Blog posts have become a critical way of maintaining relationship with clients, connecting with customers, promoting products or services, exchanging ideas, learning about yourself and reflecting on your activities or business and maintaining creativity. But a blog without direction is a blog that’s ineffective, and a blog that’s ineffective fails to engage readers and increase readership. To avoid making common blogging mistakes that turn readers off, continue reading to learn how to ensure you are maintaining a successful blog.

1. Create an Engaging Post Title
Picking the post’s title can be one of the biggest challenges in creating a successful blog, and often time writers opt to title their posts after their content has been written. While this can be a successful strategy, choosing your post’s title prior to creating your content is much more effective. Creating a title before writing the body of your blog gives you a perfect launching point for your content, concisely sums up your overall point or purpose, and helps you to stay on track while writing.

Your title post, in addition to being created before you write your content, should be engaging, and should accurately and succinctly summarize what you want to say. It should be clear and concise, and easily understandable by readers. For example, “5 Components of a Successful Blog Post” is a much more grabbing title than, “The 5 Things You Should Do if You want to Write a Successful Blog Post that Will Attract Readers.” While the latter still gets the main point across, the former more succinctly summarizes the main point and easily gives readers an understanding of what the post will be about.

2. A Short, Sweet, and Relevant Introduction
Once you’ve chosen your blog’s title, you should create an introductory paragraph that will serve as a quick summary of why your post is relevant to the reader and what the post will cover. Keep the introduction to a paragraph (3-5 sentences) or less — anything longer should be shortened and moved to the body of the post. Keep your introduction interesting, and try to create a cliffhanger that will keep the reader engaged and wanting more.

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Jackson has mastered the art of finding the balance between professionalism and keeping this interesting.

3. A Post That’s Readable and Engaging
It’s your job as a blog writer to take even the most complex of terms, mundane of subjects, or obscure of ideas and summarize them in a way that’s understandable and interesting to the layperson. One of the most effective strategies for keeping posts interesting and understandable is to incorporate your own voice and style of writing. While business posts should remain professional, there’s no reason why they can’t also incorporate humor or personal insights. Both of these components will help to set apart your blog and will keep readers attracted to your writing.

Finally, make sure that you format your blog in a way that is readable. Use fonts that are easy to read, choose a text size that isn’t too small or a color that’s hard to make out, break up your ideas into different paragraph, and use headings and subheading when appropriate. Doing so will make your post easy to navigate and more reader-friendly.

4. A Blog that’s Relevant and Factual
Your blog should serve as an authoritative source for information for your readers, and in order to legitimize this you need to make sure that any declarative statements you make or claim as fact are backed up with official sources or research. Having links in your blog to news sites, educational sites, or government sites is a great way to support any statements or claims that you make.

Your blog should also be relevant to your readers, and once you’ve chosen a topic and title you should stick to it. Don’t set out to write a blog about dog training and then include a paragraph about why people should keep pets. The reader should know exactly what he’s in for when he clicks on your post, and shouldn’t find any surprises throughout the body of your blog.

5. A Blog That’s Updated Routinely
Now that you’ve created your first blog post and it has a great title, perfect introduction, informative body content, and is loved by your readers, your job’s not over: creating a successful blog and keeping readers engaged means keeping your blog up-to-date, and consistently posting new information. You should be prepared to update your blog daily in order to keep readers interested and wanting more. If daily posts aren’t possible for you, then plan on updating your blog on a scheduled routine — whether weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly — so that readers know when to expect a new post from you.

If you simply do not have the time to create content for your blog, sign up with Content Runner and we can take care of the ensuring your content is relevant, well-written and exactly what you are looking for.