6 Essentials Your Blog is Missing

Your blog is how you communicate with your audience. You share your thoughts, views, opinions and ideas on your industry. Being an industry expert as you are, you produce original and compelling content. Unfortunately, that’s not enough to convert readers to subscribers and customers. Successful blogs accomplish thought leadership and recognition through simple but necessary extra features. Does your blog have all six?

 

1. Social Sharing Links

The visibility and shareability of your posts are facilitated by easy social share links. WordPress plugins make this a one or two-click installation process.

Year-over-year growth in unique site traffic is 7.8x higher for content marketing leaders compared to followers (19.7% vs 2.5%).

This example from Office Vibe shows social buttons on the left. Right away we know if and where to share this piece of content. Added bonus: The social share plugin has a share counter telling you how many times the post was shared across the 4 platforms.

 

 

51% of B2B buyers rely more on content to research and make B2B purchasing decisions than before. Share on X

 

2. Related Reading

Click through rates and time on site increases when a user jumps to different places on your site. When they see related content on the same topic, or something within the same message framework sas the current blog article they are on, that’s an easy sell.

51% of B2B buyers rely more on content to research and make B2B purchasing decisions than they did a year ago.
Our two examples from The Content Strategist and The Muse show related reading links hosted in two useful places: the sidebars and the bottom, respectively. Including related posts nearby increases your clicks and keeps your potential customer on the site longer.

 

3. Click-to-tweets

Want users share a certain section of the article to twitter instead of the title? Make it easy for them with pre populated tweets. Using the two handy tools of bitly and clicktotweet.com, tweetable content is one click away. This example below shows what exactly will be tweeted. The red outline highlights the link as a way to break up the content in the post.

4. Internal SEO

Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about 3 times as many leads.

Break up your content with in-line related content. In between paragraphs is a great way to ease your audience into clicking another handy post or page. Boost your SEO by linking key terms to these additional pages. The example below from Click Boarding shows further insight into a related area.

 

 

5. Calls to Action

At the end of your article, prompt your reader to take action. Whether if be read another blog, view a website page, or follow you on Social Media, a CTA is an easy way to turn a reader into a conversion. The example below is how a blog post ends on Triage Staffing’s website. After reading about an interesting post about travel nursing, the post offers two helpful links to take additional action.

 

6. Newsletter Signup

Email’s ROI was 28.5% compared to 7% for direct mail.

Build up your email contact list with a one-click, simple subscription form. This example from Invisionapp has a clean and very pretty area to sign up for the marketing emails at the end of the post. There are no hoops to jump through and no additional clicks. Typing an email and hitting the big pink button gets you on the list.

 

88% of B2B marketers in North America use content marketing, but 70% of marketers lack a consistent or integrated content strategy.

Bump up your content with subscription forms, CTAs and click-to-tweets. Increase your shares, expand your reach and grow your audience with simple but game-changing content marketing elements.