Writting A Better Content For Blog Post

One of the most key aspects of any successful blog is the ability to create content that keeps drawing people back to your blog. I’ve written so many posts on this topic and know that ‘excellent blog content’ means something different on every blog – as a result I won’t pretend that what I write in this post will be a definitive guide to writing great blog content.

However I can tell you five things that I wish I knew in my early days of blogging about writing content (with a few links for further reading).

5 Things I Wish I’d Known Earlier about Writing Content for a Blog

1. The Power of Titles – the title has the ability make or break a blog post. It impacts how (and if) it’s found in search engines and social bookmarking sites, it influences whether people visit your blog in News Readers, it affects whether people leave a comment and is vital in whether people actually read what you have to say. Read more about using Titles Effectively on Blogs.
2. The Viral Nature of Lists – a single well written list post can launch a blog to great heights in the blogosphere. While the prolific nature of lists in the blogosphere can also mean your lists get ignored, I find that when writing the same content as a list that you write as an essay like article the list will almost always get more attention. Read more about why lists are great for getting traffic to your blog.
3. The Importance of Being Original - perhaps the best lesson that I ever learned as a bloggers was that people are drawn to others who speak their mind, who have something unique to say and who say it in a creative and fresh way. Say what everyone else is saying in the same way that everyone else is saying it and you’re almost guaranteed of being largely ignored. Read more about how to avoid joining the echo chamber and saying something original.
4. The Value of Well Formated Content – people don’t read content on line in the same way that they read content in other mediums. Online readers tend to scan content. As a result if you place visual cues in your posts that draw the eye to important points you’ll find people stick with you longer into your posts. Read more on How to make your content Scannable
5. The Impact of a Good Image - another simple technique for providing an additional point of interest in your posts is to provide something visual. I don’t use images in every post on this blog but find that when I do that those clicking through on the post in my feed reader increases. Images have the power to communicate in ways that words cannot – use them. Read more on Using images to make your posts POP in RSS feeds.

Read More

Get Images Related To Your Post Content

How to Get Images for Your Content

So now that you have some good ideas of what kind of images to include in your content, here are some tools and resources to get those images.

Eye Catching Photography

The following are great sources for eye-catching photography.

• Creative Commons Images – My favorite resource is Flickr’s Advanced Search to find eye-catching photography. Be sure to check the box to Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content and include a photo credit with the image you use.
• Royalty-Free Stock Photos – If you can’t find what you are looking for through Creative Commons, your next best bet is sites like iStockphoto that allows you to buy a photo for use in your website content and designs.

There are tons of other resources – simply search for creative commons images or stock photography on Google to find them, but the above are a great place to start. Also, if you find a photo you want to use but it isn’t creative commons licensed, all hope is not lost. Just email the owner of the photo / photographer and let them know what you had in mind. You might get a great response!

People Photos

Whenever I need to grab a photo of a person, I tend to go with their Twitter profile photo as it is one they have chosen to represent themselves online. Other places to grab a photo include:

• A person’s Gravatar (if they have commented on your blog).
• The author bio page on their blog.
• The photo on their corporate bio page.

Or, if you prefer, you can contact the person and ask them to send you a photo of their choosing for an upcoming piece of content you are working on. Generally, if you let them know you are including them on a list or a positive review, they will be happy to oblige!

Screenshots

If you don’t have a program like Snagit or similar to get screen captures, then you have some free options to work with.

• Screenshots on Windows Based PCs – I tend to rely on the Print Screen (Prt Scr) button on my keyboard to do a screen capture, then resize and crop it in Gimp, a free image editor.
• Screenshots on Mac OS Machines – If you’re running a Mac, you can use shortcuts such as Command-Shift-3 to take a screenshot and save it on your desktop, Command-Control-Shift-3 to take a screenshot and save it to your clipboard, or use other shortcuts listed here. Gimp also works on Mac for editing your screenshots.
• Website Previews – If you use Safari and need an image of a website, then you’ll be happy to know that Safari actually takes screenshots of websites in .png and .jpg format. In Windows 7, you can find these previews underC:\Users\YourUsername\AppData\Local\Apple Computer\Safari\Webpage Previews. You can then edit the website’s capture in Gimp to fit your post.

Windows 7 also has a Snipping Tool that allows you to grab screenshots easily, but I have found those captures are very low quality, so depending on your needs, you might want to use one of the above options instead.

Read More

Importance Of Images And Content In Blog Posts

Remember how much you would have rather read a book with lots of pictures versus one with only text when you were a kid? The same applies, even now.

