Published on March 24th, 2016 | by Guest

Beyond Basic Blogs

If you are running a personal thought piece or just trying to expand your product-based e-shop, running a blog can be exhausting or just straight up confusing. If you need a little help finding the voice of your blog, here are a few tips and tools that are super amazing and will help you evolve past a basic blog.

Tips

Stay motivated, organized, and successful!

There is something so grand about getting yourself to sit on your computer, put out the thousand and a half words that will help someone else. Your end goal should be to make your website a place full of information and ideas that will encourage readers to click through and return. It’s the tippy top of your sales funnel that brings people into the mindset that requires your products or services.

It’s so hard to consistently add new content onto your site. While you can work around content creation by inviting guest writers; that still requires editing to maintain an on-brand voice, amazing money-pointing internal links, and super amazing social shout-outs to your blog. Keeping on yourself can be incredibly difficult for even the most organized, driven blogger. Motivate writing by looking into what other bloggers are doing, or the things you can do to improve your own blog. For example, if you are writing a business blog, looking into free tutorials or more authoritative sources information that will inspire you to write a little better and helps you gain valuable information for your readers.

A well organized site is the key to raking in readers and resources. There are two parts that need to be tracked, links (onsite and off) and the ways that your readers follow those links. Your internal linking structure should funnel people towards other articles, and eventually product pages, (if in one of your blog posts you mention a tool that you sell, link to it). Super power your blog by double checking your most powerful posts in the rankings and building out from them; it’ll mean more time on site, lower bounce rates, and *hopefully* more sales. This could mean unlearning a few of your previous internal linking strategies (like putting recent posts at the top of the queue or not updating older posts). Refreshing your internal linking structure makes for a stronger site, and more onsite interaction. This also means tracking where your content goes offsite and where your articles link to. The purpose of a link in an article is to provide citation or information to the reader, if it doesn’t, remove it. For offsite content, just make sure it’s syndicated correctly. Duplicated content can be punished by the great Google, which will affect your traffic.

Tools

Free, Flexible, or the Best

When looking for tools to improve your blog, go for a good free tool, a flexible tool that allows you to do a lot, or the best. There are a lot of tools out there to chose from, the gold standard is of course, MOZ. It will give you a number to score your website by (in the form of Page and Domain Authority), it can analyze your content, and help you find places to put your content off-site. But many of Moz’s best tools cost money. A free alternatives are found around the web, like Seo Site Checkup, which offers many of the same things moz does, but is a little easier to navigate with.

If you’re looking for a flexible option, delving into Majestic will allow you to focus on your blog from a link builder prospective, and build up appropriate links (this is super amazing if you are worried about a possible penalty from Google coming down the line). Plus, if you’re only looking at one blog, then the free version will work wonders from you. For onsite analysis, try something fun like Screaming Frog Seo Spider, crazy name, crazy free, and will give you a great idea of where some of your onsite technics are, and what you should improve on (do you even vary your H-tags, bro).

What Works?

No guarantees, play with stuff.

There are no guarantees that posting regularly and optimizing your blog’s visibility will give you the results you want. Trying a variety of options will give you the best results (something different works for everyone). Even just optimizing your site for a variety of platforms will explode your site’s traffic, and keep people on site longer. There are so many things that you can try to move beyond the basic blog, but at bare minimum, optimize your site for seo using some great free tools and consistently post. It’s so important to continually post, and improve your site. An unimproved site is a dead one.

Staying motivated, optimizing your site, and playing with a variety of options will allow you to move your blog beyond the basic, and into an information center than users return to, and explore.

Tags: basic, beyond, blogs, SEO, tools