Thursday 13 November 2014

5 Tools That Will Improve Your Blogging Results

A blog can be a great source of traffic to your website, but it’s time consuming to create blog posts and we don’t always get the results we want. When you do blog, you want to make sure you get maximum value from it.
In this article, we’ve outlined 5 tools that will help improve your results from blogging, leading to more traffic and, ultimately, sales.
1.  Create Your Imagery Using Canva
An image captures your attention and if you don’t capture the attention of visitors to your blog they won’t read it. But creating appealing, professional looking images is very challenging and time consuming and, if you get expert help, it’s expensive!
Canva is graphic design tool that enables the most inexperienced and uncreative people to produce images without the need for graphic design skills.
Once you choose the type of image you want to create (Facebook post, Pinterest pin,  blog graphic) you can select from a library of professional designs that with just a few tweaks can be customized to suit your style and needs.
Simply drag and drop your own uploaded images on to the design (or choose from a vast library of stock images) , apply eye catching filters, overlay it with text and other graphical elements, and much more.
Canva
Choose a design and then customize the images, colours, and text
For every blog post make sure to have a least one image that draws your reader in.  Canva’s simple intuitive user-interface is easy to master enabling you create eye-catching images for your blog posts within minutes.  When you spend some time with Canva, you’ll wonder how you ever survived without it.
2. Research Your Competitors Using SEMRush
Coming up with ideas for posts is hard enough but knowing which ones will bring you traffic can be difficult. Knowing what is working for your competitors can provide valuable insights and ideas for your own blog.
Using SEMRush you can enter in your competitors website address and view a list of the top keywords they currently rank for on Google.  You can see the keywords, estimated searches for those keywords and much more.
SEMRush
Identify the keywords driving the most traffic to your competitors
If your competitor is getting traffic for these keywords maybe there is an opportunity to write content targeting those keywords so you can take some of your competitors traffic!
But remember, this is not about copying your competitor.  You may form your article around the keywords but the content must be different.  You want to write a much better article than your competitors and promote it. With some investigation on SEMRush you will learn a lot more about your competitors and this will help you achieve more results with your blogging.
3. Increase the Conversion Rate for Email Subscriptions using Exit Intent Popup
If you want to build an ongoing audience for your blog an email list is extremely important.  But it’s becoming harder to attract the attention of your website visitors and convince them to sign-up or subscribe to your email convert them.
A great way of capturing their attention is a popup box that asks for their email address.  But popup boxes can be intrusive and cause an annoyance while you are browsing a website.
A neat and effective way around this is using an exit intent popup, which detects when you are leaving the site and only then shows the popup.  You could be browsing the site for hours and nothing happens but as soon as you try to leave the website a popup will appear.
OptinMonster is a very useful WordPress tool that supports a popup with exit intent.  An alternative to OptinMonster is Sumome which is not only available on WordPress but can also be used on other platforms.
4. Implement Good Sharing Options
When visitors find content on your site that would be useful to their audience you want to make it easy for them to share it.  This means having sharing icons very visible on your website, so once the mood takes them, it’s only a click away.
Flare allows you to include vertical and horizontal sharing bars on your posts.  While you scroll down through the post the sharing icons remain visible at all times.  Recently they added better analytics onto the platform so now you can see which posts get the most shares compared to visits. who are the key influencers sharing your posts, and much more.
They also have really user friendly sharing for your mobile users.
mobile sharing
This is how sharing appears on your mobile device
Sharing on a mobile device is becoming increasingly important but you need to make sure that it’s easy to share.
5. Share Your Older Content through Buffer
Too often ,we focus on promoting our new content and forget about the vast amount of content we already have on our website that is still useful and valuable. If you have evergreen content (content that doesn’t go out of date) then why don’t you share it on a regular basis.
These are the perfect types of posts to prepare and schedule in advance and Buffer is a great tool to manage this. First you define the times you want to post updates to your social channels (Facebook, Twitter) and then you simply add posts to your queue ready to be shared at the next available time slot.  A complementary tool to Buffer is Bulkbuffer which enables you to prepare all your posts in a spreadsheet and then import them to Buffer so they are automatically added to the queue.
Pick out the content on your site that is still relevant and create a spreadsheet with the updates you want to share, and import this to Buffer for easy and automatic sharing.
Summary
Your blog is an important asset for your business and by investing some time you can dramatically improve the results of your blog.  In this article we outlined 5 ways you can do this.  Which one will you implement?  Have you anything you’d like to add?
We would love to hear from you!
To view the original article Click Here

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