Increase Blog Leverage

Written by: Gary Horsman

Increase Blog Leverage

Increase Your Readership

When it comes to reaching a wider readership for a content marketing website, many marketers focus on external efforts like ads, guest posting, and syndication. While promoting your content elsewhere is important, here are five ways to help your audience which will also help you to grow your audience without ever leaving home. Here are some on-page strategies for getting more clicks, reads, and downloads on your blog.

Find and Use Target Keywords

When crafting a content piece, you should be referring to your target keyword list constantly. Try to include relevant keywords in every element of your post, whether it’s visible to your readers or not: title, subheaders, body, meta descriptions, image captions and titles, etc. This will help you raise your Google search ranking, making it easier for people to find your content. Just make sure you’re not letting keywords overwhelm the natural flow and clarity of your writing.

Always write for your human audience but have the search engine in mind as well.

Create Evergreen Blog Content

Reporting on news could be a nice strategy for some real estate companies and it will be worth it for you to do it from time to time as well. However, a very valuable blog post is what I define as an “evergreen” post. Evergreen blog posts or ideas don’t depend on current events or the news. Evergreen content marketing posts are less time sensitive. They remain relevant to your audience far into the future. They build value and traffic for a longer time frame.

Make Subscriptions a Goal

Instead of spending money on ads and bombarding your social media accounts to attract new readers, focus on establishing a loyal base of repeat readers via a blog subscription function. Include a lead capture form with every post on your blog, along with a clear call to action asking readers to subscribe. If you’re offering downloadable content (neighborhood guides, ebooks, infographics, etc.), ask users to provide an email address in return for this content. Once you’ve built a list of contacts, you can keep them up to date on your content with a weekly or monthly email newsletter.

Make Your Content Easy to Share

Don’t let all the distracting activity on your Facebook news feed fool you. It can be a big deal when someone enjoys your blog enough to broadcast it to the world via social media, and likes beget more likes. That’s why you shouldn’t waste any opportunity for your readers to like and share your content. Be sure to add like and share buttons for every major social network (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, etc.), regardless of whether you use it. For sites you’re active on, include a follow or subscribe button as well. Finally, place these buttons not just at the bottom of your posts, but also at the top.

Let Readers Consume When They Want To Consume

Many of us come across great content that we simply don’t have time to enjoy when we find it. While there are several ways to save content, some are better than others. Browser bookmarking is clunky and outdated. RSS feeds are too technical for most users, and it’s easy to get lost among the thousands of posts in reader applications. Instead, people are turning to convenient apps like Readability which allow you to save content posts with one click and access them later on any device in a simple, readable format. Be sure to embed save buttons for any “read later” service alongside your social media buttons.