A picture speaks a thousand words, and when it comes to your content, that cannot be truer if your image is relevant. Images add richness to your content, and make readers more willing to read a long article. And they have great SEO value too!

Best Images for Content

The following are the types of images you can use to add an extra bit of pizazz to any blog post, article, or other piece of online content.

Eye Catching Photography

That photo grabbed your attention, right? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been lured into reading a post simply because it had an eye-catching photo attached to it. The key is to find something that either relates to your content or proves your point. In this case, my point was to catch your eye. Some examples include:

• An article on how to calm the mind including photos of peaceful gardens or open meadows.
• An article on how to build a treehouse including photos of awesome treehouse designs.
• An article on the perfect cupcake recipe including photos of the ingredients and the finished product.

Relevant photos can help the audience really feel the point you are trying to make with your content as well as breaking up the text making the story seem like less of a daunting read.

People Photos

Have you ever noticed that you tend to trust a Twitter user or Facebook friend more if they have a photo of themselves as opposed to a cartoon, logo, or other non-personal bio image?

The same goes with content. Readers love to see the face behind whatever topic is being covered in a piece of content. This includes:

• Author bio photos for blog posts and articles.
• Photos of a person who authored a book or an eBook that you are reviewing.
• Photos of people included in a list, such as the top designer bloggers on Twitter.

Including people photos will increase the reader’s engagement and trust with your content as it lets them know that there is a real person on the other side of the screen creating the content.

Screenshots

Screenshots, in my opinion, are essential when it comes to two particular types of content – how to articles and lists.

How-To Screenshots

You can write the greatest tutorial on how to use a piece of software, but if it doesn’t include screenshots, it will make the reader still feel that the software may be to complicated for them to understand. For example, I could say that, when editing photos in Gimp, you should scale the image to the appropriate size to fit the article, such as I did with the above photo in this post to make it 570px wide. Or I could say that and then include the following:

Including the screenshot directs readers to the right menu option to correspond with my instructions, helping readers get to know the software before they get to it and give them a reference point if they get stuck.

Read More

Updating Old Posts On Your Blog to increase traffic

                                 Why Update Old Blog Posts?

I know some bloggers don’t like to update old posts (they like to let them stand as a record of their thoughts at any given point in time) but I personally don’t have an issue with it at all and think it’s a worthwhile thing to do on a number of fronts:

1. Accuracy – there are some times when things you’ve written are simply not true – or cease to be true. Correcting mistakes or making updates to reflect new circumstances actually makes your blog more useful for readers surfing through your archives – which all goes to help improving your blog.

2. Change of Opinion – there are times when over time I change my opinion on different topics. While an old post that you no longer agree with might make interesting reading – it can also impact your reputation. Someone coming to that post won’t know you’ve changed your opinion and will assume that you still think what you once did unless they find something that points them to your new opinion. At times this can be quite damaging to your reputation.

3. Usefulness and Usability – sometimes information in old posts can simply become dated or even ‘broken’ (ie links no longer working as other sites die). Updating these posts with current information and fixing links (either by updating or deleting) makes your post more useful.

By no means am I arguing that bloggers update all of their old posts – but it does make sense to go back through key posts in your archives to do some updating – particularly those that continue to generate traffic over time.

How to Update Old Posts

There are a variety of ways of updating old posts:

1. Quick Fixes – in many circumstances it’s as simple as replacing a link, fixing a mistake etc. In these cases I rarely make a note of it being an updated post as I don’t think it really impacts readers to know that it has been changed.

2. Updates – you’ll see in the example above that I did two things. Firstly I added a number of paragraphs midway through the article. I made the subheading of that section quite clear that it was an update. Secondly I made a note early in the post saying that it had been updated. I wanted to do this at the top of the post to show readers that the information in it was still current. I didn’t want people to see the 2006 date and think it was not valid any more.

When you do these updates that are more than cosmetic (and where you think the information is important) – it can be worthwhile making a short post about it on your blog to indicate to current readers that the post is updated.

3. Reposting – on my photography blog I will regularly take old posts, update the information and then repost them with the current date. I can do this on that blog because the permalinks on that blog don’t include the date in them (as they do here on ProBlogger) and so reposting them doesn’t break the links.

4. New Posts – the last technique that I use is to write a new updated post and then link to it in an old post. I do this when the updated information is significant and warrants a completely new post. In these new posts you may wish to refer back to the old post (so readers can see how your ideas have developed). It is well worthwhile when writing a new post on a topic you’ve covered previously to add a link to the old post to direct readers to the new one so that they get the up to date information.

Read More