Blogging in 2014 has the potential to engage your target audience and boost your brand’s image more than it ever has before. Yes, blogging has been around forever, but keeping up with recent best practices is what will allow brands to find continued success with blogging in 2014.
Here are five blogging tips for the new year:
1. Pick a Niche and Stay Within It
Pick a topic for your blog and stick with it. Start by finding a well-defined perspective. If you’re going to blog about food, for instance, find a unique angle such as making your own meals on a budget. Keep your blog organized and stay on topic. Archive older posts and delete comments that drift too far off subject.
2. Try Some New Blogging Tools
Do some experimenting in 2014 and try some blogging tools you haven’t used before. There’s no rule that says you have to stick with each tool you try. Here are some to consider:
- Digg Digg – With this plugin, you can add any combination of social sharing buttons to your blog without the need for a separate plugin for each of your social sites.
- InboxQ – This tool allows you to see what questions people are asking on various social sites based on certain keywords. You can then create topics based on the questions people are asking with those keywords. You’ll receive an update when people search on your selected keywords.
- Optin Skin – This plugin lets you add an option to opt-in to your email mailing list or other special offer at the bottom of each post. With a variety of templates available, you can customize it to the style of your blog.
3. Create Anticipation with Your Blogging Schedule
If you’ve been good about posting new content on a regular basis in 2013, you need to do a little more in 2014. In addition to being consistent with your posts, it doesn’t hurt to give a preview of what you’ll be blogging about in the coming weeks.
Write a general outline of what your topics will be for the next month and use that as the basis for your little sneak peaks to keep readers interested. You can also use blogging software to post content that you write in advance and set each post to go live on specific dates and times.
4. Streamline Your Style
Use the new year as an excuse to reevaluate the overall style of your blog. Are your titles clear and concise? Are your paragraphs too cluttered? What about your use of colors and images? Take a moment to look at your site as a typical visitor.
As long as you’re at it, check your page load speed. If you use too many bells and whistles, you may be slowing down your site to the point where your readers don’t come back as often.
5. Optimize Your Content for Readership, Not Search Engines
Google is sure to continue to tinker with its algorithms in 2014. One of the most recent changes is penalizing blogs that are over-optimized. You can still use certain keywords within your blog posts, just make sure you choose words you would naturally use.
Try writing your posts first and then choosing a few keywords from words you already used. You’ll probably end up having to tweak only a few words here and there.
