A communicator’s guide to perfect blog posts

With over 1.5 billion blogs on the internet, these content portals rule the (online) world.

For PR and marketing pros looking to shape their strategies for 2018, an infographic from Red Website Design highlighting blogging trends and developments can help you hone your efforts.

If you run a corporate or personal blog, chances are you’re on WordPress. The platform houses 96 percent of blogs—but there are 115 blogging platforms, including Blogger, Squarespace, Tumblr and Medium.

If you’re wondering if people are still reading blogs, the answer is a resounding “yes”—77 percent of internet users regularly visit them, with consumers reporting that they read an average of 10 blog posts each day. Internet users in the United States also spend three times the amount of time reading blogs than they do emails.

However, internet users’ attention span is waning: Only 23 percent of their time online is spent reading blogs, and 55 percent leave blog post pages after 15 seconds.

[RELATED: Learn new strategies to beat data overload and boost reach, results and ROI.]

Considering that 70 percent of consumers learn about organizations through articles rather than advertisements—and 92 percent of companies have acquired a customer through their blog—blogging offers PR and marketing pros a considerable opportunity.

You must capture and keep consumers’ attention to be truly effective, though.

Start with your headline. Aim for a blog post title of six to 13 words, because that length most consistently attracts the highest amount of web traffic. Consider where your readers reside, too: Headlines that are eight to 12 words are those that are shared most often on Twitter, and those with titles of 12 to 14 words are shared more frequently on Facebook.

Posts with images receive 94 percent more views, as readers will spend more time looking at your blog post’s graphics than they will reading your copy. A good rule of thumb is to use an image roughly every 350 words.

Though many readers will only skim your blog post, the top content on Google are posts between 2,032 and 2,416 words. Blog posts that are longer than 1,500 words also receive more tweets and Facebook likes, so remember to stick with long-form content to make a splash on social media.

Learn more about tips for crafting and sharing blog posts consumers want to read—including the best times to publish your content—in the infographic below:

from PR Daily News Feed http://ift.tt/2EwhZHI