Adding a blog to your website is a wonderful means to connect with your audience and position yourself as an expert in your industry. It’s also a great and inexpensive way to promote your services and products without using pushy sales tactics. The start-up costs are low, and if you wish to expand, you possibly can try monetizing your blog.
Additionally, a blog helps your website rank higher in search results.
Whether you are blogging for your personal website or for your online business, there is little doubt that a blog offers many advantages. However, in addition to writing useful and relevant blog posts, you furthermore mght need to concentrate to the format of your blog if you wish to provide your readers with the absolute best user experience.
While the layout of your blog page and individual blog posts will largely depend on the theme you select, there are ways to make your blog look inviting and encourage visitors to read your content.
So in this post, we’ll share with you some information about the advantages of blogging and why it’s the perfect blog format for maximum reader engagement.
What are the advantages of getting a blog?
It’s not enough to hear that every business owner should have a blog. Here are some of the advantages.
Publishing consistent content on your blog will make it easier to:
- Establish yourself as an authority in your industry
- Build trust in your readers or customers
- Provide additional value to your site visitors
- Higher position in relevant search results
- Build a larger email list that could be used for marketing campaigns
- Increase brand recognition, especially across multiple channels akin to social media
- Collect feedback to make improvements
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Why is blog format so necessary?
Having a blog is necessary, whether you’re a hobby blogger, an online entrepreneur, or an eCommerce store owner. But is just publishing blog content – irrespective of the way it’s formatted – enough?
The short answer is no, it isn’t enough.
It is necessary to attract the attention of readers who have already visited your website and encourage them to stay there.
The length of time a user stays on your website is crucial to generating and retaining traffic. A high bounce rate could be attributed to a variety of aspects, including poor design or format, poor content quality, and a poor overall user experience.
The right format will help readers easily read your content, stay on your website longer, and encourage you to take motion, ultimately resulting in higher profitability for your small business.
So irrespective of what your website is about, the way you present the information is just as necessary as the information itself.
Best Ways to Format Your Blog
1. Create a Blog Style Guide
The first thing it’s best to do is create a blog style guide. A blog style guide is nothing greater than a document that outlines what fonts you utilize in your blog’s body text and headings, what color your links and buttons are, and what form of images or graphics you utilize in your posts.
This document will make it easier to maintain consistency across your site by ensuring that you just format each blog post in the same way as the remainder of your site, creating a consistent brand identity.
2. Rethink your sidebar
Your blog sidebar is necessary for readers to discover more of your content, find relevant information, and contact you. However, it might look cluttered if you add irrelevant widgets with too much information.
To fix this, think about what your blog’s primary goal is, and then rethink the information you set in your sidebar. The key is to keep widgets that encourage visitors to stay longer, explore more sections of your blog, and engage in the same in the comments section.
Additionally, minimize the use of social media widgets in your sidebar that take people away from your site, like HubSpot does. Social media widgets are great for social sharing, but they’ll drive readers away from your site before they have a probability to read more of your content.
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3. Use engaging images
Images are one of the most significant parts of your website’s blog. After all, a picture is value a thousand words. Not to mention that individuals process images 60,000 times faster than text.
Using images adds visual interest to your blog and helps you tell your story more compellingly. Add images that add meaning and context and help readers understand and remember information.
Also add a featured image that can appear on your blog archive page. A featured image attracts your visitors and makes them more likely to click on your blog post to read it.
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4. Add videos
In addition to images, adding video and audio clips to your blog posts can make it more interactive and engaging for your target market.
Here are some best practices to follow when adding the sort of media to your blog posts:
- Be sure to let users know instantly that there is video content in the post
- Don’t Create a Blog Post That’s Just Video Content (At Least Add Some Context)
- Optimize the width of your video or audio clip to suit your blog post
- Don’t forget to include a call to motion button so people can take motion after watching or listening to your video
Finally, whatever you do, don’t enable autoplay for video or audio clips. This could cause high bounce rates, and Google disables autoplay if you are using Chrome.
5. Use pull quotes
To add extra visual impact to your blog posts, consider adding a quote. Unlike a blockquote, a quote is a short piece of text that appears outside of the blog post text.
The foremost purpose of a pulled quote is to distract the reader from the text and give the quote greater dominance.
You can easily add a citation to your blog posts using the latest Gutenberg editor or using Pullquote block.
Remember that pull quotes are there only to highlight extremely necessary information. They mustn’t be overused as they distract the user and may cause them to leave your site.
6. Showcase your best content
You can use a blog archive page to showcase your best content first. This will help readers find the hottest content on your site and higher understand what your blog is about. It can even help them stick around and see what you have to offer.
The simplest way to discover what content is performing best on your site is to use a free analytics tool like Google Search Console. Simply log in and go to the “Performance” tab. There’s a tab called “Pages” that shows your best performing pages:
There are tools akin to Milk drink that robotically consolidate and display your best-performing content, so it’s useful to use these additional solutions as well.
7. Focus on typography
The font styles and sizes you utilize on your website will have a huge impact on the overall format of your blog. After all, if you utilize too many variations, it might be difficult to read.
Avoid using script or decorative fonts in headings and body text as they are unpleasant to the eye.
Also, use at least 16pt for the font size of your body text so that readers don’t have to zoom in to read it. This is very true for site visitors who access your site on a small mobile device.
8. Use colours fastidiously
Color plays an necessary role when it comes to readability, if it is not used accurately, you are making a big mistake.
For example, using dark text on a darker background can make your entire site unreadable. Instead, add some contrast between the text and the background.
Additionally, make sure your links are easy to distinguish from the remainder of the text so people can click on them and convert. If you have to, use an accent color for any buttons or calls to motion that are included in your blog posts.
9. Include related posts and internal links
At the end of each blog post, make sure to include links to other parts of your website.
This keeps site visitors on your site longer, helps direct people to other parts of your site, and may even get you higher rankings in search engines like google and yahoo. You can easily add a list of related posts manually at the end of each post or use plugin similar to Related Posts for WordPress.
Final thoughts
There you have it! 9 Proven Ways to Format Your Blog to Increase the Time People Spend on Your Site, Increase Engagement, and Even increase your search rankings.
So, if you wish to achieve success, it’s best to make it a priority to create a style guide and publish highly engaging blog posts that are formatted consistently. If you do this, your site visitors will enjoy a higher user experience and your follower or customer base will grow like never before.