Estimated reading time: 8 minutes, 18 seconds. Contains 1663 words

Writing great content is one of the most challenging and rewarding processes one can attempt in their career. It requires that you be highly observant, have a keen eye for detail, and have an excellent grasp of grammar and punctuation. This helps you to create authentic articles that are both informative and engaging. With so many blogging platforms and editors available, it’s not always easy to take your own writing seriously. If you want to achieve success here, it’s important to learn how to improve your skills as well as hone them by reading other people’s posts. Here are some helpful tips on improving blog writing.

Know Your Audience (and Know Yourself)

Before anything else, it’s imperative to know who exactly you are writing for. You will need to identify your target audience and what they want. For example, if you are writing about design tools, such as Adobe Creative Cloud, you may want to consider making a checklist template with some basic questions relevant to your niche to help guide your writing. Once you have this information all set up, use free tools like Google Forms or SurveyMonkey to gather feedback from people within your specific industry. While there are plenty of methods for gathering data for creating effective survey templates, we strongly recommend using the Open-Ended Questions tool as its interface makes it super simple and straightforward to generate useful feedback. Remember that while surveys are great ways to collect data and get invaluable insights about people and companies, they don’t necessarily mean the work is finished! As long as you provide regular updates and include the right keywords, you can continue to gain more insight into your topic.

Know Your Platform (and Workflow) Properly

Once you have collected some valuable input from your community, you need to develop a solid understanding of your platform. What does each site require? Where do things generally go wrong? By knowing these details, you may find it easier to adapt your style to fit your platform. Understanding whether you should be using WordPress, Medium, Tumblr or another platform or even which social network you prefer, will go along way in helping you to come up with original topics for your blog. Some popular options include Quora, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat. Whatever type of content management system you choose, make sure to keep your user experience positive and professional. Ensure that your blog looks clean and has responsive design elements that look crisp and professional.

Learn From Other Writers

One of the easiest and often overlooked parts of blogging is observing what other authors are doing. Reading their posts and trying to mimic their formatting and tone will help you to boost your own writing. Doing research on similar sites will also give you ideas on your style. Read every post on various topics related to your niche and ask yourself, “What would I change about this article? What could I add that would increase my blog quality?” By copying other writers and experimenting with different styles, you can develop new techniques and strategies. Also consider looking at other bloggers’ comments sections and comparing them to your own to see if their writing is improved. There are tons of online sources for finding inspiration. One of our favorite platforms for curating information related to your niche is Upbeat Writer’s Guide. When selecting articles to read, ensure to check out what they are talking about to better understand the context of the piece. They even put together collections of resources related to certain industries or topics they cover, making this particular resource extremely useful.

Read More Content

While it seems obvious, too much reading doesn’t actually translate into better content. Too many hours per day of reading in general usually leads to boredom, frustration and unhappiness. Instead, try turning off notifications and simply scrolling through content in order to become more aware of your readers and their interests. Make note of how the text flows on mobile devices as well as tablet computers, and adjust your page layout accordingly. Take notes to remember what people are saying when it comes to social media platforms. People tend to talk less on phones, but still have their opinions! You may also want to check out how others use images, links and quotes in their writing. These little details make a big difference in writing and might just inspire you to replicate the same technique.

 

The Best Ways To Improve Your Blog

There are plenty of ways to improve your blog and make it successful. We listed several of the easiest and most common tips below.

1. Read More & Pay Attention to Detail

It can be difficult to maintain high standards when you’re constantly thinking about new ideas and projects. Luckily, it’s relatively easy to stay focused and avoid distractions. Start by reading something interesting that catches your attention – perhaps a news story about something happening recently or something in your life that made you think. Simply scanning through current events or headlines can also help to improve your focus. Before making any major decisions, it’s important to spend time thinking through the pros and cons. Once you have some knowledge regarding the subject, consider applying your findings to real-life situations and ask yourself if those conclusions apply to your situation. Often, the answer is yes, but sometimes it takes a lot of reflection before you can say for sure.

2. Learn About SEO – And Keep Learning

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an integral part of establishing or boosting a good search engine ranking. Whether you are building your brand or seeking exposure for your business, SEO is the foundation for everything you do. Even though SEO isn’t a new concept, it is still worth considering. After all, you can’t expect to rank #1, #2 or #5 if people aren’t interested enough in your services or products. In fact, your website’s traffic can directly impact your overall SEO performance. Understand where you stand today, and then continue optimizing your blog to rank higher. That means researching keywords that target the key phrases that are driving your visitors and optimizing your copy to match with the user intent. Don’t forget to optimize your meta tags so that keyword rich URLs can be identified easily and optimized for searches that aren’t targeting them.

3. Be Consistent & Stick To Your Ideas

If you want a successful blog, then you must do it consistently. Having only 5-6 blog ideas can quickly turn into half a dozen. To have better consistency, try scheduling your blog posts around specific times. Have several days of the week each and stick to the schedule. Let’s say you want your blog to update at midnight, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Scheduling an entire weekly content plan out can be overwhelming at first, but after getting used to the routine, stick with it and it gets easier. Additionally, having a daily posting to ensure your blog stays fresh will keep you motivated to push forward when you have some new ideas. Most importantly, stick with what works! You don’t want to start over tomorrow because one thing worked yesterday, but the next person is posting 2-3 times a day and is no longer bringing your idea to light any longer, so you won’t be able to see any improvement over the course of the following week.

4. Use Powerful Headlines with Strong Descriptions

The importance of strong titles is undeniable. Without the accompanying description, blog posts fall flat and lose credibility. Just like your reader knows what they are reading when they click the link button, your headline should accurately describe the main points of your content. Give them direction to move on from where your head starts and gives them something to click on. Always begin with a clear call-to-action – either through a compelling title or intriguing subhead – which provides direction for your potential reader to act or interact. Think about the benefits that will result from clicking the link and consider how you could encourage someone to act toward that outcome.

5. Publish Long Articles Regularly

It can be tempting to publish short blog articles. However, publishing shorter pieces regularly can hurt your site’s rankings, particularly if you aren’t generating as much engagement as you would like to. Ideally, you want to aim for 1.5–2 articles per month with a couple of guest posts sprinkled throughout. Although you may occasionally feel like you don’t have enough time to spend writing, we’ve found that if you stick to your schedule, you’ll be surprised at the results! At KAYAK, we like to publish 4–5 articles a month across multiple social channels. Why? Because our customers consistently tell us that their followers love the depth of our posts – including photos – and our detailed descriptions. So, the more content you produce, the stronger your presence becomes with the public.

6. Update Every Day

Even though you shouldn’t expect perfection from your blog every single day, you should strive to update your posts continuously. Our algorithm uses two metrics when calculating the frequency of updating. First, we calculate the number of views (views per day) and second, the average time spent viewing blog posts (average view per hour). Both of these metrics play a pivotal role in determining your success at increasing the frequency of updating, so you should definitely pay attention!

7. Focus On Quality Over Quantity

As mentioned previously, your goal should be to focus on producing quality content. Many bloggers think that producing lots of content is the only way to succeed. Contrary to their belief, your efforts will probably yield quicker results if you are focusing on quality rather than quantity. Creating quality content consistently will ensure you receive word-of-mouth referrals from satisfied clients (and perhaps even repeat clients), resulting in increased traffic. This alone will bring in additional money to support your growth. Plus, you won’t need to spend as much time perfecting your pitches due to fewer mistakes. Consider incorporating video in your content. YouTube is the biggest source of information