You know content matters; it is part of your website traffic strategy. But, with more than 600 million blogs out of 1.9 billion websites worldwide in 2023, the content marketing space keeps getting noisier and noisier, making it harder to be heard. Review some simple tips to help your blog posts stand out and get more blog visitors in a crowded universe of content, no matter if you are a beginner or look to become a blog expert.
Why Does it Matter?
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The average blog post gets 38% of its traffic from social media. Social media promotion should be your top priority to increase your blog post readership. This can be achieved by sharing your posts on social media platforms, creating advertisements, and actively participating in social media groups.
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70% of people will read a headline, but only 20% will read the rest. Your headline holds immense significance as it needs to be concise, clear, and attention-grabbing while also relevant to your blog post's content.
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The average blog post reader spends 2 minutes and 20 seconds on a blog post. It's crucial to ensure your blog posts are engaging and well-written to captivate your readers and keep them coming back for more. Utilize clear and concise language while incorporating visually appealing images, videos, and other visuals to break up the text.
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The most popular blog posts are those that are evergreen. To ensure your blog posts remain relevant and engaging, focus on crafting evergreen content that can be consumed anytime. Consider topics such as productivity, marketing, or personal development that offer lasting value to your readers.
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The average blog post gets 100-200 shares on social media. Utilize the power of social media to expand your blog's reach and attract more readers. Share your blog posts on all your social media channels and encourage your followers to share them. This way, a larger audience will see your blog content, increasing your chances of gaining more traffic and engagement.
For several reasons, having a website traffic strategy and getting traffic to a blog is essential. It can be a source of revenue through advertising, affiliate marketing, or sponsored content.
Secondly, having a large audience increases the visibility and credibility of the blog, which can lead to more opportunities, such as collaborations with other brands or websites.
Finally, a high level of traffic can indicate that the blog is providing valuable content to its readers, which can lead to more engagement and a sense of community — blogging at its best.
Simple Tips to Help Your Blog Posts Stand Out
Know Your Audience & Do Your Research
Don't guess what your audience needs or wants. Your blog visitors are individuals you are looking to engage. Make data-driven decisions on content by doing industry research and competitor analysis. Analyze visitor metrics such as bounce rate, time spent on a page, and the number of pages visited.
Write Compelling Headlines
Humans are pretty shallow: we judge a book by its cover. And a blog post by its title. The headline is your hook. It's how you draw readers to click through and check out the whole article, so the catchier, the better. Find out all about blog headlines and what makes them stand out.
Break Up A Page With Subheadings
White space is your friend. Create subheadings and use white space; it'll be easier for readers to skim your content and decide to read it. If they read it, perhaps they'll also take the action you want.
Use Bullet Points to Highlight
Highlight your best information with bullet points people read:
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- Treat bullets as small headlines
- Express clear benefits
- Keep them to a line or two
- Keep them symmetrical
- Avoid clutter and stick to the basics
- Again, bullets are not paragraphs; they are headlines.
Add Images
People react and process visual content much faster than text-based content. So adding images boosts engagement.
Advanced Ideas to Make Your Blog Posts Stand Out
Maybe you've gotten the basics down. You're crafting quality headlines, utilizing good formatting, and researching who your audience is and what they are looking for. Great work! Use these more advanced ideas to take your blog posts to the next level.
Check Out the Competition
Make sure nobody else has written the post you were planning. Type keywords, subjects or headlines into Google and see what you find. If you find somebody who has written a post just like what you were considering, make your post different enough to stand apart. Add value with stats, images, or resources, or offer a unique angle on the topic.
Remember That Details Matter
Do your readers' homework and have extra details that add authority to your post and better prove your points. Doing your research and thoroughly educating your readers with sourced facts creates solid content you're unlikely to see duplicated elsewhere.
Answer Your Questions
As you look around for ideas and find questions being asked that you've never heard before, you may have your next great topic. If you can answer questions nobody else has answered—or nobody has thought to ask—you can produce unique valuable content.
Share Lessons Learned
Readers will appreciate the strategies and the insights they can gain from your transparency. Sharing mistakes and lessons learned helps your audience learn what to do and not do.
