When it comes to blogging, you may have heard that engaging content is king. In reality, that’s only part of the story. It turns out that the look and feel of your blog is of crucial importance as well. The idea here is that your blog should be attractive enough on the surface to keep people on your site and reading your content. In addition to having people simply read it, it’s important that they want to share it on social media and link to it on other sites. All this is achieved by tweaking the appearance of both your actual blog site and the articles themselves.
Think scanning, not reading
Every tip regarding the look and feel of your blog comes from one basic feature of internet user behavior: people scan content rather than read it. If the format of the post is amenable to this fact, you will increase the chance of users reading, sharing and linking your content.
Improve your blog’s overall attractiveness
- Use a professional looking quality theme that is reflective of your brand.
- Make sure your site is enabled with social media sharing buttons and widgets.
- Your URLs should be clean and static, and your titles, tags and meta descriptions should be informative.
Grab and keep their attention
Your title should grab attention. This is the first step in getting people to click on a link and read a Web design best practices (which admittedly can vary some according to opinion)
Break your post up into small paragraphs and use subheadings.
Use attractive and original photos. According to this marketing study, Photos of people are always better than stock graphics and photos of real recognizable people are always better than generic models. Add captions to your photos.
She’s got a very popular blog
Custom graphics, especially infographics, are always great. Visually representing data to support a point is compelling and highly shareable.
Use bulleted lists to break up the text and draw the reader’s eyes in. Remember:
- Lists are easy to scan
- Lists create space and rhythm
- Listed items are emphasized and appear important
- Listed points are easier to remember
The techniques Blue Hat use in our own blog posts speak for themselves. There are many more subtleties when it comes to writing compelling, shareable content that is also SEO friendly, which is why our clients come to us to take advantage of our business blogging services. We provide them with professional quality content which makes their online marketing investment go a long way.
