(photo by Swiv)
Although you can have a blog that looks really great, if it doesn’t have any substance, people are not going to return to your blog or subscribe to your RSS feed. Therefore, since the posts that you publish are the substance of your blog, it makes sense that you would want to make them as good as possible. There are a lot of different ways to accomplish this, and we are going to discuss a handful of them right now:
Create a List:
If you are having a hard time thinking of what kind of post you want to create next, list posts are always a great choice. There are several reasons why I recommend this type of post:
Appeals to Social Media Users
If you look at the popular pages of websites like Digg and Reddit, you will see that lists comprise a significant percentage of the content that people like to vote on. Since you already know that these are the kinds of websites that can send you a lot of traffic, it makes sense to write content that’s going to appeal directly to the people who are using these websites.
Attracts Links
When someone links to you, they are basically casting a vote and saying that they think you have something worthwhile to offer to others. Not only can attracting links help your search engine rankings, but it can also send visitors directly to your blog from another blog or website. Because lists are viewed as resources, they are quite likely to attract links.
Easy
Regardless of how passionate you are about the subject of your blog, I know that there are times when you simply don’t have the energy to sit down and write a 1000 word post. Fortunately, lists are quite easy to create; you just need to invest some time in surfing around and putting together a collection of resources.
Install WP-PostRatings:
By installing this plugin on your blog, you are accomplishing two things. First, you are encouraging your visitors to participate with your blog. Second, you can find out what people really want to read about. You may think that a post you wrote is great, but if it gets a lot of low votes, you will know that you should probably avoid that specific topic in future posts.
Use Images:
Images can be a very powerful way to get people’s attention. If someone is surfing around and an image suddenly catches their attention, there is a very good chance that they are going to stick around long enough to read what the content associated with that image has to say.
Proofread and Spellcheck:
While I realize that bloggers aren’t expected to have perfect grammar, it is useful to read over your posts and correct any errors before publishing. Additionally, given the fact that WordPress has a built-in spellcheck function, correcting any misspellings requires less than a minute of extra work.
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