Writing Content

The post How to Use Numbers Effectively in Your Blog Posts appeared first on ProBlogger. Photo by Nick Hillier on Unsplash You’re a blogger, so hopefully you feel confident working with words. But words alone aren’t enough. Even if you haven’t been blogging for long (or are yet to start), you’ve probably noticed numbers coming up a lot in other people’s posts. You often find numbers in post titles such as: How I Made over $500,000 with the Amazon Affiliate Program (ProBlogger) Marketing Doesn’t Have to Be Sleazy: 5 Real-World Examples (Copyblogger) $453k in 33 Days: A Guide to Launching on Kickstarter – Guest Post by John Lee Dumas (Smart Passive Income) Even if they don’t appear in the post’s title of the post, numbers can be

The post Why Nobody Reads Your Content and What to do About it appeared first on ProBlogger. Photo by Brands&People on Unsplash Question: How do people read online? Answer: They don’t read, they scan. In research on how people read websites it’s been found that 79{6f482cd57796f86e9ad1be82bcf1dcf19049bb2b279893497447a8f8ed9023fd} of users first scanned any new page they came across and only 16{6f482cd57796f86e9ad1be82bcf1dcf19049bb2b279893497447a8f8ed9023fd} read word-by-word. Knowing this, how should bloggers who want to reach an audience and communicate effectively write? Why do people scan? Chances are that not everyone who comes across your blog will already be a devoted reader. These new visitors want to find out quickly whether reading what you’ve written is a worthwhile investment of their time. Studies have also shown that

The post Giving Underperforming Posts a Second Chance with Updates appeared first on ProBlogger. Photo by Jeffrey F Lin on Unsplash If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again…. Have you ever written a post that you thought would hit the spot with your readers, generate lots of interest and/or stimulate a great conversation and then find it fell flat on it’s face? I have – in fact it happens all the time for a variety of reasons: Sometimes your posts fall over because other stories break in the blogosphere and hog all the attention Perhaps you just had some bad luck and the right influential blogger didn’t happen to see your post (and spread the word) At other times its because

The post Seasonal Traffic and How to Capture It for Your Blog appeared first on ProBlogger. Photo by Chris Lawton on Unsplash Don’t Miss Seasonal Opportunities on Your Blog for Spectacular Traffic. Read to the bottom of this post for an example of how I used the same content three times in 18 months to generate 50,000 page views on one post. One of the skills that I encourage bloggers to develop is to think ahead about what events might be coming up that will impact the niche that you’re writing about. The web is a fairly rhythmic place and every year there are waves of activity across search engines and other websites that are quite predictable. For example: In November and December every year millions of

The post The Secret to Writing Effective Sales Copy appeared first on ProBlogger. This post is based on episode 105 of the ProBlogger podcast. This week I want to talk about writing sales copy. Now chances are you’d much rather write a blog post than try and sell something. You may have even become a blogger so you can avoid writing sales copy. But it’s an important skill to have, especially if you plan on monetizing your blog by selling products or services. And I’m going to talk through a little exercise that will get you in the right frame of mind for writing it. Selling without the sleaze If the idea of selling makes you feel sleazy, you’re not alone. At one point I worked in sales

The post How to Structure Your Blog Posts with Subheadings appeared first on ProBlogger. This post is based on episode 132 of the ProBlogger podcast. I’m willing to bet that every blog post you’ve ever written has a main heading at the top. (If you use WordPress, it’s usually the title.) But how many of them have subheadings? Even if you’ve never used them before, chances are you know what they are (especially if you’re a regular ProBlogger reader). They’re those ‘mini titles’ you see in posts that are formatted a little differently to the rest of the text. They might be a different colour, in a larger font, or even in a completely different font. Good for the reader Now not every post needs subheadings. For

The post How to Edit Your Blog Posts in 7 Simple Steps appeared first on ProBlogger. This post is based on episode 168 of the ProBlogger podcast. We often talk about being a great writer. But most great writers are also great editors, because chances are their first drafts were far from perfect. So here’s how to be a great editor of your own work and have people think you’re a great writer, too. Step 1. Plan what you’re going to write Okay, so this isn’t technically part of the editing process. But planning what you’re going to talk about before you start writing will make the editing process a lot easier. It’s far easier to set up a good structure at the beginning than to rearrange entire