July 10, 2020

9 Simple Ways To Improve Your Blog Post

Reading Time: 12 mins

Writing new blog posts can be a huge challenge, especially starting out on your blogging journey. Learning how to improve your blog post can be even harder.

There are so many tips and tricks all over the internet that it can be difficult to know where to start. It becomes a mind-numbing process of trying to weed out the nuggets of useful information you can apply.

In order to make your life easier, I’ve assembled the top 9 simple ways to improve your blog post. I have learned these things over time as a content creator and can’t wait to share them with you.

By reading through this article and using it as a reference, you can add to your blog post creation workflow over time to get better. Over time you’ll be able to write longer and more helpful blog posts that your audience will enjoy reading.

With all of that being said, let’s dive into the 9 simple ways to improve your blog post.

Improve Your Blog Post - Pin

1. Make Sure Your Spelling & Grammar Are Top-Notch

The number one easiest way to improve your blog post and make it look more professional is simply to proof-read it.

By reviewing what you write at least once before you publish it, you will drastically improve the spelling and grammar of your blog post. This will in turn make it easier for your audience to read.

Think about it, if you were reading a blog post with a lot of spelling and grammar mistakes, you’d think the site was unprofessional and simply leave.

This is a really simple way to improve your blog post. In fact, I have added proofreading as a step on my post creation checklist so I don’t forget it.

When I have finished writing my post, I take a tea break for 10 - 15 minutes, come back and re-read what I’ve written.

After that, I run the post through Grammarly.

Grammarly is a free online tool for eliminating spelling and grammar mistakes that you may have missed on your first proof-read.

I highly recommend installing the chrome extension as it sits in your browser and helps you with spelling in real-time which is an actual godsend in most cases.

Recommended Spelling & Grammar Tools

2. Add Plenty Of Imagery To Illustrate Your Points

To put it quite simply, adding images to your blog posts will increase the amount of time a user spends on your post.

By adding imagery throughout your post in places that make sense, you can add a lot more visual interest to your post.

If you’re writing about a particular benefit of a product, it makes sense to include images of you using the product or something along those lines.

It’s worth coming back to the experience of the reader here.

Think about how you read online articles or just anything you read online. How many web pages do you see that are devoid of images? Probably zero or close to zero I’m guessing.

The way we interact with and consume information in this digital age has become much more visual. It engages the creative part of your brain and allows you to retain more information.

All of this to say, scattering appropriate images throughout your blog posts is an excellent way to increase engagement and have readers stay on your site for longer.

Now I’m sure you’re wondering where to find images to add to your posts. It’s a fair question.

My first piece of advice would be to take your own photos where possible.

Simply capture some photos on your phone and use them in your blog post.

This will make your blog post much more authentic and will show readers that you are a real person which will make them more likely to stay on your blog in general.

3 Add Video & Other Types Of Media To Increase Time On Page

In a similar way to adding more images to your post, adding videos to your post will vastly increase the time a user spends on your page.

This is a really great way to add a different type of media to your blog post to provide your reader with the information they are looking for.

Having a video embedded in your blog post can allow the reader to watch a video that relates to the content of your blog post. That way, they are staying longer on your page and also learning more about what they arrived on your page to learn about.

It’s a good idea to make sure the videos you add to your blog post, relate to the content you are writing about. Un-related videos will not be of interest to readers and they’ll be more inclined to leave.

In terms of how to find the videos to add, YouTube is the absolute best resource for this. Simply search for a specific area that you think isn’t fully covered by your post and choose the video that matches.

Long term, it would be a great idea to create these videos for yourself. That way you’ve created the content so it will add much more credibility to your site as you are seen as the expert.

With all of that being said, video embeds aren’t the only type of media you could include in your blog post.

Audio embeds like podcast episodes or audio transcripts of your blog post are another great way to add more interest to your blog post.

By spending the time recording yourself reading out your blog post and adding that to your website you’ve created yet another piece of content that can be used.

Not only that but it gives your audience another way to interact with your content.

4 Consider Creating An Infographic To Summarize Your Post

If your post is providing some useful data or facts to the reader, why not consider adding this content into a handy infographic.

By spending the time creating a useful infographic and adding it to the bottom of your blog post, you can encourage readers to share this on social media. This will in turn increase traffic to your blog post.

Creating an infographic may sound like a tough challenge but I’ve found Canva.com to be an excellent tool for this task.

