It takes me less than two minutes to figure out whether I should add a blog post to my reading list or skip it completely.
What’s my secret?
I scan for certain characteristics that indicate a good post, such as:
- Does a post include expert quotes?
- Are the images included in the piece of a high-quality and not taken from stock sites?
- And so on.
Each of these elements adds additional benefits for your readers increasing the chances to attract a solid number of visitors to your page.
In this post, I want to share how exactly you can supercharge your blog content to interest people without breaking the bank and avoid wasting time creating skippable content.
1. Adding Expert Quotes
Expert quotes make your content more trustworthy, which leads to people wanting to stick around your page. Quotes are also shareable so they improve your chances of getting links and engage people in a conversation.
But how to start collaborating with influencers?
If your brand has already established relationships with experts within your niche simply connect with them and ask to share a few sentences.
They are typically more than happy to do that since it gets them exposure to a new audience. But don’t forget that at this stage you need a 100% finalized post because experts will want to know the exact context and other details.
If you don’t have a personal connection with those influencers there is a trick for you. It’s much easier to get a quote from influencers that are aware of your brand and have already mentioned it in their content.
You can use this search operator to find those mentions:
intext:[YOUR BRAND NAME] -site:yoursitename.com
Here’s how it looks for my own brand:
Plus, you can use Ahrefs to find people who referred to your site with the help of a referring domains report. Just look up your site and check the Referring domains tab.
But what if your company just started building relationships with influencers?
Don’t let it stop you from using this hack. There’s an elegant workaround which still allows adding a quote without stepping into an influencer marketing niche.
Follow these steps:
- Find an expert’s quote that is relevant to what you are writing about.
- Select a few sentences that match your content perfectly and add them to your post.
- Then shoot the influencer a quick message on Twitter or LinkedIn, just letting them know that you allocated the quote in your post.
Make sure the quote is well-designed for a reader to easily spot it on your blog. Also, don’t forget to add authors contacts, links to social media accounts, and an image.
Collaborating with influencers is a great way to get exposed to an established audience.
You can go a little further and instead of asking for a quote see if there is a possibility of co-writing a study or referring to their research.
2. Referring to Well-Known Studies and Researches
Do you know of any research that is relevant to your audience?
Adding references to your in-depth analytical pieces from that source enforces your statements and stresses out that what you’re writing about requires their attention and is worth reading.
The only thing that I wouldn’t recommend is linking to sites that aren’t an original source of data.
Some of the most reliable sites that I like linking to are:
- Google Consumer Barometer, HubSpot Research, and eMarketer if your content is related to a marketing niche.
- Statista for nearly any type of content.
It’s easy to get carried away with interesting facts and statistics while writing an informative post. So make sure you don’t end up with boring non-readable information.
A great way to spice up your post is by adding graphics and images.
3. Adding Eye-Catching Images
Images can make or break your post.
Even a well-researched piece will look mediocre if you don’t invest time into finding great visuals to bring your text to life.
However, some niches continue using low-quality stock images.
For instance, we have a client from a health-related niche and we’ve uncovered that the majority of top-notch sites in this niche look pretty lifeless:
So, what could you do instead of using stock images for your blog?
The cheapest option is to use tools like Canva that allow you to create custom-made images. They have tons of templates that you can slightly modify to match your corporate’s style perfectly.
After this step, your post should be optimized for ranking well on Google. Now it’s time to make sure it gets in front of your audience by using the magic of SEO.
4. Delivering Keyword Research
If you want to rank in Google’s SERPs, then you should do some keyword research.
In reality, the best practice is to do this before you even start writing on any topic.
Organic traffic simply won’t come unless your post includes the right search queries with a decent number of searches per month.
I have a perfect example to back up my words with some data.
I’ve recently uncovered a blog post on BuzzSumo that had gained the biggest number of referring domains, over 1,3K:
Can you guess how many users came from Google? Well, on a good day around 100 users, on average around 12.
There’re plenty of tools to help you become visible.
My favorite is the SEMrush Keyword Magic tool: it shows multiple keyword options grouped in a handy way as well as the difficulty of getting to the top 3 results:
This step could be a little daunting, especially when you can’t wait to share your new content with the world.
However, taking the time to perfect your keywords will help you get better engagement and reach more people.
5. Optimizing Meta Description, URL & Title
After you come up with a list of keywords, you need to ensure that they’re allocated in your meta descriptions, URLs, and post title.
Remember that both a meta description and title have a limited number of characters so make sure to not go over the limit to avoid appearing on Google SERPs like this:
You only have one shot to attract Google users to visit your site: some of them might not even know that Page 2 of Google search exists. So try to make your site’s preview descriptive and interesting.
Without a doubt, a well-written meta description and title will get you more clicks.
After working on every step mentioned above you should have a great piece of content that your audience will like.
But there is still some work to be done.
6. Suggesting Related Posts to Your Users
After your users enjoyed your post, it’s good to suggest similar posts they might like.
By doing so, you increase the average time they spend on the site and decrease the exit rate.
For example, here’s how the further reading suggestions are shown on the HubSpot blog:
Conclusion
Being a great writer is not enough to get visitors to your site anymore.
The abundance of information requires trying that much harder to spark interest in your content.
When writing posts try stopping for a second and asking yourself if it would spark interest a person if they only had a minute to glance through it.
Remember, it has to be love at a first for a potential reader to give your post a chance.
More Resources:
Image Credits
Featured Image: Created by author, August 2019
All screenshots taken by author, August 2019
