When you search for the WordPress website or blogging tutorials, there must be full pages of content illustrating how to add more interesting and valuable content or tech you how to improve your writing. However, to operating a successful blog site on WordPress is not only on more and better content on the site. Actually, it is better to go away from composing more content on your site and pay attention to some others you’re able to obtain better effect on you site, like marrying content marketing and SEO.
There are a lot of factors having an effect on your blog success, evolving data set, tools, and strategies. Correctly choosing and using them will be the important to your blog success.
Which Data do you need?
Using a right web metric is vital for you to make progress on your blog, because you need to use right data sets to track the progress as well as correctly adjust your blog, so as to drive the improvement. Wrong data or deficient data can lead you stepping backward rather than stepping forward. So, you can understand the importance of data. Also, you should know which type of data is right.
Depending on you blog’s niche, you may focus on different statistical data types, but there are still 4 vital stats each blogger should look at and understand. They are as following:
- Visitor Growth – To measure the visit growth, understanding the number of unique visitors your blog get is one of the best way! And, you also need to know the huge difference between the ten new visitors and one regular visitor visiting your site ten times one month.
- Referrals – It is to help you know where the traffic coming from. Also, you can understand who send you most traffic, which part on your site drives most traffic, and which part wastes your efforts.
- Bounce Rates – It is an important hint enabling you to know whether you are offering the right audience the right content.
- Average Per Page Visits & Time on your site –Tracking average visits per page as well as the time each visitor spending on your blog can help you make sense the methods to improve the “stickiness” of your blog.
Using good tool makes things done better and more effectively. You can choose a free but easy-to-use tool to help you track and report these data, such as Google Analytics. Importantly, your WordPress blog can integrate it. After you have a good knowledge about the four data types on you site, you need to jump into 15 practices for improving your blog.
One: Understand your audience
It is because the better you know them, the better you can meet their demands.
To meet the needs customers have is one of the best ways to make your site success. However, before you decide which content you are going to deliver to your visitors, you should take time to know who your typical blog visitors and customers are. For example, you need to figure out their general age, education level, and special cultural background.
After that, you can move to gear your blog fit your audience. There are several survey tools which can help you easily understand who your blog audience is.
- Survey Monkey – It enables you to ask your visitors questions to help you know them better.
- Alexa – The free tool offers you lots of data which makes you know what your competitors are performing. Punch their site addresses, and receive the data about where their visitors are coming from, and what their competition is.
- Xtensio – It helps your whole team understand your target audience and focus on the goal to reach the audience, by allowing creating a user persona for sharing.
Two: Data-driven improvement strategies
After collecting and analyzing the right data, you can step to improve your blog. Generally, you should understand what works and others not, and also lead your efforts to the things good to your blog most.
Things you can do in reality
- Invest more efforts and money into the best 10 traffic sources for more. For example, if your major traffic comes from Facebook, then you should spend more on some target Facebook ads.
- Spend twice on the ads campaign working! If you are taking $40/mo on a Google ad which is also bringing lots of traffic on your blog, then you should spend $80/mo, helping reach more audience.
- When figuring out which topics attracting more readers, you can expend on the related content, which can obtain the highest social media shares or the best engagement rate.
- Revamp the topics with low performance, to make them fresh again and fulfill your target audience’s needs.
Three: Low hanging fruit
Low hanging fruit is the fruit easy to get. Fortunately, most sites have the low hanging fruit for audience to easily pick. Based on the principle, there are a series of basic actions you can take to immediately improve your blog:
- Promote the latest blogs on social media by IFTTT.
- Create your blog’s social media profile.
- Include social media sharing buttons on your blog.
- Set up a contact page for visitors to reach you easily.
- Install a 3-party comment plugin or system on your site, good to increase user engagement rate.
- Add a disclaimer page that can make readers trust you.
- Re-share your content to make it always in the public eyes, especially the older posts often ignored.
- Write some roundups including the best content on your site.
- For popular posts, you can make some infographics to further explain them.
