Frequency and quantity of blogging are certainly two factors that will impact your business results. However, you won’t get far without optimizing your blog posts. You need to optimize your content to grab people’s attention and rank well in search engines.
What is more, your blog posts should also introduce offers that can directly impact your lead generation efforts. It’s a fairly simple concept – the more visitors you can attract to your blog, the more chances for conversion.
In this blog, we will look at ten different ways in which you can optimize your blog posts, from an SEO perspective as well as a lead generation standpoint.
How to Optimize Your Blog Posts
1. Social Media Sharing Buttons
Give your blog content extended reach by including social media sharing buttons on every post. This will encourage readers to share your content with their personal networks and expand its reach beyond your own connections. Look left – ours are hovering right there.
2. Compelling Images
Include an image that conveys what the blog post is about. This makes your content visually appealing to readers and breaks up blocks of text-based content. A blog post that has some type visual element – whether it’s a photograph, a graphic, or some type of infographic – typically performs a little better than a post that’s purely text.
3. Eye-Catching & Optimized Titles
Headlines are the most important element of your blog posts. While there are quite a few elements that make up a successful blog post, one of the best things you can do to capture readers’ attention and entice them to view your post is to write an awesome blog title.
4. Formatting Is Your Friend
In blogging, it is important to break up blocks of text into chunks. Online and mobile reading is not like reading a physical book. The online reader wants to be able to immediately scroll through content and scan subheaders, bold text, and even bullet points.
5. In-Text Calls-to-Action
Once you have built a blog readership, you can start making attempts to convert those visitors into leads. A well-constructed blog post should always include in-text links to other resources.
To maximize lead generation potential, why not point these links to landing pages for downloadable offers such as an ebook you’ve written, an upcoming or archived webinar, or other conversion opportunities like demo requests, free trials, etc.?
6. Sidebar Calls-to-Action
In addition to the individual blog articles you publish, the homepage for your blog can help generate leads in itself. The top of your blog as well as its sidebar are both prime real estate for CTA banners and buttons.
Design some visually stimulating CTAs that link to landing pages for some of your best-performing offers. Feel free to also test and rotate different offers to make sure you’re using this space for maximum lead generation power.
7. Make It Actionable
Whether people found the blog post through a search engine, an email, or a social network, they most likely clicked through to an article to solve a problem. What makes people share a post with others is the actionable insight it provides to solve a problem. Provide clear takeaways and actionable steps in blog posts to ensure your idea resonates with readers.
8. Combined Relevance
Metaphors are a timeless storytelling element. Don’t leave metaphors to novelists. They should be an active part of blog posts, too. Comparing two seemingly different things and drawing connections between them is a valuable way to combine relevance and generate more interest in a subject.
9. Entertaining
Informative doesn’t have to mean boring. Just because your business isn't cutting-edge, doesn’t mean your business blog can’t also be entertaining. Have someone outside your company review your blog post to check for entertainment value.
10. Definitive
Great blog posts aren’t meek or subtle. They are clear, direct, and definitive. Take a stand, make strong word choices, and don’t waver on your advice. Be the expert on your topic.
There are thousands of blogs out there. If you are convinced that yours should stand out from the rest, you should do the necessary work to optimize it. Optimizing your blog drives more traffic to your posts, increases your visibility, and helps to establish you as an authority in your niche.