Sovrn has the opportunity to work with over 20,000 talented publishers, helping them with their monetization strategies through advanced audience analytics, programmatic advertising solutions, and a robust publisher-facing reporting platform. You might think the sheer volume of publishers we work with might make us jaded to the quality of the content we help monetize. On the contrary! Working with all these sites has only enhanced the effectiveness of the blogging best practices digital publishers implement. So, we thought we’d share a few of the top blogging best practices we’ve noticed on our most successful sites.
Strategic Ad Placements
Whether it was the hours you poured into implementing an effective SEO strategy or your famous brownie recipe that brought them in, someone visiting your site means you caught their attention and now it’s time to engage, convert and retain. Having a visually appealing site layout is essential in keeping people on your site.
More ad spaces may seem to mean more revenue but, unfortunately, most people don’t enjoy navigating a website plastered with advertisements. If your advertisements are placed so that you are blocking content or disturbing the function of the site then you will start losing readers and with them your money. So with quantity not being the answer, we now turn to quality. Non-obtrusive is always a good standard but advertisers won’t pay big to appear at the very bottom of the page Native advertising is the practice of strategically placing ad spaces around your content so it appears to be a part of your site. This ad placement from HelloGlow is great example of effective ad placement. It doesn’t interfere with the user experience but since it is next to interactive content it is very likely to be seen.
Be Attentive To Your Readers
The people who comment on and share your site are your most valuable readers. An active and loyal community will attract new readers and will help you in producing quality content. Reading and responding to comments is a blogging best practices that allows you to receive feedback and can help you form a relationship with your audience. Alissa from OhMyVeggies has an excellent presence on her site. For example, one of her readers asked her about where to find an ingredient and although she doesn’t have an obligation to respond, she answers it thoughtfully and timely. An “About Me” section can further give a voice to your writing and your readers will feel more of a connection to you because of it.
We love helping our publishers understand the value of engagement, and that’s because engagement leads to greater revenue. An engaged audience is what advertisers are looking for when deciding how much a spot on your page is worth. A website with regular visitors and a low bounce rate is given a higher value because an advertisement is more likely to be seen and internalized by that audience.
Foster A Community
Offering a way for people to discuss and ask questions not only engages them but can also make your site more prominent in search engines. For example, if you’re running an Auto site, you definitely want to show up on searches for online car reviews and purchases. CarGurus does a great job of utilizing their community to boost their SEO ranking. They promote the community aspect heavily so that the reviews and discussions written by readers appears relevant to search engines. On a more personal note, giving your readers a voice engages and empowers them, and in return, they provide free content that attracts new visitors.
Your community’s existence doesn’t stop on your site. Having a strong social media presence is key to growing your site. Every visitor to your site has the potential to bring in more traffic so it’s best to make your site and content as sharable as possible.
One method might be to prominently place links to your social media accounts like DivasCanCook does so people can easily find them and start sharing with their audience.
Segment Your Content
Moz does a great job of segmenting their content for their audience, making site navigation for the reader extremely efficient. To segment your audience, first you need to understand your audience and their behavior. Having your site’s content clearly labeled makes it easier to navigate for users, easier to crawl for search engines, and can improve reader engagement and SEO.
Categorizing your content is a simple way to make your website seem less overwhelming and it gives your readers a better idea of what you are offering. Content segmentation also plays an important role in your search engine optimization. Answers does a great job with this. You immediately see the major topics that are discussed on the site and without leaving the page. Thanks to their category list, search engines will now consider the site relevant to readers sharing their interests.
A great way to make sure your site is up to date and as user-friendly as possible is to regularly keep tabs on your other sites in your content category. What blogging best practices are they doing well? How could they be doing better? What are you doing well that they’re not?
Do you have any other blogging best practices you’d like to share? Leave them in the comment section below!