- Do A/B tests to figure out how everything is going on, such as CTA buttons and navigation.
- Define your blog theme and ensure each post match up your blog theme or goals.
- Always check typos, misspellings, and grammar mistakes on you blog, because these low-level mistakes really make a blog unprofessional.
- Set up an editorial calendar.
- Make a backup schedule to get rid of data loss risks.
- Follow and Learn from other great blogs in your niche.
- Comment on and offer valuable thoughts to other blogs.
- Make your CTA word as simple and clear as possible, and replace the common words such as “click here” with those having stronger commands like “Get Free eBook Now”.
- Make sure your images always relevant to your post, and balance text and images.
- Fix broken links. There are many useful plugins available helping you find the broken links easily on a WordPress blog.
Four: Collect emails
To collect the target audience’s contact information is very important, because you can still market to the individuals after their visits. And because they are the group interested in your topic, the marketing to them will be more effective.
Besides, whereas current social media is really overcrowded, email is still a good channel to reach specific audience you target with your special materials. There are about 91% people checking their email box every day, so your emails will be read very possible. If you will do this practice, you definitely need some reliable email marketing service providers or tools to help you go smoothly.
According to our experience in email hosting and email marketing review, we recommend you the 4 best email marketing service providers, Mail Chimp, AWeber, Constant Contact, and GetResponse.
Additionally, to collect email information, you will need to use a well-designed opt-in form for users to sign up for your mailing list. Note there is possibility to be suited of spamming those in the list, but with reliable email marketing tools, the possibility will be lower. Some companies we recommended above will offer you built-in plugins of opt-in forms which sync up with your WordPress blog.
Five: “About” page
A truly fantastic About page should not only include your company’s facts, but also your story, core beliefs, and unique competitiveness. Here we are to recommend you 3 tips to create an amazing About page.
Idea 1: Guide readers with an opening hook to grabbing them.
This is the About page of Yellow Leaf hammocks which grab readers with the line on the page. So, what can you do to get it? Only read it on!
Idea 2: Make it personal.
Eight Hour Day simply leads with “Hi! We are Nathan Strandberg and Katie Kirk…” Such a strong and conversational tone can help pull readers in.
Idea 3: Share your history.
This example starts About page with his company’s history. For you, your About page also needs include a reflection your personality and business statement. Try to make it more interesting and enable readers feel like they already learn you on the personal level.
Six: Never use the ugly stock images
Your ugly stock images or photos not only are indistinctive and bland, but also may be contained in multiple websites. If you use them on your blog, they will make your site less professional and leave a bad effect on you site. Therefore, you should avoid using them! What are the ugly stock images or photos? They are the photos or images with the badly posed models, complete white backgrounds, and fake expressions, or the photos are unrelated to your topic.
Don’t worry! There are many places for you to get free but beautiful images and photos, such as Pixabay and Pexels. Besides, you can also edit the photos via Instagram, Pic Monkey, and Canva on mobile your phone. This is from Little Visuals.
Seven: Less is more for blog design
To improve your blog site, the blog deign is one part you can’t ignore. It decides how well you leave your readers the first impression of your blog. So, the balance of this page is very important! Each element should contribute to a usable as well as visually pleasing effect. There are 3 tips about good blog design.
Tip 1: Never place all content together!
The balance between white room and other elements is important. So, be wise to use the negative space for creating the sleek look; delete or move unnecessary items elsewhere; try to reduce the clutter and increase white room for better viewing environment of pages.
Tip 2: Be simpler to minimize distraction
A good blogger should pay more attention to content. The site Mint does this well, to make readers focus on the site’s purpose naturally and sign up.
Tip 3: Add fewer items in the top navigation menu
Less navigation menu makes its more focusing and clean. To make up the other parts, you can also add the sub categories under lager menus. Sometime, the e-commerce websites makes its better. For example, this Amazon.com site shows the good instance of less navigation menu items.
If your blog need to handle lots of categories, you have to firstly come up with the main categories to display. Note less is more, but always be clear!
