When users visit your site, do they find your great content obscured by a wall of boring or badly formatted text? Whatever you’re blogging about, you need to make it easier for people to not only read your blog posts and enjoy them. Here are 4 quick ways to crank up the awesome in your blog posts.
1. Images
A lot of people don’t think of this when they start a blog, chugging along typing up posts. But if you look at any of the major, successful blogs, there’s no doubt you’ll find one thing: Lots and lots of images. Pictures are worth a thousand words as they say, and they’re great for adding visual interest to an otherwise vanilla piece of text.
Start your blog post with a prominent, featured image. To be most effective, make it relevant to the post you’re using it in. Use this to give a quick impression of what your blog post is about, and entice your viewer to read more.
But don’t neglect the rest of the article! If you have a post that’s medium to long in length, it can be helpful to break things up every once in a while with more images. Give the viewer the tiniest of breaks, to take in something other than your words.
2. Pull Quotes
If you’ve got a pull quote for every paragraph, things are going to get weird really fast.
Similar to photos in that they switch up the pace of your blog posts, pull quotes are a great option. However, use sparingly. If you’ve got a pull quote for every paragraph, things are going to get weird really fast. Use one or two to spice up the look of your posts, and make sure to grab the very best, most interesting quotes from your article.
Note that you may have to do some extra CSS styling, or install a plugin to get pull quotes working on your blog. We use “Simple Pull Quote” for WordPress with some custom CSS.
3. Subheadings
I went over subheadings in a recent blog post, 5 Tips To Upgrade Your Website Content. So I’m not going to go really in-depth here. Suffice it to say, break up your post into thematic chunks, and label them with subheadings so people find it easy to figure out what’s being discussed in each section.
4. Links
Strengthen your blog with links to more great content!
Links can be abused, but used properly, links can really add to your blog posts. Use them to add to the “usefulness quotient” of your post. Got extra info that’s interesting, but a little outside the scope of your article? Link to it, so people looking to go more in-depth are free to do so. Have previous posts that drill down into a subject you’re touching on? Link them, which will not only boost your usefulness to your readers but also your search engine rankings.
Links are best when they support the clear, concise nature of your post. Cut out all those meandering, tangential paragraphs. If they’re important enough, create a separate post and link between them. Voila, you’ve got in-depth information for those who want it without a huge amount of text for those who don’t.
Take Action
These are some easy methods to fix up your blog posts. A lot of them seem like common sense, but can easily elude even experienced bloggers if they’re not thinking about it. Maybe make a checklist so you can be sure you’re bringing your “A game” to every blog post?
Are you using these methods in your blog posts? If not, are you going to start? Let us know what you’re planning in the comments!
