting to know your audience better can be crucial to your blog’s growth. Google Analytics is a go-to for many bloggers looking to see their latest statistics, who has visited their blog and what their habits are. You can find out a lot about your audience. Here are a few things you can look at to help get to know your readers better:

- Geographic Location - This will show you where your readers are based. It’s important to know if the majority of your audience lives in the UK or USA because you might want to cater your writing style and any relevant links you use to the geography of your audience.

- Age and Gender- Age and gender also play an important part of your blog because it affects the type of content you churn out as well. Age because your style of writing might need to be more mature or cater to a younger audience. Gender is also important if you were writing for women but the majority of your readership are men.

- Hobbies and Interests - Hobbies and interests are that extra nugget of knowledge that’s helpful to have when you want to tailor your content to suit your audience’s interests. For example, if you’re writing about home decor, your audience’s interests might be DIY. Knowing this, you can move forward to creating more content around that specific topic. This means more relevant content for your readers and the chance to have those readers to become regulars.

Get Digital Savvy

When it comes to running an online blog, being clued up digitally is important to improving your site. With the digital industry constantly changing, it can be hard to keep up. Here are a few ways you get digital savvy:

SEO - Stands for Search Engine Optimization and is something you want to be working on constantly to stay relevant. SEO is essentially where your site or a blog post ranks in search engines. The higher you get, the more chance you have of getting more traffic to your blog. There are a number of ways you can improve the SEO of your site. Compressing your images will make your site more responsive which is important as readers will click off your website if it takes too long to load. Keywords help towards your site’s relevance and using the right ones can mean you’ll be found higher up the search engine pages.

Editing - Having good editing skills is useful when it comes to understanding how everything is arranged on your site. Buying a monitor from monitorsforphotoediting.com/ will help edit any photos you take and you’ll also be able to see your site in full. Editing also comes in use when you need to customize the site.

Communicate With The Blog Community

The blog community is a big one and regardless of your blog’s theme, you should make a conscious effort to have communication and make connections with other bloggers. As blogging is growing, there are certain aspects that are still deliberated over and problems may arise where you need help and advice on. The blogging community looks after one another, which is great. Commenting on other people’s blog posts is something you should make time to do every few days if possible and following bloggers you like on social media will help you make those connections. There’s plenty of blogger groups on Facebook that you can join and hashtags you can type in on Twitter to find relevant bloggers in your field.

Don’t be afraid to reach out to other bloggers to discuss collaborations, especially if that blogger has a bigger following. Growing your audience can take time but partnering up with another blogger on a project can be great for your site.

Work On Building Up Followers

It can feel like an incredible achievement, early on in your blogging, when you get a couple of views on your content. As you grow and churn out more content, you want to work on building up a loyal following of readers. Building your email list is a great way of maintaining readers you already have and having automatic emails that push out the week’s content is useful to have. Make it clear where your audience can sign up to become part of your ‘tribe’. When it comes to sending emails, make it appear as though it’s an exclusive part of your blog. Offer freebies, useful advice and early access to your webinars or courses if that’s something you provide.

Get active on social media if you’re not already. Try looking for opportunities where you can grow your followers organically. This might be posting more often or improving your photography or promotional skills. You can also use paid advertising to boost certain posts to reach more people and this can also have a knock-on effect in regards to your followers.

Be More Personable

We all crave human interaction and when it comes to online interaction, if someone enjoys your content and becomes invested in your blog, they’ll love learning more about you. Not to say you should lay every aspect of your life online for all to see but it’s beneficial to be personable. One of the ways you can do this is to have an ‘About Me’ page. This can be a simple Q&A to yourself or a life story of where you’ve been and what you’re doing now. Being open about yourself is certainly going to benefit the relationship between yourself and the reader.

Improve And Promote Your Old Content

Blog writing can certainly take up a lot of time, depending on how much you write and how often you post onto your site. So why, after all the brainstorming of what to write, taking photos and editing, should you let it fade into the back end of your blog? Improving and promoting old content will not only improve the SEO of your blog but it’ll also show off older content to new readers. That’s why it’s important to replace any broken links. There’s nothing more annoying than a new reader on your site, clicking on a blog post and not being able to click on any links.

Focus on content that also did well in the first place. This is your evergreen content and should be updated, edited and re-uploaded regularly. Think about titles for blog posts too as these can be just as important at drawing in a reader as photographs are. Imagine being a new reader yourself and whether you’d click on that content.

Set Goals For The Blog

Like everything in life, setting goals can be really beneficial in improving productivity and motivation. You should be setting goals for your blog that are both short-term and long-term. Think about what you want to achieve and your ultimate dream for the blog. Make sure your short-term goals are easily achievable and build towards the big goals. It’s incredibly satisfying when complete a task or something on your to-do list because it reminds you of why you’re doing it and allows you to feel like you’re making some sort of progress.

Running a blog can be really fun. It’s your own little space on the internet and you have an unlimited amount of opportunities that come with blogging now, especially if you find yourself wanting to craft it into a career. As long as you have the passion and the patience, it is possible. Most success doesn’t just come overnight, it takes a lot of hard work and time!

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