Blogging has been gradually rising since the introduction of the Coronavirus. People sitting at their homes trying to market their products have evidently concluded that blogging is the best tool for content marketing. If you want to build a social media presence or just want to put your thoughts and ideologies out there for the world, blogging is the answer.
Read: Effective Ways to Enhance Your Blog Post
People who are new to SEO or digital marketing always have a feeling that blogging is a waste of time and might prove to be worthless. But, the fact still pertains and can not be changed that most of the social media presence of several celebrities is consistently increasing due to Blogging.
If you think for a moment, most of the internet is compiled of blogs in either text, images, or video format. Wikipedia, Instagram, and YouTube are examples respectively. The point here is that if you know how to use content marketing tools and have a prominent SEO strategy then you can get a fair share of the audience despite the fierce competition and/or difficulties.
If you are a beginner in blogging and in the process of creating your first blog, then you must know that even after your blog is ready you need to learn ways to make it popular so that you can generate good income. Here we will talk about some simple steps that will help you achieve your digital marketing targets efficiently and swiftly.
Here are 15 Steps to Make Your Blog Post Popular
1. Define a Purpose
While blogging is an effective and simple way to market content, many bloggers spread the topic or the agenda in different directions rather than streamlining them into a single, unique and informative narrative.
This makes the reader lose interest in what you write and won’t revisit your site in the future. You can blog for either money, leads, or traffic and will have to write content accordingly. People think of writing any blog as a compilation of words to sell something, but it is much more complicated.
If you want to increase the traffic the content will be totally different from when you write to generate money. Yet defining a purpose and doing research accordingly will solve a lot of your problems. And this leads us to the next point.
2. Do Thorough Research
Having confidence in the set of information you possess is a great thing but to read more and understand more about a topic through physical research or online research will lead you to have more in-depth and professional-like knowledge when you will start writing any blog.
The process of research can be very tiring and extreme if you don’t know what you are doing. There is a huge possibility of you not finding what you are looking for online. Using the right keywords to search and assessing multiple posts that render after using those accurate keywords will help you to create that perfect blog.
Research can be both passive and active, passive research is done to find ideas and generate a foundation of basic and intermediate information to work on your content and active is to analyze and evaluate the patterns and similarities in multiple blogs and come up with ideas on how to deliver unique and fresh content.
3. Identify Your Target Market
There are 7.2 billion people in this world, you need to narrow down who is going to read your content consistently. You can divide them demographically, geographically, gender vise or can use any other parameter that you think suits you the best.
Analyzing different articles and gauging their reader base can help you compare and skim down the best option for you to choose from and would lead you to write accordingly.
4. Good Heading Leads to Good Views
Writing a proper heading and selecting accurate and appropriate words that will trigger the SEO is a very very crucial and significant task. When you have decided your reason and have done thorough research on what you want to write then now comes the turn of coming up with a headline.
Using Google Keywords to get a basic idea of what keywords are trending is a great initial step, find the top keywords related to your topic and you can also use online headline generators like Optimizely or SEOpressor will give you a vivid idea on what are the best options you can choose from.
5. Outline Your Post
Creating an outline is the step where all the difference is made. Your post goes from basic or average to professional and well refined. Here you will decide what are the subheadings that you will write and what are the points you will focus on the most and points that don’t need much attention.
Creating an outline is like making an outline for a drawing and all you need after that is to color that drawing. This saves time and effort while actually writing a blog. Coming up with the formats and focal points while writing a blog has proven to be extremely frustrating and time-consuming.
When you know what you are working with beforehand, executing the task becomes ten times easier.
6. Introduce Your Agenda
‘Well begun is half done’ was said by Aristotle a greek philosopher and this holds a lot of weight when it comes to blogging and content marketing. Diving right into the topic without creating a context will perplex the reader and rather than reading between the lines they will be forced to read to understand what the writer wants to convey through the main content.
But if you write an introduction properly and formulate it in a way that hooks the reader into reading the rest then it will surely make your blog post an undeniable success. Introductions can be long and elaborative where you want to break down the topic into simpler bits or you can write a shorter introduction by just writing the gist of the topic.
