If you maintain a relevant blog on the same domain as your site and update it constantly, then it’s probably already bringing you some traffic and sales. But running a blog is an ongoing effort — there’s always room for improvement. The following blogging DIY tips are simple and effective and, apart from boosting your traffic, they can also increase user engagement.
1. Share Your Blog Post Across Social Networks
Rather than manually sharing your post on Twitter, Facebook, and other social sites – a process that’s not only time-consuming but also tedious – use IFTTT to connect your blog’s RSS feed to the social networks you’re active on. In this way, whenever you publish a blog post, it will be automatically shared across social sites.
2. Enable Users to Tweet Highlighted Parts from Your Posts
It’s an excellent way to encourage Tweets and promote your blog while sharing powerful facts, statements, and statistics. There are two ways in which you can do this, but Click to Tweet is probably the simplest and most convenient way to highlight text in your posts and make it ready to be shared on Twitter. Of course, this strategy needs valuable content to be effective.
3. Add Calls to Action to Your Footer or Sidebar
Promote resources like e-books or reports, sell products or services, or invite visitors subscribe to your blog or newsletter. Depending on your site design, you can implement calls to action at the bottom of posts, before or after social media sharing buttons, or in the sidebar. Images don’t have to be too big, but they must catch the eye and include a short but powerful call to action.
If an image leads to a download rather than to another page, make sure that the download starts the moment the user clicks the link – in other words, don’t force the user to go to a separate download page.
You can create footer CTAs using good quality stock images to which you add calls to action. For best results, create several CTA images and rotate them.
4. Establish Google+ Authorship
Establishing Google+ authorship is an especially useful strategy for blogs that feature multiple authors. By linking their Google+ profile to the content they create, you not only add the author’s Google+ profile image and byline in the search results but possibly also boost the search engine ranking of the post. Your posts will also become more credible and more authoritative.
5. Make Your Blog Post Images Pinnable
Pinterest, one of the world’s most popular and exciting social networks, can bring your site a lot of traffic, provided that you make your blog images Pinnable. It isn’t hard. All you have to do is make sure that you copy-paste the title of your post into the image’s Title and Alt Text sections. It will make your image Pinterest-friendly, enabling users to pin it to their boards.
Finally, keep in mind that none of these tips will be effective if you don’t frequently update your blog with worthwhile content. Good content is the cornerstone of any successful blog.