You spend hours and hours writing a blog post that you find great, heck, even amazing! You’re so excited to publish it and patiently wait for traffic to flock to your website.
But surprisingly, when you do hit publish, barely anyone goes to read it. No matter how often you refresh your website analytics page, that statistic isn’t changing: your blog traffic remains low.
Wondering what you did wrong? Before you attempt to write a new blog post, here are some tips to remember for writing blog posts that get read.
Proofread
No matter how eager you are to publish a blog post, you can never skip proofreading. It’s one of the most critical steps during the blog writing process, so much so that we ranked it as number one.
At the very least, blog copy riddled with spelling and grammatical errors shows that you’re sloppy, disorganized, and unprofessional.
At worse, error-filled blog copy can damage your brand’s credibility and drive your audience away – forever.
Invest in proper proofreading software to help avoid making these types of mistakes. Choose ones like Grammarly that do more than identify spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors; they can also assist with clarity, engagement, and tone.
Reading your piece aloud can also help you identify errors, catch awkward phrasing, and improve the flow of your blog.
We always suggest avoiding publishing something the day you create it. That’s just asking for errors to be missed! Instead, look at your content with fresh eyes the following day, and preferably, with the help of a trusted friend, too.
Skip the Fluff
We’re all busy, so keep that in mind when writing each blog post. Get to the point right away rather than bury it towards the end of your article.
As much as you may not want to hear it, most blog readers are skimmers. So make your blog as easy as possible for them to do that! Insert a Table of Contents at the start of your blog post that links to various sections, and include a TLDR section to summarize your article’s main ideas.
Use Short Paragraphs, Lists, and Lots of White Space
The easier you make your blog posts to read, the more likely your reader will read them to the end.
Keep your sentences and paragraphs short to maintain a lot of white space throughout the article. Looking at a huge blog of text can be overwhelming and actually drive traffic away. Make use of bulleted and numbered lists to also break up the text.
Include SEO Tactics
You need Google to rank your article before traffic can come to your page to read it. That’s why it’s important that you’re writing about topics that are currently trending on Google or socials.
Using keyword research, integrate certain keywords applicable to your blog topic throughout your article. But be careful; you don’t want to stuff too many in there! There’s a fine balance to tread between overstuffing keywords and including them naturally throughout the content.
One great way to include a lot of keywords naturally? Include an FAQ section at the end of your blog post!
Publish Consistently
Having a stagnant site is not a good idea – in fact, it can start to hurt your rankings. Google regularly comes back to your site to re-crawl it and rank any new pages that have been added since the last time it did this. If it sees that nothing new is there, your site may start being viewed as inactive and not appear as often on Google SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).
When you’re trying to improve your SEO, the more often you publish, the better. But unfortunately, consistency is often directly related to budgets. So the best you can do is to publish as often as possible. Even publishing consistently once a month is better than going months between posts!
Include Internal Links
The longer people stay on your site, the more your average page views increase. When people stay on your site longer, Google views it as a helpful information source, which can also help improve your SERPs.
But it only takes so long to read one blog article. To entice readers to stay around for longer, include internal links to other helpful blog posts (like this one) that they may be interested in reading. Hopefully, they’ll hang around long enough to lead to some type of conversion.
Research Trending Topics
You only want to write articles that people are actually looking for on Google. So before completing your keyword research, you should check out sites like BuzzSumo or the “People Also Ask” feature on Google to see what’s popular.
When you find a topic worth pursuing, don’t just re-hash the same information found in other articles. Instead, try to take on a different angle, extend the word count, or write it better.
Use Engaging CTAs
The whole purpose of your blog posts is to try to get your target audience to take some action. Maybe you want them to sign up as a blog subscriber to get your next article straight into their inbox, or you want them to download your free e-book. Or maybe, just maybe, you’re going for the golden egg: to purchase your product or service directly on your website.
Whatever it may be, you’ll want to include some well-written CTAs influencing a reader to make a move.
Include a Captivating Headline and Visuals
You may think that the most time-intensive part of writing a blog post is the writing itself. But in fact, experts suggest that you should spend just as much time writing your headline as you do your article! That’s because it’s your title that helps people decide whether they’re going to read the entire article or not.
The same goes for including relevant visuals. Keep your reader entertained by having a great visual at each scroll.
Use a Headline Analyzer tool to help create headlines that will attract, hook, and persuade more people.
Promote Your Blog to Your Target Audience
You can’t just sit back after publishing your blog and hope traffic comes to your site. This is where the real work starts!
You need to promote the heck out of that blog post. Use it in your next newsletter, include short snippets from it on your social networks, and request backlinks from reputable sites.
You don’t always have to promote the latest post that you’ve done, either. For blog posts you published a while back that are no longer getting views, bring them back to life by following the same tactics discussed. You can even write brand new blog posts like “My Top 5 Popular Posts” or “From the Vault” to get traffic back to posts from yesteryear!
The Bottom Line
Writing a blog post is never easy, but the above tips can help you write content that’s more likely to get read. And that makes all that hard work worth it!