It depends on your target market and the majority of your readers. Gauging them accordingly will help you initiate the introduction. Take an example of ‘how to write a blog’ here you can divide the introduction into two parts, first “what is a blog’ and second ‘the process”. This will make the reader feel at ease and he will surely read it till the end.
7. The Reader’s Perspective
This step is more craft-based if compared to aspects of blog promotion. Your blog will only work if your content pleases the reader’s heart and mind. Like preparing for an oration in front of a mirror this process is almost similar.
You need to think like the target market that you have defined for your blogs and write accordingly. This will engage more audience and will gain more likes and shares if compared to a blog that doesn’t follow this step.
8. Use Case Studies and Examples
A blog becomes more meta and personalized if you add any real-life case study or a real-life incident that matches your topic’s niche. The words that you will use here will automatically become SEO-friendly.
Creating common ground with your audience and setting the tone of the blog through these case studies and examples will help you to make your article more readable and will also engage more audience.
9. Length of the Blog Matters
There is no defined length for any blog post but many surveys and studies have suggested that a relatively long post is more shareable, likable, and readable if compared to brief and short posts. There is no scientific thumb rule that you are supposed to follow but if you keep the post under five to seven hundred words then the SEO strategy might fail.
Yet there can be a post of five to seven hundred words depending upon the topic and what kind of target market you have. These factors affect the word count drastically. The best way is to analyze three to four articles on the same topic and calculate the average word count.
10. SEO is the Backbone
Learn the basics of SEO and its principles. From the first heading to the conclusion paragraph everything you write must be SEO friendly and must be strategies accordingly. Formatting the titles and headings with H1, H2, and so on is very important.
You should maintain a balance to have both PC and mobile-friendly content. Providing target links in an organic way is also a significant part. Everything depends upon the SEO strategy you optimize for and the niche of your topic.
11. Polish Your Article
You have the content idea, you have done the research on it and have created a solid SEO strategy but the job is still not done. You cannot just throw some words on the readers to read. Using different fonts for headings, sub-headings and content will make your article look more polished and professional.
Using italics where required and using appropriate colors for words will make the post look attractive and they also play a psychological role in the reader’s mind and will increase the chances of them reading the post till the very last word.
Add images related to your blog, the aesthetics please the reader. Use infographics like graphs and pie charts wherever they fit well. Any drawing or colored object catches the reader’s eye more quickly.
12. Proofread!
When you have finished writing the article like a human you are bound to make some minor or sometimes major errors. While writing continuously for two to three hours straight to meet the deadline and the word count, your mind experiences fatigue and stress that can force you to make inevitable mistakes.
Therefore, you need to read and reread your article multiple times or you can use online grammar and punctuation mistake detectors that can figure out the mistakes for you and will also suggest the appropriate changes accordingly.
13. Edit the Article
Once the proofreading is done, you need to edit the blog. There can be micro-changes like changing the fonts as per your choice and mood or major changes like including or excluding a whole paragraph.
While writing you might feel like what you are typing is the best content possible not realizing that there are more potentially better ways to match your SEO strategy but, once you proofread and analyze the article you will surely feel differently. Using that backspace button is no work of shame rather it will make your article more professional and well put together.
14. Promote Your Blog
It is a very demoralizing fact that you work on an article for days, researching, outlining, re-writing, and making it SEO friendly and after all the hard work, no one is reading it. You need to forcefully promote the blog, it doesn’t matter if it’s amazingly well written or is just above average.
Promoting your blog on social media simultaneously integrates your site with your social media platforms. Using Google Ads or Facebook Ads to promote it to a larger reader base will also help you catch more readers and will increase traffic on your site organically.
15. Consistency is the Key
The next step after understanding the whole process is to be consistent in uploading the content. If you are a blogger or an affiliate marketer or a critique, to be visible in the feed of your target market and readers.
Readers are searching for new, freshly brewed content with every passing day. The social media algorithms also work in the same way. There is a defined set of rules and a guide that you can find anywhere online regarding how frequently you are supposed to publish new content.
This step is very crucial if you want to increase traffic and be visible in the market organically.
Wrapping up
Here we got to learn the 15 basic yet effective steps that will surely make your blog post more popular. Understanding your audience and knowing the basic principles of SEO and following these steps accordingly in a consistent way is an extremely important phenomenon that helps you make your blogs more visible and increase traffic on your site organically.
