Turning a good blog post into a great one doesn’t have to suck all of the time out of your day. Check out these 7 quick ways to improve a blog post and give your readers what they want:
People don’t read blog posts. They scan them. Learn how to format your blog posts for scanners so that your audience actually wants to consume them.
Download our free checklist on how to write scannable blog posts.
1. Write a better headline
The first blog post headline that pops into your head may be great. Or it may just be mediocre. But don’t feel bad about it. Many professional copywriters write tons of headlines for a single post before finding one they like.
If you need help writing a headline that hooks readers, try this winning formula:
Number or Trigger Word + Adjective + Keyword + Promise
E.g., 13 practical ways for writing insanely powerful website copy
You can then use CoSchedule’s headline analyzer to see if your headline packs a powerful punch. Check out our post on headline analyzer tools to learn how it works.
2. Shorten the introduction
When it comes to blog post intros, less is often more. What do we mean? You can typically improve a blog post by shortening your intro and getting straight to the point.
For example, look at this sample intro:
There are so many blogs out there today. So you can’t churn out mediocre posts. They need to be outstanding. When you post outstanding content on your blog, you’re more likely to keep readers coming back for more. But writing epic blog posts takes a lot of time, doesn’t it?
Not necessarily. Turning a good blog post into a great one doesn’t have to suck all of the time out of your day. Check out these 7 quick ways to improve a blog post and give your readers what they want:
And compare it to this one:
Turning a good blog post into a great one doesn’t have to suck all of the time out of your day. Check out these 7 quick ways to improve a blog post and give your readers what they want:
Which one’s stronger? Which one doesn’t waste your reader’s time?
3. Don’t forget about your conclusion
Have you ever noticed that stand-up comedy routines always seem to end abruptly? It feels a bit weird, doesn’t it? Like the comedian just left you hanging.
Don’t do this to the people who read your blog.
A cliffhanger may work once in a while. But your blog post isn’t the season finale of a cable TV show. That’s why you can improve a blog post by writing a thoughtful conclusion. Summarize your key points, make it clear what readers should take away from your post, and include a call-to-action.
You conclusion doesn’t have to be a profound, earth-shattering observation. It just needs to wrap things up and tell your reader what to do next.
4. Include great photos
When people read blog posts, they don’t want to see just text. That’s why an engaging image can get 30–50% more sets of eyeballs on your blog content.
Improve a blog post by adding some good eye candy to it. Find some good stock photos, grab some screen shots, or snap some pictures yourself. Just be sure that whatever you do, you don’t scrape photos from another site without permission. Otherwise, you could end up in some scorching hot water.
5. Use subheadings
An easy way to instantly improve a blog post is to add subheadings. Subheadings are critical for blog posts because most readers won’t read a post from beginning to end. Instead, they’ll scan it by jumping from one sentence or paragraph to another.
Subheadings make it easy for scanners to find out what each section of your post is about and to decide whether they should read it. Your readers may be looking for the very information you’ve included in one of your paragraphs. But if they have to scan a long post that doesn’t have any subheadings, they may miss it.
6. Increase your white space
Subheadings aren’t the only formatting feature that help scanners and other readers get value from your post. You can also improve a blog post by creating more white space – the space in a post that isn’t covered by anything.
Remember the last time you were on a blog or website that was super cluttered – one with dense paragraphs, images, banner ads, and buttons everywhere? We bet it was pretty overwhelming. And even if it didn’t feel this way, you might not have been able to focus very well on reading the content on the page.
Make it easier for readers to digest the information in your blog post by using these simple tricks:
- Make paragraphs short
- Split long paragraphs into multiple smaller ones
- Use bulleted or numbered lists
- Increase the spacing between lines
7. Add links
A quick way to improve a blog post by adding value is to link to other sources in your post. Do you reference something you’ve written about in another post? Add a link to that post. Do you talk about an app that will help your readers get something done more efficiently? Link to it.
Adding links to your blog post helps you in many different ways. It improves your SEO, keeps people on your blog (when you link internally), and helps you position yourself as a credible expert.
Use these tips to quickly improve a blog post
Blogging can be time consuming. But turning an okay post into a stronger one doesn’t have to take hours. Even if you have just a few minutes to spare, you can put at least some of these 7 quick tips into action.
People don’t read blog posts. They scan them. Learn how to format your blog posts for scanners so that your audience actually wants to consume them.
Download our free checklist on how to write scannable blog posts.
