If you’ve got a blog to run, you’re already doing well with your content. You’ve managed to curate a little corner of your niche, and you’ve got a loyal readership regularly checking in to see what you’ve got to say. You’re happy with the way your blog works, and you’re happy with all the hard work you’ve done to get this far.
But sometimes, our online content could do with a few upgrades. We could do with rewriting and reshaping a few things, to make them better for the future. For example, as times change, so does the way the world works, and if your blog requires up to date information, you’ll need to improve your ability to create evergreen content.
Of course, a change in your blog content won’t happen overnight. It happens overtime, when you have a plan to follow and plenty of ideas churning in the bank in your mind. And if you’re interested in making a difference to the things you post online, and indeed, taking it to the next level, this post is for you!
So, without further ado, here are some things to think about when trying to curate better content, with a clearer sense of quality to go around the quantity. You want to be proud of your blog, and if you’re going to feel that way for anything you publish in the months to come, these deserve thinking about.
Taking Your Online Content To The Next Level
Create Hype with Themed Content
This is all part of your new content strategy, which hopefully, you’ve been working on for a while now. Of course, it’s perfectly fine if you haven’t - we all run our blogs a bit differently! But when you’re trying to take your content to the next level, it might be worth it to throw a quick schedule together, with plenty of themed content mixed in to spice things up a little.
No matter what niche you work in, there’s always going to be an opportunity to theme your content here and there. You’ll always be able to find a relevant angle to hop on the latest trend sweeping the net, or you’ll be able to move your own little niche into a wider circle. Don’t worry, if you’ve been having success with your content so far, it won’t be hard to give yourself a bit more to write about!
You could also hop on the bandwagon of celebrating national days of the year. If it’s in your niche, you can theme a blog post, or a series of them leading up the day, around it. For example, if you’re an arts and crafts blog, you can write about National Sewing Machine Day on the 13th of June every year. You can talk about your own experience with sewing machines and how they improve what you do, or you could review the best models on the market. The world is your oyster here!
Collaborate with Fellow Bloggers
Collaborating with the people who publish alongside you is always a good way to generate more and more good content that’ll bring more and more people to you. Indeed, guest posting is one of the main ways to grow your viewership, but if you manage to make a deal with another blog in your niche, you get to combine your readerships for the long run.
It’s a lot easier to network with fellow bloggers than you might realise. Even just dropping them a line through the email they list on their site is a great way to form a first connection, but if you really want to capture their attention, regularly reading and commenting on their content is an amazing way to make a first impression. And don’t forget about social media either.
You can come up with a series together; if you both publish similar things, you can bounce experiments off of each other, and think about the different results you get from each. Link back and forth to each other’s blog, and you’ll present two connected but different pieces of content for a viewer to get through. And when you’ve got some loyal fans, that’s a very exciting thing to give them!
Develop Your USP
Your unique selling point is what makes your blog so popular and attractive. And the more defined and unusual your USP is, the better! If you’re looking to take your online content to the next level, then you’re going to want to think about this for a little while; you’ll want to think about ways to change it, a little organically, but for the better.
You never know when your readers are going to get a bit tired of what you’re currently publishing online. Of course, never give up on what makes your blog your blog, but always think about the twists and turns you could naturally go down. After all, your unique selling point is what brought your people to you in the first place, but that doesn’t mean you have to stick with it forever. But you don’t have to break out of it either, as long as you have a plan.
Above All Else, Make it Accessible
Your blog content should be accessible to everyone who wants to read it. Seeing as you won’t know most of these people personally, it’s key to adhere to general accessibility rules, that a lot of websites often forget to include as part of their UI design. So, you might want to reshape your blog interface whilst you’re at it; if you go through the tab order right now and see that it makes zero sense currently, you’re going to want to change that.
Sometimes your category tabs at the top of the page aren’t even a part of the load order, and that’s very bad for business!
At the same time, you might want to mix your media a little. Yes you’re a blog, and you mostly present your online content in a written format, but you could always use audio and visual techniques to make things a little more accessible, and even a little more flashy and sophisticated. You’ll show how much you care about your content, and about the people who want to read it, by catering in each and every way that’s currently possible to do so.
You won’t need to open your own podcast here, unless you want to, and you won’t need a Youtube channel either, but you can record yourself reading out your blog posts for someone who is sight impaired to make good use of. And seeing as videos often make use of audio description services, even at a basic level like captions, you’ll able to diversify your readership simply by including everyone. Bringing in a bit more traffic to your website, and even getting ranked a bit higher by Google - wouldn’t that be quite the upgrade?
Ready to Go to the Next Level?
It’s something a lot of bloggers dream of, and it’s perfectly doable! Your online content has the capacity to be better, and to do better. Even when you’re proud of the numbers you’re already pulling in, you can always take things a step further, as long as you want to.
Take the time now to come up with a plan, with all of these tips in the back of your mind, and you’ll have a new content strategy for bigger and better things by the time the new year is in! January is a great time to develop whilst online.
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