Running a blog on your WordPress website can be a lot of work with everything from setup, writing to images and repeating it in a routine that can keep your site relevant and people coming back to it.
This work can quickly end up taking up a large chunk of your time, which can be a problem if you have a lot of other stuff you need to get done. This can lead to pushing the blog content back and focusing on other things more, which is a shame as blogposts are a great way to get people to your website and get your content and site onto a broader range of search results.
If you are looking for a way to make running your blog a feasible task or simply want to find ways to improve different aspects of your blog, its reach or your process, then this is the article for you.
What you need to look for
One of the most important questions that you need to ask yourself in this process is ‘what are you looking for?’. What do you need to make your process easier and what aspects bother you the most.
What you need is important as you might not need to improve all aspects, if some of them are easier for you to simply do yourself, or somethings might just not be relevant for your blog. Then you don’t need to spend unnecessary time trying to optimize something that aren’t needed.
It can be a good idea to divide your needs into categories:
- Absolut necessities: Things that are so necessary for your process that you probably won’t be able to do it without help with it. If it is something that becomes such a problem that it stops you from doing a blog post.
- Would help: These are things that would greatly help you run your blog and make the whole process easier to do, but aren’t a block for creating the posts in the first place.
- Just extra: These are things that would be a great help to the process and will add extra features or elements that can help you get a better overall product or process, but just works as the cherry on top.
If you can divide your need and want into these categories, then you will have a clear image of what you need and what takes priority.
Ways to enhance your blog
There are many ways to enhance your blog, so we have gathered a few different things to help you get started on the process.
Upgrade your SEO
One of the big purposes of the blog is to gain interactions with your site from people, who are interested in topics related to your expertise and field. If you write about thing that people are interested then they will be more likely to enter your site and to read and maybe engage with more of your site. But for that to happen you need people to find you, when they search for topics.
This means improving your SEO. Improving SEO means optimizing the content on your site and behind it. Making sure that you use keywords that fit with your topic, have an accurate and informative header and put work into your meta data.You can get a lot of help for all of this with finding out how well your content is being read by the computers on the other end and what can be improved. This help usually comes from plugins. There are many SEO plugins that help you cover most of the bases for your site, like AIO SEO, Monster Insight or Rank Math.
These will help you on your way when dealing with SEO and give you a lot of great features.
Keyword search
SEO doesn’t work on its own you need some level of knowledge about what keywords are relevant to your topics and what words and phrases seem to do well for your site, so that you can put extra focus these topics or grouped words.
There are many services that can help you with this, like Google Analytics or Ahrefs, that will help you with what words and combinations of the them get the most traction and is searched by people and where you place in these types of searches. You can also use plugins like Semrush to help you with this.
Build your pages
Using a page builder is a good way to get your page looking the best that it can and make it feel more professional with minimal effort and coding.
If you want a good looking page without having to spend a lot of time coding it, then you can use a page builder platform, like Elementor, Gutenberg or Seedprod. These will help you build a nice looking page and works together with WordPress seamlessly, so you don’t have to worry about that.
Send out notifications
One way to get people to come read your content, that isn’t SEO, is to notify them when you post. This only works for people who are signed into your website or have given you their email address. But if you want your users to be able to easily know when you post then this is a good way.
It can be done through mail services like Mailerlite or Mailchimp, so you can send newsletter style mails to people or with plugins like Push Engage, that allows you to notify people of your activity and get them back to your site and your content.
Let your content to be shared
A good way to get your content out is to allow people to easily share it on social media. This will allow for seamless interactions between your website and social media platforms and remind people that they have the option to share a blog post.
There are many different plugins, that let you add things like share buttons and lets you customize it to your aesthetic of your site and the networks you want people to share with. This can be done by plugins like AddToAny or ShareThis.
Add a table of content
To make your posts easier to navigate and let people get a clear look at the content within it you can add a table of content in the beginning. You can do this manually and with plugins.
One plugin you can use to help you is Lucky WP table of contents, that lets you add an interactive table to your page, so that people can skip to the sections that are relevant to them and what they are searching for.
Improving writing
There are many ways to improve your content and for a blog post the text is especially important. This means that you need to take a little extra care of this.
If what you have trouble with is grammar or making sure that your text is the best it can possibly be then you can use add-on features like Grammarly or Hemmingway App to show you want parts you need to look more into or where you might struggle.
Improve images
The text isn’t everything and can often end up looking quite boring if you just leave it by itself. Therefor it is important to also include images to make it feel more alive. If you don’t have the ability or time to go take photographs of everything, then it is possible to use stock images from places like Shutterstock or Unsplash.
If you want to create your own or change it up a little, then platforms, like Canva, can help you get the images to look just like you want them and has a lot of inspiration and help to find if images aren’t your thing.
Conclusion
There are many ways to improve your blog and hopefully some of the things we have introduced can help you on your way, but there are many other things out there made to help blogs. Taking small steps to improve your blog can go a long way and can very easily be a gradual process. Fortunately, most of the step introduced are ones that become easier as time goes on and you get more used to the processes. So, the only solution is to get started and find the help that works for you.