Your new post is loading...
Your new post is loading...
"Should I kill off my blog?” These are valid questions. In this article, I’ll help you come up with valid answers. First, we’ll look at a few “false flag” reasons you may feel like calling it quits and how to get past them. Why dwell on the false flags? I don’t want you to make a permanent decision based on problems that can be fixed easily. It could simply be a case of you using the wrong strategy. Then, we’ll get into the circumstances that may warrant killing off your blog....
As the response was fairly positive to my original post on headline engagement and best practices, I wanted to share a few more examples before I moved on to other topics. But as I continued to talk about headlines, I kept finding new and better case studies. So what follows really is more of an addendum to the first post, a final notebook dump of sorts, where we at the Chicago Tribune took digitally deficient headlines and really focused on drawing out the compelling aspects. As before, in all of these examples, we at least doubled realtime homepage engagement (click-through rate) after we made the change. We based this on Chartbeat’s heads-up display. So if 50 people were clicking on a headline before, at least 100 were after. Visually, that looks like this…
An expert roundup is a collection of quotes or interviews by influential people in your niche. Each participant should be someone with some authority in your field and that has something to contribute to your readers. The most effective roundups pose a very specific question that the experts can easily respond to. It should be a question that people care about the answer to.Here are a few great example roundups....
A surge of traffic may look great in your stats – but it won’t necessarily result in many new long-term readers.
Instead of thinking just about traffic, you want to focus on getting subscribers: people who keep reading your posts day after day, week after week, and month after month.
A great first goal is to get 1000 subscribers to your blog, either through email or RSS subscriptions. (Unless you’re writing about techy things, you’ll probably find most readers prefer to subscribe through email.)
When you’re just starting out, though, with just a handful of subscribers, or none at all, 1000 can look a long way off. Here’s how to get there, step by step....
In order to arrange your design, you need a place to start. Backgrounds are the foundation of your graphics — it helps pave the path to forming a successful composition. Textures and colors help create depth and contrast, allowing your graphics to stand out and get noticed. Well composed images can help create space for you to overlay text, while visually communicating your message at the same time. Using a background can help give your designs more context and provide a visual element to help support your content. Bonus: We’ve designed most of the images in this article as templates for you to personalize! To use them for your own stuff, just click them and they’ll be ready to edit in your Canva account (No Canva? It’s free!).
You have just written the blog post of a lifetime. The one that you know has the potential to go viral on social media. The one that you know will drive a lot of qualified traffic to your website generating leads and ultimately sales. You’ve optimized it for search, checked it twice for grammatical errors, and you’re ready to schedule it to go live.
Then you stop.
Why?
Because it’s at this point, you ask yourself the ultimate question—when. When is the best time to publish an amazing blog post? What day of the week? What time? What timezone?...
Sometimes, the jump from zero readership to several hundred, thousand, or ten thousand hits per day happens in a few weeks, more often it’s several months after a project begins that regular readership begins to take shape. It’s 9 parts hard work and 1 part serendipity, getting your posts in front of the right people at the right time.
This blog is young, and I’ve far from cracked the code, but I can share with you what I’ve been doing with each post that goes up on this blog in order to nudge some initial traffic towards it.
In fact, if you’re reading this right, now, it’s highly likely that your visit is a direct result of one of the methods below – so it’s at least working a little bit, right?...
Looking for ways to keep visitors coming back for more?
Creating great blog posts won’t get you results unless you have an audience that reads and engages with them.
In this article I’ll share six ways to grow your blog audience and turn first-time visitors into devoted readers....
Did you know: Some bloggers recommendyou spend as much time promoting your content as you do writing it.(Derek Halpern of Social Triggers has an 80/20 split: 80 percent promotion, 20 percent writing.)
