Brighter Blogging Roundup: Friday 26th July
Looking for some extra blogging inspiration?
Each week, I pick a bunch of my favourite blog posts to share with you. Here’s this week’s:
TOP READ: The Death of Google Search Traffic and What It Means for Marketers, Michael Stelzner, Social Media Examiner
This fascinating (and disturbing!) post was my favourite of this week. In it, Michael (the CEO/founder of the massive blog Social Media Examiner) takes a detailed look at the increasing Google trend of showing answers, rather than just titles, links, and descriptions, in Google’s search engine results, hence potentially costing bloggers traffic. He links this trend with the rise of Alexa and voice search, and also shows how it’s working on mobile search. Well worth a read.
STRATEGY: How to Win Over New Kinds of Reader, Sonia Simone, Copyblogger
This great post uses the 4MAT teaching framework and makes it a little catchier, explaining how you can divide your readers into four different types, based on what’s most important to them when learning about a new topic. (E.g. some readers want to put things into practice, other want lots of facts and evidence that help them trust your authority.)
EDITING: 6 Grammar Checkers and Editing Tools to Make Your Writing Super Clean, The Write Life
If spelling, grammar, and punctuation aren’t your strong points, then these automatic editors can help. Several are free (though you’ll normally need to pay for a “pro” version to get access to all the features). The Write Life has reviewed them thoroughly and fairly here, pointing out what would make them better as well as what’s best about each one, and giving a recommendation for how best to use them. It’s also a great example of a well-structured review/recommendation post that uses affiliate links.
CONTENT: Four Types of Blog Post to Create if You Don’t Want to Write Much, Ali Luke, ProBlogger
This post (by yours truly) is a guide to types of posts you can “write” … without having to type a whole lot of your own words. If you’re feeling a bit burnt out on writing, or if you want to do something a bit different on your blog, give one of these a try. (Note: I don’t cover video posts or image-based posts; these ideas are all focused on full-length written posts.)
MISTAKES: 13 Blogging Mistakes Most Beginner Bloggers Make, Lindsay Kolowich, Hubspot
This comprehensive post goes thoruhg a whole bunch of tips, explaining where bloggers often go wrong and how to get things right. There’s probably nothing controversial or new here, but it’s all great advice and well worth paying attention to. You don’t necessarily need to be a “beginner” blogger to benefit from this one, either: if you feel like you’re struggling to gain traction with your blog, use it as a trouble-shooting checklist.
Hope you enjoy these posts as much as I did! Make sure you’re on the newsletter list so you don’t miss out on my future roundups (and my regular posts too).