The Next Step: Taking Your Blog to New Heights
March 23, 2017
The fact that content marketing is now bigger than ever also means blogging is quickly becoming a popular dream job for many. The market is about to be a lot – and I do mean A LOT – more competitive, so it is time to step up the game and take your blog to new heights. Here are some of the tips you can use to get started.
Social Media and 360 Content Distribution
A blog always works as an anchor to all of your online activities. The tweets you send out to thousands of followers every day, the Facebook posts about the latest issues or the visually pleasing photos you share on Instagram are great for boosting exposure, but they are not as long lasting as a blog post. Fortunately, you can actually combine these two types of content delivery methods for an even greater impact.
A lot of professional bloggers started doing this since last year. The live Instagram stories and photos posted on the stream can be used to tease the audience about an upcoming blog post. For example, you can use the same platform to share live posts while traveling, allowing the audience to follow you on your amazing trips. The same can be done through Snapchat, too.
These shorter posts are there to generate excitement. Using travel as an example, the audience knows you’re traveling to a particular destination. They can follow your every step, watch the beauty at different times and even get involved by sharing their own experiences. You can, for instance, ask your followers to recommend a local restaurant or a place to visit.
A blog post following this series of posts will tie everything together perfectly. You can share more details about the trip, tell longer stories and get viewers really hooked by the whole experience. You can also provide more valuable information, such as how to get to the destination or the amount of money you spent along the way.
Focus on User Engagement
The days of sharing as much information as possible are over. Today, blogging is as much about engaging the audience as it is about producing good, high quality content. Continuing our previous example, sharing blog posts on social media is something you can now do on a more advanced level.
Don’t just share a link with a short caption on Twitter and Facebook. Sure, this will get you a lot of traffic, but it won’t encourage user engagement and isn’t the best way of integrating your posts. Instead of sharing a URL, create preview posts leading up to the main blog post. On Twitter, you can share minute details and exciting experiences, along with photos about them, to generate interest. When users started to ask questions or engaging with the posts, you can then share the main article with more information.
Take the time to reply to comments and communicate with the audience, both on your blog and on social media. This will help develop a stronger relationship between you and your viewers, allowing you to grow a much stronger audience base and boost the value of your online presence greatly. You can even find the best app development service and create a mobile app to produce a much more unified experience for your viewers.
Get into Videos!
If you’re not making videos yet, now is the perfect time to get started. Video marketing is definitely the future. Users love watching videos more than they enjoy reading articles. The nature of videos also lends itself to more interesting content in various genres. Adding a video to your blog posts can really up your game and help your blog grow like never before.
YouTube videos are much easier to produce these days. You can use your smartphone camera and a free editing app to make video. The content of your videos is more important than the execution itself, at least when you’re just getting started. As you get used to producing video content, you can find ways to increase the production value and reach an even greater audience in the process.
As mentioned before, the blogging landscape is about to get much more competitive. These tips will help you stay ahead of the competition while developing a brighter future as a professional blogger and content creator.