Looking for blogging tips to improve your blog?
No matter how much you enjoy blogging, it’s easy to put it off.
It’s no secret that I adore blogging; I created my first blogs in the late 1990s. My oldest extant blog is my writing blog, launched in 2004. But blogging takes time and energy. When I’m busy, it’s easy to procrastinate and tell myself that I’ll blog when I have “more time.”
Here’s a quick solution for that, if you find yourself procrastinating too.
Blogging tips: spend five minutes on your blog every day
As the saying goes, out of sight, out of mind. So schedule a quick “check my blog” task in your daily task list. When you schedule it, you’re more likely to do it. If you don’t do quick checkups, you’ll forget about blogging for days and even weeks at a time.
Let’s look at some simple five-minute blogging tips.
1. Create lists for everything related to your blog
Lists are key to ensuring that you make your five-minute daily blogging sessions count. I keep my lists in a paper daily planner, but use any tool for your lists which you regularly check.
Lists have many benefits:
- They clear your mind, so you’re less stressed;
- You’re more productive because you know what to do next: blogging becomes easier;
- Big “tasks” become projects: you can chunk any project down into five-minute tasks so you’re less likely to feel overwhelmed.
For example, perhaps you’ve created a task: “choose a new blog template/ theme”. However, you soon realize that choosing a new theme is a project which is made up of many tasks.
Nibbling away at your little tasks gives you satisfaction. Before you know it, you’ve chosen the perfect theme and you’re ready to install it on your blog.
2. Update older posts and link them to newer posts
How many posts have you written?
Every post on your blog is a gateway for your site’s visitors, but due to the nature of blogs’ structure, older blog posts quickly fall off your home page. You forget about them, and fail to leverage them, by linking to fresh products, and new blog content.
You can read and link a post from last year or the year before to a newer post in five minutes. Update the older content if necessary. (Or delete the content if it’s no longer relevant.)
Remember to link out from your blog too. Your links are vital. Not only do links help with SEO, they help your visitors too.
3. Improve your titles: think headline, then SEO title
Your blog’s headline can be different from your blog’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization) title. So, in effect, you can have two titles if you wish.
An example, let’s say you have a blog post titled “10 Clever And Easy Bathroom Storage Ideas”. Your keyword is “bathroom storage ideas.” Currently, you’re using this title as both your headline and SEO title.
Keep “10 Clever And Easy Bathroom Storage Ideas” as your SEO title, then brainstorm fresh headline titles. Try using a headline generator, such as Portent’s Idea Generator for inspiration. (This tool offered “How Bathroom Storage Is Bringing Sexy Back.”)
By the way, if you’re using WordPress, install Yoast to make adding headline and SEO titles easier.
Over time, spending an occasional five minutes on blog titles is sure to improve your blog’s traffic.
4. It’s all about the images: create additional images for your blog posts
Not only do images make your blog posts more appealing, they also help with social media. Use a tool like Canva (it has thousands of templates) to create an image for a blog post in less than five minutes.
5. Create and use a mailing list for your blog
Creating a mailing list for your blog and sending messages to your subscribers takes time, but it pays off.
Remember: turn projects into itty bitty tasks.
The big benefit of a mailing list is that it keeps your subscribers coming back.
Bonus tip: set up a Resources/ Tutorials page with links to evergreen blog content
Over time, much valuable content gets lost on your website. That’s the nature of blogging.
If you create how-to or other content that’s useful for readers, build a webpage or a blog category to bring your site’s visitors’ attention to this content. Be sure to link these pages to your products too… And link from your products to useful blog posts.
Try these blogging tips—and keep adding little tasks to your lists
Do try a couple of these blogging tips. They work for me, as well as for my blogging students. You’ll be amazed at how quickly you’ll see a change in your blog’s traffic, and in your own mindset too.
Updated: January 8, 2023.
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Copywriter and marketing pro Angela Booth maintains a busy copywriting and ghostwriting practice. Fascinated by online marketing, she wrote one of the first business books for internet marketing, published by Allen & Unwin. She’s been an enthusiastic blogger since the late 1990s.
