5 Tools That Will Improve Your Results from Blogging
A blog can be a great source of traffic to your website, but creating blog posts is time-consuming, and we don’t always get the results we want. When you blog, you want to ensure 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 visitors’ attention 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 customized to suit your style and needs with just a few tweaks.
Simply drag and drop your own uploaded images onto 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.
Make sure to have at least one image that draws your reader in for every blog post. Canva’s simple intuitive user interface is easy to master enabling you to create eye-catching images for your blog posts within minutes. When you spend some time with Canva, you’ll wonder how you 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 works for your competitors can provide valuable insights and ideas for your blog.
Using Semrush you can enter your competitor’s 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.
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 differ. 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, which will help you achieve more results with your blogging.
3. Capture Subscribers With An 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 to convert them.
A great way to capture their attention is a popup box asking 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 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.
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 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 always remain visible. Recently they added better analytics onto the platform so 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 user-friendly sharing for your mobile users.
Sharing on a mobile device is becoming increasingly important, but you need to ensure that it’s easy to share.
Download the Easy Social Share Plugin
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), why don’t you share it regularly?
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 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, create a spreadsheet with the updates you want to share, and import this to Buffer for easy and automatic sharing.
Your blog is an essential 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!