If you want your blog to gain active readers, it won’t happen without some skills.

The following are seven ways to beef up your blog posts:

Tip #1: Speak to Your Audience

The reason you blog must be determined in order to add content that will work for you. You should become well acquainted with your target audience and their profile, as well as your main message and how it relates to your company. Knowing your reader makes writing to them much easier. This also means that your posts will have meaning and be directed to the right audience. You won’t be wandering off-topic and covering topics that do not concern your readers.

Tip #2: Be Aware Your Reader’s Wants

Always keep in mind what your reader wants when writing. Let them know what they will walk away with from reading your blog. Why does it matter to them? Readers constantly evaluate a blog and decide whether or not it’s worth their time to keep reading. Putting yourself in their position increases your chances of keeping them interested. Bring up serious problems and other events important to them. If you aren’t sure what those are, simply ask and find out.

Tip #3: Frequent Editing

There are tons of blog entries that open up with, “I had this great idea yesterday…” or “As Winter comes to an end…”. People often make the mistake of treating a blog like an essay or other literary work. But they are not. You should waste no time in getting your main idea across. Use the helpful acronym of KISS = Keep It Short and Sweet. It will end up meaning less writing is required of you.

Write using brief and strong phrases, leaving out words that you can do without. Do this by reviewing posts more than once before publishing them. It isn’t necessary to have any formal education in writing. Writing an email is as simple as writing a blog post. But just like emails, your posts will become better if you go over them before they are published.

Read it through one more time following publication. Sometimes this is useful for noticing small grammatical mistakes and other typos that slipped by. Many readers will place a good deal of importance on correct spelling, so make sure you fix any errors you find. Online, text is all that represents you.

Tip #4: Titles with Keywords are the Key

Write headlines full of carefully placed keywords that relate to your topic. Keywords are held in the highest regard of SEO experts who charge hefty sums for their services. But let’s simplify this area.

Imagine you are your reader. If you are using Google to find information or answers to a question, would you find your blog? Compile a list of all words and phrases that may be entered into a search engine when looking for your business and the things you offer. Those items are the words and phrases you should litter your site with. When creating headlines, use these often. This highlights what is important about your post, both to readers as well as search engines.

Staying up to date on keywords will help you stay in touch with what your potential customers would like. By doing a little research on occasion, you can discover how readers are locating the information you specialize in. Use descriptive headlines. Don’t keep them general. Keep them cute without going overboard, but just be sure to include the topic of your writing and make sure it clearly lets the reader know what is discussed.

Remember, this is centered around your audience. The idea is to guide them with the content you provide. Blogging will do you little to no good at all if your readers are not getting what they’re looking for out of reading your blog.

Tip #5: Start Off With Strong Opening Sentences

Using the keywords from your posts headline, compose the first paragraph. State your message clearly and right away, rather than writing an introduction for it. Your first sentence should be keyword rich, and should be reused again to wrap up your post. Always include an invitation to leave feedback at the end of each post.

Tip #6: Keep it Brief and Space it Out

When blogging, paragraphs should never drone on. Instead, keep them limited to a couple sentences and then break for the next. In some cases, a single sentence can convey as much as an entire paragraph. White space is good, use it generously between your blog post paragraphs.

Don’t forget that many readers are pressed for time. It’s not as easy to read text on a computer screen as it is to read text on paper. Your goal should be to communicate your message in a timely manner, making it as easy for your readers as possible.

Tip #7: Apply Bullets and Other Formatting to Your Lists

Lists and bullet points should be put to frequent use. A few reasons they add convenience to your post are:

Easier Reading
Easier to skim
Easier to comprehend
Easier to retain

According to research, people like things to be easily absorbed and broken into parts for them. Formatting your message into a list of 3-5 items makes them more likely to recall it later. Online writing professionals suggest keeping lists to an odd number of bullet points, but the biggest emphasis should be on using lists whenever possible.

There are several methods for strengthening your blog posts. These seven tips are a good start in the right direction and can be used as a checklist to keep you on track and supplying content that will interest and motivate your readers.

What other suggestions should be added to this list in order to improve blog posts? Share your favorite blogging tips in the comments below.

Share on Facebook

I recently ran across Blogger, Sam Diener, on LinkedIn. If you have not read any of his blogs on networking they are most definitely worth a read. http://www.samdiener.com/

Anyway, I thought that what he had to say mirrored a recent conversation I had with a client, so I thought I’d post his blog for you to read.

A Note For My Readers: Many of you have been used to me writing my articles on Stuff For Success about networking and social media. For this article, I have ventured into the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which is a very important topic in the marketing world. As a definition, you can think of SEO as anything you do to make Google, Bing, or Yahoo visit your page. And now, enjoy:

It’s all over the Internet. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the hottest topic out there. Bloggers think that if they write “7 Tips on How to Improve Your SEO” for the 800th time, they will get millions of hits. Companies are – suddenly – feeling the need to create whole SEO departments. Webmasters are compelled to write their content just for the search engines.

And everyone else? They just don’t care. But I have something to say to all of you….Here is the most important thing you should know about most of the stuff you read:

IT’S ALL GARBAGE!

In this economy (and don’t get me started on that) if there is a general misunderstanding about a topic, EVERYONE is going to try and take advantage of it on it. Have you noticed how many career “experts” have suddenly popped up during the recession? Well capitalizing on the same type of confusion, these so-called SEO “experts” have popped up all over the place claiming that they know the answers to make all of your internet traffic dreams come true.