Wow, this is an area I fall well short on. I’m so impressed by those who hustle to get their content out there and in front of as many people as possible who can gain value from it....
|
The pop-up form can be tricky. Sites can be dinged by Google for interrupting or obscuring the reader’s experience. So why bother? At nearly two percent, the conversion rate for pop-ups is remarkably high, and while using them may interrupt usability, gaining immediate access to a reader’s inbox is a powerful tool for newsrooms. Pop-up forms get a bad rap, but for those sites that are willing to take the risk by using ads to garner subscribers, they make it worth their while. We’ve listed five of our favorite, most eye-catching pop-up forms from across the web. Not only are these forms interesting, they actually convince us to sign up for a newsletter we otherwise may have overlooked....
Although there’s no magical recipe that instantly makes a blog article epic and uber-sharable, there is certainly a formula you can follow to achieve virality. After all, viralityis a scientific phenomenon, even if achieving insane levels, like 2.5 billion views, isn’t predictable. You can engineer virality to a certain degree. You start by understanding a few factors and elements that unite viral content. Here’s a sequence you can follow to engineer the perfect viral blog article....
Writing a blog post is like making a sandwich – anybody can throw together a simple one, but if you really want it to be memorable, you’ve gotta show a little initiative. (The use of a panini press is only advisable for one of these situations, though. See if you can guess which!) Because while all you really need for a blog post is a bunch of words, you might be leaving out the ingredients that give it flavor. Adding a few quick steps before you hit that publish button can help your posts get more clicks, more shares, and more comments – and that makes actually writing them a whole heck of a lot more rewarding. What are the must-haves that your blog posts might be missing? Here are a few things you definitely don’t want to leave out!...
In this post, we’re going to take a look at what can be done to improve the pageviews of your website. We’ll go through a number of strategies. There may even be some techniques that you haven’t even heard of before. By the end of this post, you’ll have an incredible overview, in terms of what needs to be done to boost the pageviews on your site....
Raise your hand if you want to know a perfect method of landing a guest post, article, or even the perfect job. If you know how to write the perfect pitch, you’re on the path to success. It took me a while to realize that I’m really good at writing pitches. I don’t think I’ve ever had a guest proposal refused. And of course, I’ve received hundreds of guest proposals here at WritetoDone. Some great and many abysmal. So I know a thing or two about writing pitches. The key to a successful pitch is honesty and respect. With your pitch, you are building a bridge to another human being. And that bridge can only carry weight if it’s built with integrity....
Help! I don’t know what to write!
Does this sound familiar? I feel like this about 50% of the time!
I'm responsible for a lot of content every week… and sometimes I draw a blank when it comes to inspiration. Today, I have a great infographic for you that is packed with ideas for blog posts when you just have no idea what to write.
There are some broad categories:
- Be useful. One of my favourite kinds of blog posts is a DIY or a how-to. They create a lot of value!Be human. We long for the human connection, so writing about your experience can really draw people in. - Be generous. “Pump the tires” of your colleagues, or other businesses you admire.Be controversial. It’s a great way to generate (heated??) discussion. - Be entertaining. We love to be entertained. We love to laugh or think we are the smartest kid on the block because we learned something new. Share that kind of content, and your readers will love you. - Be timely. Some of the best-trafficked blog posts I’ve ever written have been in response to world events....
You get the idea. These bad boys are everywhere. List posts are a fixture of content marketing.But rather than merely accept them as being, we should understand them. More importantly, we need to know if they’re effective or simply a tacky way to push content online.
So, here’s a list post that will give you everything you need to know about list posts....
Writing regular blog posts can be tough.
You need a blog strategy, constant new ideas and the motivation to get the posts written.
But you don’t have to get on with this alone – there are tools that can help you to write your blog posts so they are easier and quicker to produce.
Ready to boost your productivity and get better blog posts?
Read on!
Quite often, I find myself publishing instinctively and sometimes failing to consider all the necessary questions and guidelines for what makes a wildly successful, viral—and valuable!—social media update.
To do right by your audience, to deliver the utmost value and receive the maximum engagement, there are a handful of qualifications that every social media post should meet. From our experience and our research, 12 items stand out, making for a super slick checklist. We’d love to share with you how this looks....
|
Neil Patel says blogging is a super high-maintenance and isn’t for the faint of heart.