Canva.com is a free to use online tool for creating all kinds of graphics from infographics to YouTube Thumbnails to Pinterest pins.

I highly recommend you try it out as it can be used to create some very professional graphics.

To create an infographic, it can be as simple as highlighting the main points of your post and add some appropriate graphics to add visual interest.

Of course, creating infographics can become much more involved depending on how much time you want to spend at it.

To learn more about creating infographics here is a great article that you can read: How To Make An Infographic In 5 Steps.

5 Add A Table Of Contents For Easy Organization

If your post is quite detailed with lots of headings and subheadings, a great idea is to include a table of contents at the top of the post.

Let’s face it, the average length of blog posts is at least 1500 words these days.

With that in mind, essentially all of your posts should have a table of contents.

This allows the user to take a look at the structure of the post before reading it.

A lot of times a reader will glance at a table of contents before deciding to read the full contents of a blog post.

By making this process easier for the reader through having a table of contents, you’re ensuring that you capture their attention and hold their engagement.

A table of contents is something that can easily be achieved using a free Wordpress plugin.

The table of contents plugin that I use across my blogs is called: Easy Table of Contents.

6 Add Tweetables To Encourage Social Media Sharing

To increase the engagement with your post, being able to share great snippets of content across social media is a great way to boost its visibility.

Adding short “tweetables” in-between chunks of content encourages the reader to share these on their twitter feeds for their followers to look at.

By sharing your content on social media, you are vastly increasing your visibility online which in turn can lead to more traffic to your site with little effort on your part.

This can easily be achieved via a free Wordpress plugin that allows you to create Tweetables on the fly and add them to your blog posts.

7 Add Share Buttons To Make Sharing Your Post Easy

Similar to the point above about Tweetables, adding social media share buttons to all of your blog posts will encourage social media sharing of your content.

By allowing readers to share your content on Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook your content becomes visible on all of those different platforms that have unbelievable amounts of traffic to them.

In addition to simply adding social media share buttons to your site, it’s always a good idea to ask your audience to share your posts in each post.

By simply encouraging your readers to share your content if they found it valuable, you’re empowering them to share your content with their peers on social media.

This can have a massive benefit for traffic to your website as others click on those shared links.

8 Add Internal & External Links To Add Credibility To Your Post

You may have already heard of the terms internal and external linking as it relates to blogging and website development.

Let’s examine these in more detail and how you can leverage them to improve your blog post.

Internal links are links that take users to other parts of your website.

For example, at the end of a blog post you might say: “If you enjoyed reading this article, I’d recommend you read this one next”, with a link to another article you wrote.

This is an example of an internal link.

These are super beneficial to improving your SEO as it shows Google how you’re pages are connected.

It also keeps your readers on your website as they always have a next step to perform.

External links are links that take users to other websites outside of your own.

For example, in your post, you might mention a topic that requires further explanation. You might say: “To learn more about Topic X, I would recommend you read this article by Joe Bloggs”, with a link to their article.

This is an example of an external link.

The benefit of external linking is that it increases the credibility of your website. It can also encourage interaction between you and other content creators in similar areas.

When Google crawls your website they can examine these external links to determine the kind of content you are writing about.

This helps them to understand your website and in turn, will rank it higher for searches related to those areas.

9 Install The Yoast SEO Plugin For Even More SEO Optimization Tips

The Yoast SEO plugin is a free plugin you can add to your Wordpress website.

This integrates nicely into your posts so you can see how well a post is doing in terms of SEO and readability.

The goal with these ratings is to turn both green by following the suggested improvements recommended by the plugin.

Of course, in my experience, I’ve found it’s not always possible to turn everything green so don’t worry about that so much.

Use it as a guide to make sure you’re hitting each area effectively so you’re post will be that much better than the competition.

Conclusion

We were able to cover a lot of useful information throughout this article so let’s summarize the 9 tips to improve your blog post before we finish:

  1. Make sure your spelling & grammar are top-notch
  2. Add plenty of imagery to illustrate your points
  3. Add video & other types of media to increase time on page
  4. Consider creating an infographic to summarize your post
  5. Add a table of contents for easy organization
  6. Add Tweetables to encourage social media sharing
  7. Add share buttons to make sharing your post easy
  8. Add internal and external links to add credibility to your post
  9. Install the Yoast SEO plugin for even more SEO Optimization tips

I hope you enjoyed reading this article and found it useful. If you found some value in this article, I’d really appreciate you sharing it on social media so other people like you can find it.

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