With more than 500 million blogs online, adding enhancements that let yours thrive is essential. You want to stand out from the competition and drive traffic to your site. That’s where blog enhancements can help. These enable you to focus on the things that matter while ignoring those that don’t.
But what specific enhancements should you make? Let’s take a look at some of your options.
Use Internal Linking
The first blog enhancement to make is to use internal linking. Adding this to your blogs can make your site easier to navigate and introduce readers to more of your content or sales pages. Internal linking is also helpful for SEO. It helps Google arrange pages into a hierarchy, from most to least important.
Add Visuals
Another simple blog enhancement is to add visuals. Images, videos, and GIFs can make your posts more entertaining than a plain block of text that only 5 per cent of your audience will read. Adding visuals helps understanding and gives readers something tangible to digest. While it might take more effort if you are making something bespoke, that can be the key to producing fantastic blogs that attract visitors and links from across the web.
Run Contests
You can also enhance your blog by running various contests. Giving away prizes generates excitement and keeps people interested in what you are doing. Target your contests at new readers to grow your audience. Ensure you provide something that will immediately benefit a person looking for a site like yours. Don’t just preach to the choir.
Think of different strategies and track your results from running promotional schemes. Find out which methods work the best by linking them to your readership numbers. See what resonates with your audience and try to figure out why it works so you can replicate it in the future.
Use Social Media Advertising
Also, don’t be afraid to use social media advertising to promote your blog. Instead of viewing it as a rival platform, see it as a funnel to get people to go to your site. Many top bloggers are prominent on social media. These individuals have large followings that help them get more eyeballs on their site.
Try to avoid putting all your content on social media. Instead, divide it up, putting teasers on Facebook and Twitter, while leaving the meatist stuff elsewhere.
At the same time, continue working on SEO. Find ways to make your website more visible through traditional approaches so that those using search engines can find you more easily.
Add A Chat Feature
Another cool idea to elevate your blog is to use a SaaS live chat. These systems let site visitors communicate with you or bots immediately on arrival, letting you provide a more interactive experience. These chat features are becoming increasingly advanced over time, offering various automation and natural language processing (NLP). Bots can direct users to your merch pages or help them find the content they need while browsing your site.
Start Guest Blogging
You might also be able to make some progress by guest blogging on various sites. These help you get your name out there and expand your audience instead of keeping you cloistered. Guest blogging is helpful for several reasons. The first is the new connections you will make. Many people will stick with you from the start and help you expand your reach because they like your ideas and they want their audience to see them.
However, it is also valuable for SEO. Many third-party bloggers will let you place links in posts back to your site, improving your backlink profile. Just make sure that the hyperlinks are non-promotional so that they comply with Google’s guidelines.
Guest blogging also allows you to see how different audiences react to your content. You can get a flavour of the direction your blog should go in the future if you continue to generate posts, helping you give more people the type of content they want.
Start Email Subscriptions
Most of your audience won’t hop onto your website and start consuming content manually. Instead, they will need you to feed it to them somehow via a platform they use all the time. The most common approach is to set up a social media account. However, that’s time-consuming, difficult, and prone to censorship. Instead, many bloggers now use emails as a tool for delivering content to their audiences.
Every week or so they write a post to their loyal readers, bypassing any platform restrictions. Email subscriptions are helpful because they serve as a source of security, even if they seem old-fashioned. Google could shut down your website and social media companies might bar you from commenting or posting on their platforms, but you can still get the word out, and that can be tremendously valuable. Email has the added benefit of being entirely free, often at the business level. Therefore, you can start using it immediately to get the word out.
Advertise On Social Media
You could also try advertising on social media. Promoting your blog could pique the interests of specific groups of users. Social media is an excellent advertising platform because it collects vast data on users. Companies can provide bloggers and other advertisers with granular information on users, helping them target the proper people depending on their behaviours or characteristics.
For this reason, you may find that social media advertising offers higher returns than conventional approaches. It’s not perfect, but it can be helpful when you want to target a specific type of person.
Diversify Your Content Format
Another pro tip for enhancing your blog is to diversify your content format. Instead of always following the same rules, try branching out and trying something new. For example, many bloggers enhance their work by adding infographics, something that the pros like VisualCapitalist do exceptionally well. You can also add videos and listicle elements if you feel it would attract more links and provide additional value to readers. Don’t get us wrong: there is a place for the traditional blog format. However, you want to supplement it occasionally with something new that maintains audiences’ interest.
Add Social Sharing
You can also enhance your blog by adding social sharing features. These help individuals share blog content with their friends, again introducing you to a wider audience. Interestingly, adding visuals is the best way to encourage social sharing. Many users feel bad linking 1,500 words of pure text to their contacts, but if there is something digestible they can latch onto, they are more likely to share. Adding social sharing is native to most platforms. However, you can usually get widgets that add it to your blogs automatically every time you upload one through your CMS. You can also add them manually if you are using an old system.
Switch To A More Visually-Friendly Design
We’ve all seen those trendy blogs from the early 2000s written in Courier New. It was cool at the time, but we are now well beyond the novelty. Therefore, invest in making your blog more visually-friendly. Don’t just present page after page of hard-to-read text on white backgrounds with poor navigation. Instead, use tools that automatically let you improve your blog quality from the ground up. We’d recommend taking the approach that the biggest blogs in the world take. These use the same format for every post, ensuring that the site makes sense visually. Top bloggers also make it straightforward for users to navigate to different topics or sections, according to their interests.
Promote Your Blog Through Online Communities
If advertising on social media platforms doesn’t appeal to you, you can also try promoting your blog on social networks. Advertising it through various online communities, groups, and forums can be a highly effective way to build a niche following. These highly committed followers are also likely to be more engaged with your content. You can also try growing by becoming a leader in these communities. Making unique contributions will get you noticed and encourage more people to gravitate toward you.
Make Your Content More Readable
Finally, you can enhance your blog and make it thrive by making your content more readable. Using concise language and breaking up text with subheadings and bullet points can be an exceptionally powerful technique. Data since the 1990s shows that IQs are falling. This evidence means that people can’t process long sentences or complex vocabulary as well. Writers must now write in shorter sentences to account for a considerable decline in general intelligence. Bloggers must also take conceptual complexity and nuance into question. Therefore, try to get your reading age scores down as low as possible without losing quality. Look for new ways to express yourself that don’t involve using long words that people might not use. Talk more in soundbites and sayings instead of using as much verbal rigour.
So, there you have it: some of the blog enhancements you can make to ensure yours thrives. Try them today and see if they make a difference to your overall online impact.
