7 Ways to Revamp and Improve Your Blog
There are infinite improvements you can make to your blog on an ongoing basis. A blog can be a great source of income once your traffic increases to a point of appeal to advertisers. Everyone wants their blog to be optimized to a point where it’s making them money on the side. Blog owners know that they shouldn’t neglect their blog, yet they often do exactly that. Instead of neglecting your blog, you should regularly be educating yourself on updates, improvements and features you may want to add to your blog to increase traffic and attract returning visitors. Perhaps you’ve been thinking about an all-out blog makeover, or simply thought of some improvements you’d like to add to it. If that’s the case, now is the time. Stop delaying, stop neglecting, and try out these 5 improvements for your blog:
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Add a Call-To-Action to Every Blog Post
A call-to-action is often missing from our blog posts, and a fantastic improvement to make to your blog is to add a call-to-action to help your posts get more comments and shares. At the bottom of your blog post, simply add a line (in bold) requesting action from your readers. You’d be surprised how effective asking people to share your content is. A reader is much more likely to share, or spread the word, and promote your post if asked to. Similarly, you can add a call-to-action at the end of your blog posts that asks your readers to comment their thoughts on the article.
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Switch to Cloud Hosting
If your blog website is currently using regular hosting on a physical server, you might want to consider switching to the newest advancement in hosting technology, which is cloud hosting. Cloud hosting delivers hosting on a virtual network and advancement in cloud hosting technology has made it very secure. Cloud hosting offers a much more flexible pricing structure than regular hosting, and it’s also more scalable and higher performing. Those aren’t the only benefits of cloud hosting, though, so be sure to check out this list of 10 benefits of cloud hosting.
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Try a New, More Modern WordPress Theme
When you first decided that you wanted to start a blog, you may have chosen a WordPress theme that is now outdated. Perhaps the theme you chose is now a design that doesn’t look as modern as it should. Although implementing a new WordPress theme requires that you pay a website designer again, it’s well worth it to give your blog a beautiful makeover. Your new theme should be more modern, cleaner and use more eye-catching colors.
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Add or Change Your Pop-Up Message
A fantastic tool your blog should have is a pop-up message, which encourages readers to subscribe to your blog or ‘like’ your blog on Facebook. Even if you already have a pop-up message, you may want to update it or make some changes to improve it. For example, it’s best if your pop-up message waits about 5 – 10 seconds to pop up, and it’s best if it is humorous instead of dictating. So, instead of your pop-up messages saying “Like us on Facebook!” it could say “We like you! Like us back?” Do your research and figure out which types of pop-ups generate the most results.
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Install Useful Plugins or Widgets
There are probably tons of plugins and widgets that would greatly improve your blog. For example, there are WordPress plugins that allow you to make your blog’s images shareable, which leads to more traffic. You can make your blog’s images pinnable on Pinterest by installing one of Shareaholic’s image-sharing plugins. Another great plugin is one that allows for tweetable quotes. Your article could highlight a specific quote and allow the reader to ‘tweet’ it out to their followers. With the plugin, it looks like a cool quote-box design.
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Add Internal Links to Every Blog Post
Every blog post should contain at least 2 internal links to other, similar articles on your blog. Adding these internal links is a great way to improve your blog’s pageviews and boost your blog’s analytics. Internal links are also great for SEO. Simply highlight anchor text that relates to another blog post on your page, which still relates to the original blog post.
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Update Old Blog Posts
If your blog has been active for awhile, you probably have tons of older posts that need updating. Perhaps back in the day, when you first started blogging, you weren’t as good at adding SEO-friendly tags and keywords to your articles. Or, perhaps your grammar wasn’t as good as it is now. You can bring old blog posts back to life by fixing grammar issues, updating the keywords and tags, and adding shareable images and internal links. This way, your old blog posts will start to get more traffic.