5 things your blog posts are missing

even as a veteran blogger (12+ years and counting), learning to craft a balanced, visually appealing and genuinely good post took years to learn. not everything that goes into making a good post is intuitive - and that's ok! learning to take full advantage of the space you're working with, the power of your words + visuals and building off of your older content are all beneficial skills to remember.

here are the things you may be missing in your blog posts.

photos that aren't as large as possible.

you've got the space, so use it! it's frustrating for readers to navigate to your blog and be forced to sift through tiny photos centered in a post. make your photos as wide as possible without the size itself becoming an eyesore - usually, however wide your content area is, make your photos this width. your readers eyes will thank you. after all, if you can barely see the photos, why put them there?

links to your old posts + other's content.

if you're writing a post about a new restaurant you tried and happen to mention the restaurant you're comparing it to, link to that post, please! your reader may wonder: "oh, they also reviewed dan's cafe? well, where can i find that? i don't see it here... oh well." and that's how easy it is to lose additional engagement + pageviews. link anything and everything within reason. as i've written on before, blogging is about community now. if you mention someone else's ideas, photos or posts, link them.

re-visitation of old topics & ideas.

everyone's views are going to change over time. have you updated your readers on your newfound  ideas? if you wrote a post on blogging do's + don'ts two years ago, are those tips still applicable today, or have you learned more? this is an opportunity to link posts together and give readers a journey to follow.

content that is not only authentic, but digestable.

on the internet, this is know as "tl;dr", aka "too long, didn't read". can that apply to some of your posts? separate concepts, paragraphs and ideas with headings, lists, tables and bullet points. this helps the reader skim a lot of information quickly, and makes your posts much easier on the eyes. if you've got a long story or rant to tell, that's ok! just make the formatting visually pleasing by adding photos in between paragraphs and headings to give structure.

 

your true writing voice.

read your posts. seriously. read them. is that you in there? do you really talk that way? i am all for being professional and polished online - in fact, my friends who know me in real life could say my social media is a highly censored version of myself (i have a sailor's mouth, but i mean c'mon, my family reads my blog). but beyond the lack of f-bombs, it's really me. is it really you?