Eight: Eat Your Dog Food
Working on your old content is another simple method to improve your blog. The following list of things is what you can do to your old posts:
- Check grammar mistakes and correct them.
- Add better post titles as well as sub headlines to replace the old ones. Don’t forget to check the new titles and sub headlines target the keywords you need and be interesting enough to grab readers’ attention.
- Promote old content on social media with new ideas. You can use your old posts as a start to lead a chat or discussion on Facebook or Twitter.
- Use another interesting and fresh method to respond and present old content, such as video or slideshow.
- Upgrade and recycle old post into something more valuable.
Nine: Present your best posts or Highlight the topic readers like most
A good blog can have a ribbon page featuring all best posts on the blog, and you can try it. Besides, you can also choose to highlight a specific topic that your readers are most interested in, according to your data analysis.
The content you could display and highlight may include the types like:
- How-to tutorials on a specific subject
- Case study
- Popular topics
- Advanced topics
Ten: Connect with your competitors
If possible, you’d better connect with the influencers in your niche, even though you are competing for the similar traffic. Leave the competition behind, you may get more from the connection with them, so do they. These influencers already have enough traffic going around, so when they make recommendations on yours, their readers tend to check your blog. So, How?
- Link up with other influential bloggers. Because you both target the similar audience, you both can benefit. Even more, you can connect with the related niches’ bloggers.
- Share information with them. If you know the place to successfully advertise, and others know others as well. So, you both share information, then you both get the maximum benefits.
- Guest post is one way to increase organic traffic. So, you both can exchange the guest post the reach each other’s readers for more traffic.
- About content, when connecting with others, you both can share writing as well as editing ideas to optimize your content.
Eleven: Make use of Facebook ad
Currently, Facebook’s active users per day are up to millions and the number is continuing to increase as well. Also, Facebook is the second largest media owners, and Facebook and Google together took 20% total global ad spend. Therefore, for bloggers, Facebook is absolutely a good place to put your ads. If you decide to use Facebook to promote your blog and brand, you must know how it works and take time to optimize it and make it worth your while. Here, we collect some tips to help you start easier:
- Track Facebook new features which are normally released on a weekly basis. Be sure to always be the first one to use its new ad formats such as Canvas ads, DPA carousel ads, and Instagram video ads.
- Perform automatic A/B testing to increse ad efficiency and reduce costs via an ad tool. For example, Asepresso can help users create, run, as well as track hundreds of ads in one campaign.
- Cross promote or cross sell. Even though you do not sell any actual products, you can use the trick of cross selling to keep your current visitors. Cross promoting is a good idea as well. When visitors viewing your one single page, you can cross promote other relevant products or posts automatically via retargeting feature.
- Figure out how you can use Facebook ads to reach targeted audience.
- Again! Learn from your competitors from learning what they are doing first. Or, you can target and push your own Facebook ads to the audiences who have already visited other competitors’ Facebook ads.
- Focus on promoting a benefit, instead of a product. You should understand that the sales of content or others always come from the relationship you build with your own audience. So, you have to make your audience learn how your content is valuable to them, or what your content can offer to them for their needs?
- More photos. Photo posts are founded that they can get more engagement than those without photos. You just need to pick out the right, interesting, and favorable photos for your posts.
Twelve: Build and expand your team with your business
When your business grows, never ignore to grow your team. Pay attention to finding the persons who are both trustworthy and provide your team with really high-quality work. After training, they should complete jobs with a little your direction. Your goal is to finally easily manage your team and also leave them the actual work. Working with right team and having continued efforts, you blog can continue to expend as well.
Furthermore
When working on a WordPress blog site, you can find there are many things you can do, we just pick put some easy but very useful tips for you. However, there are still some important things we do not illustrate, such as on-page SEO and off-page SEO, which are both good to boost your blog traffic. Our site have already talked details about them, you can go to check. Finally, we want to tell you that, running a blog and making it popular everlasting are not an easy job, because it takes time and needs your patience. Now, you can start, and Good Luck!