You probably already know this, you little #girlboss you, but it bears repeating: the most important part of your blog is your content. I don’t doubt that you’re trying to put out the best content you can, but I have a few suggestions of ways that you can improve your content even more, in order to create high quality blog posts that get shared, pinned, and loved by your readers.
Today I’m sharing five innovative ways that you can up-level your content to create truly memorable and impressive blog posts that get people talking and set your blog apart from the rest.
Including research, citing sources, and showing your readers that you’re not just sharing your opinion and assumptions, but the research and findings of others, is an excellent way to boost the quality of your content. It shows that rather than only sharing your own perspective, you’re also sharing the perspective and even studies that other people have done about your post’s topic. This makes your blog posts even more persuasive and trustworthy, since you provide research to support your ideas.
How to put this into action? Here are a few ideas:
Here at TNC, we don’t currently add outside research to many of our posts, as they’re based on personal experience. However, this is definitely something I’m aiming to add more of in the future.
By now you probably know that it’s important to include at least one image in your blog post. This keeps readers engaged and breaks up the large amounts of text in articles. However, if you want to up-level your posts, then try including screenshots or additional images, such as infographics, into your blog posts.
Screenshots can be especially helpful if you’re doing a tutorial. They’re a great way to show your readers how to do something step-by-step and they add a lot more value to your post than if you were only to describe each step using words.
Here’s an example of a Photoshop tutorial we did, which includes screenshots. Can you imagine if we did this post without these screenshots? It would have become more cumbersome and confusing to understand.
Also, here’s a post I did about social media scheduling programs. While this article could have survived without the additional images, it certainly adds value to the post (which ended up being one of the most popular posts I wrote last month with more than 500 shares).
Different people like to consume blogs in different ways. While some people enjoy reading blog posts, others might benefit even more if they were able to listen to or watch them instead. Want to provide value to your readers? Then try including your blog posts in audio or video formats, too. You can embed the audio or video straight into your blog post, so that readers immediately have the option to choose whether they want to read your post, listen to it, or watch it.
Think this will take forever? It might! ;) But here’s a thought: see how we divide our blog posts up into sections with different headings? Those section headings can be used as an outline to guide your audio or video. If you remember what you talked about within each heading, this step should only take a few additional minutes. At the very least, you could even record an audio of yourself reading your blog post out loud (so long as you aim to make it sound more engaging than if you were simply reading an essay). ;)
Very few blogs incorporate audio or video versions of their articles, so it would certainly help your content stand out. It would also give your readers the ability to listen to your posts on the go, which could add an incredible amount of value to your site.
While this isn’t something we’ve tried at TNC, it’s definitely an enticing idea we may incorporate. Would you be interested in audio or video versions of our blog posts?
Content upgrades refer to additional materials that you provide to your readers as a way to “upgrade” the content that they just read. For example, we recently wrote a post about how to write a killer “about me” page. At the end of that post, we offered free worksheets to our readers to help them write their own “about me” page, as writing that page is typically a struggle for bloggers. Not only did those worksheets provide more value to our readers, but they also resulted in 200 more email subscribers than we normally receive, since our readers were asked to subscribe in order to receive the worksheets.
Some examples of content upgrades you can provide?
All of today’s tips can be summed up with those two words: just be thorough. Each time you write a new blog post, aim to include all of the most relevant and useful information that you can. Be so thorough that you answer your readers’ questions before they even need to ask them. If you can surprise your readers, they will happily share, pin, and drool over your incredible content.
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