Be Specific
Branch off from a general idea, getting more detailed and specific with each branch. Increased specificity makes your post stand out from the crowd. You and your posts become more valuable when you share strategies, tips, and examples.
Share Yourself
Your opinions, recommendations, and thoughts are yours alone. Share them, and your content will be as one-of-a-kind as you are.
Tell Stories and Share Anecdotes
Using facts, data, and statistics creates content that appeals to the logical part of the brain. But don't overlook content that connects emotionally with the reader. Use storytelling to establish this connection by being open, honest, and genuine. Story content can be something that happened to you, an event you witness regularly, or you can make up something that would or could happen under some facts. Try humor when writing your post, or use silly examples to illustrate your point.
Use your experiences, opinions, and knowledge to create content, unlike anything others can share. By bringing something different to the table, you can break free from the blog-writing hordes and reap the benefits of originality.
More Advanced Ideas to Make Your Blog Posts Stand Out
When developing content, you can seek out subject matter that relates directly or peripherally to your market niche or share your personal take on a particular widget's product, service, or benefit. Be transparent, keep your voice consistent, and your audience will await every new post. Here are some more advanced ideas to help your content stand out.
Criticize or debunk an opinion: Remember to attribute facts and figures to support your stance.
Go against the flow: Observe everything around you and flip it on its head. Be fair and professional.
Write reviews: Be honest and civil, but don't be afraid to point out faults or even hand out a poor score. People appreciate your transparency.
Leverage a famous quote: Attribute the quote to its original author.
Tell a story: It bears repeating. Audiences are drawn in by stories.
Be accountable: Discuss your achievements and failures.
Leverage current news: Retain your blog's voice and style and discuss something from the current news cycle (try Google News). Including reliable and interesting facts will make you more authoritative.
Leverage history: Find historical events related to your niche.
Ongoing topic themes: Dedicate a day a week to something your audience likely shares in their own lives and talk about it, talk about them, respond to comments, and create a stronger community.
Rant: Go on a rant about something; speak your mind; share your frustrations. Since everything stays on the internet and can ignite, do enough research and have someone you respect to read the post before it's published.
Pop culture commentary: Share your thoughts on trending topics, news stories of pop culture interest, or events. Respond to comments.
Beginner's guides: Newbies are always interested in learning more—mentor from a distance. As always, respond to questions and comments personally.
Myths or facts: Those newbies, again, they do tend to fall for the same false information regularly. Create your post from the most common myths in your niche and correct them with the facts.
Three Powerful Ways To Do Something Great on Your Blog Right Now
Here are three simple and powerful ways to make your blog stand out in a super-crowded blogosphere. Try some of the above ideas, but deliver them with these overall directives.
#1 Be Disruptive
When you interrupt people with something of value, they will not see it as an intrusion. They will welcome the jolt to their mental energy.
#2 Be Dynamic
Explore the edges of your blog's world, and seek new territory. Do something not previously tested and proven. One way or another, you'll be surprised by the results and stand out while doing it.
#3 Be Dramatic
Do something that catches people off-guard and makes a strong point. Dramatize your ideas. Your story can go a lot further than a simple statement can.
Things to avoid when trying to increase traffic to your blog
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Don't use "black hat" SEO tactics, such as buying backlinks or keyword stuffing. These practices hurt your search engine rankings and damage your blog's reputation.
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Don't post low-quality, plagiarized, or irrelevant content. This can harm the reputation of the blog and result in losing readership.
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Don't neglect on-page optimization, like meta tags, image optimization, content structure, and internal linking. Not doing this will make it hard for search engines to understand what your blog is about and can result in lower search engine rankings.
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Don't ignore analytics; regularly check your website's analytics to understand how users interact with your website and which pages need improvement.
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Don't stop promoting your blog; consistently promoting your blog on social media through email campaigns, networking, and collaborations with other websites will help you reach more people and drive more traffic to your blog.
Go. Dominate your space and upgrade your editorial calendar. The information presented here is intended to underline some basic truisms about the current state of blogging and suggest ways of finding topics or tweaking common issues. Hence, your posts stand out from the noisy content everywhere else. Happy content creation!
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