By Speakers’ Corner Presenter and Social/Digital expert, Amy McIlwain

Utilizing blogging as a tool to grow your business through increased awareness, website traffic and leads can be hard work. Success isn’t going to happen overnight. So how do you know if you are on the right track? Is there anything else you can be doing to help boost your blog views?

We have created a checklist to help you optimize your LinkedIn profile and blog content, make sure you have your blogging platform setup correctly and offer new ideas to get more people seeing your blog articles.

Optimize For Your Audience
Who are you trying to reach with your blog? What do they want to hear from you? What information will they find helpful, informative or entertaining

Start with these tips for optimizing your blog content for your targeted audience so that they will keep coming back for more:

1 – Define your ideal reader.

2 – Think about what questions this reader would have and answer them. When someone asks a question in a search engine online, your blog will come up. Also, being extremely helpful will help build trust and credibility.

3 – Include quotes from influencers.

4 – Don’t let your content get out of date. Old content or broken links may deter readers from coming back.

5 – Use quality, unique images to add value. Don’t rely on stock photos. Also, be sure to label your photos with optimized names, descriptions and alt tags.

Optimize For Readability & Usability

Now you have your awesome custom content ready to go, but you need to present it in a way that is easy to digest. Here are 5 tips for making your blogs easy to read, no matter the viewer:

6 – Pick a legible font. Fancy fonts stand out, but may be hard to read, so use them for headings and subheadings only.

7 – Pick a practical font size. This is often larger than what you would first pick as aesthetically pleasing.

8 – Use a dark font on a white background, because it’s just more pleasant for your eyeballs.

9 – Get rid of large blocks of text. Using large subheadings and bullet points make an article easy to scan and interrupt a monotonous flow of text.

10 – Use a responsive design. Many of your blog viewers may be coming to your site from mobile devices like phones and tablets, so it is important that it will be legible and have a clean layout on any device.

Optimize For Increased Traffic
You’re almost there… you have great content that answers your audience’s questions and it is laid out in an organized, user-friendly manner on your website. But how can you get your blog in front of more people? Below are a few tips to get more traffic, followers and devoted readers:

11 – Edit your headlines. Make sure that your titles and headlines are full of search-friendly keywords. Also, when sharing on social media and via email, make sure your headlines are intriguing.

12 – Always write meta-descriptions. These are the descriptions that show up in search results, so it should be a short description that encourages someone to read your full article.

13 – Use categories. This helps human readers and crawling search bots find your content. Categories are much more helpful for SEO than adding tags.

14 – Create images that are the correct size for each of your favorite social media channels. Optimal image sizes encourage engagement and sharing on social. For image sizing, check out our guide.

15 – Add social sharing buttons to your blog page. Placing these buttons right at the beginning or end of your blog encourages the reader to share with their friends, because it makes sharing on any channel so easy.

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Remember that your blog is a tool to start the conversation with a potential client, and not a direct sales tool. And to win business with your blog, you need to do more than write valuable content. You need to make it easy to find, easy to read and easy to share!

You can download the full 15-step checklist in this PDF!

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