A company with which I did some consulting has 10 million dollars in revenue. The guy spent 1.5 million a YEAR on ADWORDS thinking it would improve his search engine placement. (Adwords are those little advertisements on the side of Google that you never click on…) I almost cried. And then when I tried to find his site, it was nowhere to be found in any search engine. This type of thing is a marketing travesty and it shouldn’t be happening.

My goal here is to make sure you understand the reality of modern search engine optimization. So when you go to “optimize” your site, or hire someone to do it, I want you to make sure you take the right advice and know that there is specific experience you should be looking for that can help you do this job correctly.

So without any of my further blabbering, let me get to it:

1.SEO takes a LONG time: There are no shortcuts to getting your content to the top of Google, Bing, or wherever else…. especially in the popular categories. A major category in determining where your webpage comes up is how long it has been there, also known as Aging. Don’t believe me? Run a search for a popular topic. Try “How to Network.” Even though I humbly think some of my networking articles are MUCH better, Google proudly displays a page from 2005. The first article isn’t even from the past two years and with people losing their jobs left and right since 2007, networking has been a subject of research that has exploded the last few years. Additionally, search engines are reading through billions of pages. If your site is not important, it takes a loooong time to update in search engines.

2.The Actual Algorithms Are Secret: Algorithms in this sense are the complicated methods search engines use to determine what pages should be shown for each search. It has been said that no one outside the actual search engines actually has a copy of the algorithm that determines search engine result pages (SERPS) and it is constantly changing. So how is it that these “experts” know what to talk about? Well, actually, it isn’t really true that nobody has a copy. Most of the basic algorithms are patented or in provisional patent phases and patents are public but you have to know where to look for them.

3.The Days of the Meta Tags are Long Gone: A website owner used to be able to talk directly to the search engines by using “hidden” codes called meta tags. However, the only use for the tags at this point is in order to declare the title of the page. It doesn’t matter what your tags say the subject of the page is. In fact tags, if repeated on your site could hurt you. In fact, Google added a keyword tracker in their webmaster tools. It seems to me that they are trying to suggest that they are reading the actual text content of the site? Additionally, writing content that repeats repeats repeats repeats the keywords doesn’t work either. You will get a site banned from a major search engine that way and that is an awful thing. Amendment: The “description” tag is also still pertinent as it describes your page to the search engine. (I forgot to include this)

4.Not just any backlinks will do: Backlinks are when websites link to yours. Many know that an important factor in SEO is how many links you get coming to your content. What some don’t know is that they must be high quality links. As we previously established, there are plenty SEO companies and individuals who will gladly take your money to submit your page into spammy links directories and link schemes. They may work temporarily, but because this is not the way search engine companies want you promoting your site (it’s considered spam), your site could be quickly removed from search engines. There are quality directories that still exist such as the DMOZ and Yahoo and if you can get your site onto one of these, that’s a bonus. These are human edited and search engines give credibility to this characteristic. This brings us to my next point:

5.Search Engines are Meant To Work For Humans: Back in the beginning days of search engines, it was possible to simply “optimize” your page to attract the search engine to the page. Seeing this as an opportunity, many took advantage of this and found ways to cheat the system. They wrote sub-par (and downright bad) webpages designed to get top results through spam-like tactics. As a result, search engines, which, ironically, happen to be written by some of the smartest people in the world, were redesigned and none of these old techniques work anymore. There is NO way to search optimize your page legitimately aside from producing quality content and getting others to link to it – EXCEPT to utilize:

6.Good Coding Practice: You know all of those SEO changes that people are willing to come in and make for you? Guess what. They shouldn’t need to. They should be employed as a standard when a person writes a web page for you. Content that validates with the w3validator is standard practice. Most websites have hundreds of errors, so call your website programmer and demand they fix it. Think of it this way: you wouldn’t want to read a book littered with grammatical errors. Search engines hate reading webpages with grammatical errors too. One change you can make immediately is to make sure the titles of your pages contain the key words for your page as well as the URL (also known as a permalink). This is VERY important.
Real SEO People are Hustlers and Great Networkers in Real Life. From my rants we have established that quality links to your site, age, and good coding practice are the main ways to influence your search engine rank. Well once you register a domain and have your code written properly, then establishing quality links is the only thing you can do. There are only two ways to get these, and one of those is pay major advertising dollars to get them from high quality sites. The other is to get someone who is VERY good at networking, both online and off, who can get out there and meet the people who run these sites and convince them of a reason to link to you. It’s a very specialized practice that few are good at. But that’s an article for another day. Let’s hear what you all have to say!

Update: As of 12/04/09, evidently Google is making all searches personalized. This means that it could become possible that you will no longer discover sites that you didn’t know you were looking for. This could have a HUGE effect on the SEO world. I would love to hear your thoughts and discuss here as well. This news is from the google webmaster blog.

Conclusions: Sam Diener is from Philadelphia, PA, US. He started Stuff For Success, The Sam Diener Blog. In five months, he has built an audience of nearly 25,000 readers, and has guest blogged for major US sites such as Under30CEO and the Personal Branding Blog. Feel free to read more at the Sam Diener Blog.

Share on Facebook