The lockdown necessitated by the coronavirus pandemic has thrown up all manner of unique and unforeseen challenges for businesses and content creators. However, being in lockdown is also an opportunity for blog owners to revitalize their blogs and find new ways of reaching out to both new and old audiences alike. Here are four of the best ways to do this.
Consider Giving Your Blog A Makeover
These are strange and confusing times. Uncertainty pervades everything like a bad smell and, whether we like it or not, it seems as if we are headed for a radically different world to the one most of us have been used to. With everything around is in a state of flux, now is the perfect time to give your blog a long-overdue makeover. Usually, we would advise caution when it comes to major facelifts of your blog – any experienced blogger understands what a precarious process that can be. One wrong move and suddenly your blog seems a whole lot less attractive.
However, with change all around us and people everywhere looking for new and exciting distractions to help them through the emotional stress of lockdown. It might be tempting to play to your reader’s desire for the safe and the familiar, but that will be difficult when you are inevitably going to have to rethink your content to some degree. We will talk more about this shortly, but while you don’t need to switch the focus of your blog entirely to Covid-19, it would be madness to avoid the subject altogether. If nothing else, terms like “coronavirus” and “covid-19” are going to be appearing frequently in users’ internet searches, so you will want to be able to cash in on this new trend.
Don’t Force Covid-19 Into Your Posts (But Don’t Fear It Either)
Every blogger right now is having to make a decision as to how much they are going to incorporate the ongoing pandemic into their content. As we said above, the potential SEO rewards are far too great to pass up on. Content that is even tangentially related to the Covid-19 is hot right now, it’s an easy way of racking up those page views. You should try to add some Covid-related content into your usual rotation, but you don’t want to stray too far from your usual path. If the content you produce feels too unnatural and out of character for your blog, it could ultimately end up putting off your regular readers.
Striking the right balance here is going to be easier for some people than others. For example, if you run a medical or science-focused blog then producing Covid-19 content that slots naturally in with your regular output isn’t going to be much of a challenge at all – although we would recommend that you still don’t switch exclusively to coronavirus content.
If your blog is about business or your blog is for your business, there are still plenty of ways you can organically work Covid-19 into your content. In fact, the unpredictable and constantly evolving impacts of Covid-19 on business and economics mean that you will have plenty of new topics to explore on this subject going forward.
But then we have other blogs – art blogs or blogs focused on a particular hobby, for example – and once you have written a couple of articles about how the coronavirus pandemic is impacting your field of interest, it can be hard to know where to go next. The only solution here is to get creative. If you are really stuck for inspiration, then don’t be afraid to engage in a bit of competitor research to find out what the competition is doing to keep their content flowing.
Write The Right Headlines
There are some basic hacks that should ideally be a part of your routine approach to maintaining your blog. But even the best blogger can easily slide into some bad habits, or at least out of good ones. If you are one of the many people out there who finds themselves with an abundance of free time on their hands, thanks to lockdown, this provides you with the perfect opportunity to run through this checklist and make sure that you are staying on top of the basics.
At the top of that list should be your approach to writing headlines. A good headline will pull a reader in instantly and entice them into reading through the main body of content. There are certain keywords and phrases that are particularly effective when used in your headlines and these correlate to the types of articles that tend to perform the best.
The most popular types of articles are listicles, how-to articles, and articles that posit a specific question – “why…” and “what…” articles. As a result, headlines that contain numbers, instructional words, and questions all fare well. Strong adjectives – simple, free, fun, awesome, surprising, etc. – are also attractive to potential readers and make them want to read the main article.
Use Calls To Action
If you are targeting search terms that include terms like “coronavirus” then you are inevitably going to be welcoming some new readers to your blog, even if they are only stopping by to read one article. Even experienced blog owners often underappreciate the power of a call to action. Adding something along the lines of “If you enjoyed this article, be sure to share it with your friends.” Or encouraging the reader to post a comment both make it significantly more likely that the reader will do just that.
It is easy to underestimate just how effective this technique is but, trust us, it is well worth the very small amount of effort required. Using calls to action will enable you to retain more of those transient first-time readers than you would otherwise be able to.
The current Covid-19 lockdown is affecting us all in different ways and throwing up numerous challenges for our personal and professional lives. For bloggers, the lockdown has been a mixed bag. However, by taking the right approach to your blog during this period and strategizing carefully, you can turn crisis into opportunity.