 If you have a laptop, tablet or smartphone and an internet connection, there are now a wealth of tools that make self-publication an incredibly easy process. However, it isn’t quite as simple as just typing a few paragraphs and hitting the ‘publish’ button. It takes a lot of time and effort to get your content in front of your target audience. It's not easy but we’ve picked out seven brilliant blogging tips that can help your blog posts stand out in the ocean of content out there. 1. The headline When you pick up a newspaper, what’s the first thing that grabs you? If the editor has got it right, it’ll be the headline, and the same goes in the world of blogging. For your post to stand out and get noticed, it needs a great headline. Keep your blog headlines interesting and promise an answer to a question you know the blog will deliver. Make it snappy and end it on a cliff-hanger to increase the chances of people clicking-through. 2. The introduction The intro for this blog is just three, short paragraphs. It doesn’t labour the point, nor does it head down any literary culs-de-sac - it simply sets the scene, highlights a problem and then promises to provide tips for solving it. Make sure every blog post you write has a good introduction. 3. Featured image Blogging isn’t just about words - far from it, in fact. For your blog post to really pop off the page and encourage people to delve in further, you need an engaging header image. There is nothing wrong with stock photography, but try to find quality images, relevant to your content. Find the best image you can that is free to use or, ideally, create your own by either taking photographs or using one of the many free online image editing tools. 4. Good excerpt The headline for your blog should encourage people to click it, but some will need a little more convincing. This is where the excerpt comes in handy; by picking a short sentence or two from the blog itself and presenting it as an excerpt, you’ll give people more reason to delve in. 5. Meta title When it comes to successful blogging, it’s often the stuff you can’t immediately see that makes the biggest difference to gaining good visibility on search engines. The meta title is a very important part of search engine optimisation (SEO). Try to include the primary keywords for the content and make it no longer than 60 characters (it is a bit more complicated as it is actually based on pixels rather than characters but under 60 is a good rule of thumb). Get it right, and it can help with both ranking and click-through rates from the likes of Google. Remember, if your meta title closely matches the searcher’s query, they are more likely to click on it. 6. Meta description This can be seen as the small excerpt presented by search engines within listings, and it can influence your click through rate. In other words, people will be more likely to click on the results with a more relevant meta description. Again, keeping it short and snappy is key - keep your meta descriptions under 160 characters. Longer than that and they may get truncated. Google is often changing the look and layout of search results pages so the optimal length for meta titles and meta description can change. 7. Correct use of Facebook Open Graph Markup By utilising Facebook’s Open Graph Markup, you’ll gain more control over how your blog posts appear when shared on Facebook. For example, you may want a particular image to be used as the one featured on the Facebook post. Using Open Graph Markup correctly can make a big difference to click-through rates. Summary We hope our tips will help you with creating content that draws in big audiences and encourages lots of shares. So, what’s missing? That’s right - quality content, on top of all the technical tips, to be successful online you will still need to produce unique, quality and sharable content. It all starts with a great idea. Author BioIzzy is an SEO specialist and Marketing and Advertising graduate from the UK. She likes everything about marketing, promotion, PR and advertising. As for other interests, she also likes photography and dance.
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