Running a blog is not easy nowadays, with so many competitions around. If you want your blog to do well, you will need to do your best to keep up with the blogging trends. The trends are the things that bloggers worldwide are doing to get their blogs ranked. The following are the 6 top blogging trends in 2019.
Add Visual Elements to Your Blog Post
In every top-ranking blog you visit, you will notice that they use several pictures in their posts. Therefore, if you want your blog to be popular, you will need to include pictures in your posts. You can insert pictures in between the paragraphs to make it easier for the audience to read. The picture you use in your blog post doesn’t have to be 100% JPEG quality, but it must be clear with no sign of blurriness. Before uploading the photos, you can enhance them with a filter or add text.
Optimize Images with Alt Tags
In addition, you must add an alt tag to SEO optimize your images. Before uploading your image, make sure you already scale it to reduce it to just the size you need and converted to the small format like JPEG. As a rule of thumb, you should always use legal images. The best is if you can take the photo yourself and customize it with the preferred text and special effects with a video editor.
Engage with Followers on Social Media
Nowadays, bloggers that want more traffic must know how to engage with readers on social media. When just starting, you must keep creating new content on the blog. Every time you create new content, you get to share a link on social media. However, don’t always share links from your own blogs only. You should also share links to other useful content that can help your readers.
Whenever someone posts a reply, remember to respond promptly. If you keep doing this, you will find that more and more people following your page. You can also collaborate with other brands to boost your following. The collaboration can involve activities like giving away freebies, hosting contests, and promoting content on each other’s blogs.
Finding Long Tailed Keywords
It is hard to rank for a short-tailed keyword because there are more authoritative sites dominating them now. So, if your website is new, you have to target for a long-tailed keyword. The easiest way to find a long-tailed keyword is to use Google suggestions. It automatically generates the rest of the keywords when you type the first half keyword.
You can also find long-tailed keywords by using Google related searches. Google related searches will appear at the bottom of the organic result. You can also use a keyword research tool to find long-tailed keywords. Google Trends is another place where you can find long-tailed keywords. Your analytics is also another place where you can find long-tailed keywords.
Start a Video Channel for Your Blog
Having your own YouTube video channel can drive more traffic to your website. You can create the video around the blog post. Once you have created the video, you should upload it to YouTube and also embed it in the blog post. In your videos, don’t forget to incorporate a call to action at the end to let your viewers know that they can visit your blog if they like your video. Before you make your video public, be sure to upload a thumbnail. Video thumbnail can increase video engagement by 50%. The thumbnail must be relevant, not exaggerate and be able to grab the visitor’s attention.
Improve the Loading Time of Your Blog
Your blog must load fast if you don’t want to lose visitors. Ideally, all your blog posts must not take more than 4 seconds to load. To ensure your blog load fast, you must choose a fast hosting. The hosting must cost at least $3 per month. You can use a WordPress cache plugin to cache the entire blog.
The cache plugin can speed up your blog by reducing the number of requests made to the server and lower the amount of bandwidth consumption. Another thing is that you must not install too many plugins as they can cause your blog to load slowly. You can host your images in another place like Dropbox if you find that including image in your post cause your blog to load slowly.