Blogging is an excellent way to grow your customer base and position yourself as a thought leader. However sometimes when we’re rushed or unable to give enough attention to the content we’re creating, embarrassing typos, technical glitches, and web building errors throw all that into disarray.
To help limit the number of post publication errors that make it into your blog’s content, we’ve developed the following list for you to use when publishing your next blog post. Use this list as a reference point when publishing your content to ensure a higher level of quality control, and to assist in building the trust and respect of your growing audience.
1. Check your spelling and grammar
OK, so let’s get the most obvious check out of the way first…spelling and grammar. The reality is that some people don’t care about the odd typo or grammatical error in a blog post, but others will write you off completely. It’s just not professional to publish content with grammatical errors, so try and keep your grammatical issues to a minimum! If you’re going to post content that’s aimed at positioning yourself as an expert or thought leader in your niche, step #1 is to ensure people can understand and easily peruse the content you’re publishing. It’s also worth noting that in all honesty, this would be the most common issue we come in contact with when we receive guest post submissions, and is often a determining factor which places otherwise strong articles in the “too hard basket” if we deem a lengthy edit will be required to get the article ready. Watch your spelling and grammar and your content will perform much better online!
2. Broken links
Broken links are basically inexcusable in today’s modern publication environment. With so many tools at your disposal to check links, there really isn’t any reason why your blog posts should include broken links. The primary reasons why it’s so important to ensure your links aren’t broken, is that it can drastically damage your SEO performance, result in you losing your audience if the link is internal, and can prove very frustrating to discerning readers. We recommend clicking on each and every link in your blog posts prior to publication, and ensuring you open external links in new windows for best practice.
3. Broken images
In many people’s opinion, broken images on a web page are far worse than broken links. Why you ask? Because broken links really stand out and deter website visitors from staying on your site. Often content publishers get caught out including images from external domains that they have no control over, and is a practice best avoided. We recommend running a link-checking program over your site from time to time to try and locate any broken images such as Xenu’s Link Sleuth. Tools such as this are a great way to keep your content compliant, and ensure broken images do not become a feature on your site. We also recommend ensuring you include ALT text on all images alongside a proper, descriptive naming convention to help search engines pick up your content.
4. How engaging is your post title?
In blogging, creating engaging post titles that get your readers’ attention is one of the most important aspects to any successful blog post. Some authors have been known to spend up to two hours alone on creating highly engaging post titles. If you’re ever in need of some ideas for blog post titles, we recommend checking out Copyblogger’s “10 Sure-Fire Headline Formulas That Work”, and ensuring that you pay attention to key SEO metrics when writing your post titles. If you’re using WordPress, a great plugin you can use is the Yoast SEO Plugin for WordPress that gives you some really clear guidelines on writing headlines and copy for search engines.
5. Does your post make sense and contribute something to your audience?
There’s little to be gained from simply adding a few more hundred words to the Internet; you’re content needs to be of value to your readers to be of value to you. If your content doesn’t read well, make sense, or offer any real learning opportunities or valuable insights, then you need to ask yourself is it worth publishing? Make sure, no matter how good you think your post may be, that you proof-read your post, and ask yourself these questions. If you feel you’re imparting some valuable learning outcomes, great! If not, don’t be afraid to start from scratch or rework your post.
6. Have I linked to one or more of my previous posts?
Building internal links to previous posts is a really smart blogging strategy that is widely used, but only if done so appropriately in a non-spammy way. The guidelines to internal linking are pretty simple; only link to something that will add value to the current topic, and don’t fill your content with irrelevant links. There’s also nothing wrong with linking to external sources, but if you can manage to drive your readers from one page of your site to another, your average time on site and pages per visit will rise. As a rule, try re-reading each of your posts before publishing them to see if you can fit in a contextual link you may have missed.
7. Have I encouraged users to comment and share their opinions?
It’s one thing to impart useful knowledge on your blog on your blog and expect nothing in return, it’s another to build an engaged social following on your blog and social channels through careful implementation of call-to-actions. Readers of online blogs generally love the chance to get close to content authors, and often relish intellectual debate and the chance to contribute something to a discussion themselves. Adding statements such as “If you’ve got any thoughts of your own on the above topic, we’d love to hear about them in the comments section below”, or “We’d love to hear your suggestions on X”, always vote well in this instance.
8. Have I included my post in one or more categories?
It’s amazing how much traffic post categories receive on blogs if they’re positioned clearly and are of interest to readership bases. By ensuring your post is appropriately categorised in one or more post categories (usually two or less), you’re boosting the number of pages which link to your content, and the chances of someone stumbling on your article via a search engine visitation or through a related link visitation.
9. Always use sub-headings and chunk your text
Sub-headings are a great way to increase the time your website visitors spend on your site. Often if a visitor sees a comprehensive slab of text with no real format, they’ll move on. By breaking your content down into clearly defined sub-sections using H2, H3 and even H4 tags, you’ll keep more visitors on page. By communicating to your audience that the content they’re about to consume is easily read, your exit rates will remain low. Because nobody wants to struggle through a page of content, ensuring that you’re content is easily read is a vital check point before publishing a blog post.
10. Is now the best time to publish this post?
One of the best features of WordPress is the ability to schedule posts. If you’re finding that you’re seeing strong readership at a particular time of day or week, scheduling your posts around these times is a common practice used in the blogosphere to boost visitation. Some bloggers will schedule posts up to a month in advance, especially if they’re cross linking from related topics of interest. Therefore you should always consider what content you have lined up for delivery, and whether or not holding off on a post may be a better strategy than publishing it immediately.
We’d love to hear your suggestions!
If you have any suggestions you think our community would be interested in hearing on this topic, please don’t hesitate to mention them in the comments section below.
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