4 Simple Tricks to Beef Up Your Existing Blog Posts

Blogging isn’t dead, but what if yours is on life support?

Maybe you’ve poured your heart into writing blog content that shows who you are and what value you bring to the world, but you’re just not getting the responses and interactions you were hoping for.

Beefing up your existing blog posts is a great way to improve your online business.

Or maybe you are doing a good job getting people to your blog, but your click-through and conversion rates are lower than you’d like.

Or maybe you like what you’ve written, but you just want to take it to the next level.

Regardless, beefing up your existing blog posts is a great way to improve your online presence. It’s almost always easier and faster to see gains this way than writing new content.

Here are four simple tricks to get you started. You can implement these today and have a significantly improved blog—in a fraction of the time it would take to create a new post.

1. Define All of Your Acronyms

Once upon a time, I worked at a place where people used a TON of acronyms.

I used to make a bit of a game out of asking people in meetings to define the acronyms they used.

Most people will not understand technical or niche-specific acronyms in your content.

You’d be surprised how often the people who used acronyms had no idea what they meant.

This was really just something I did to pass the time in yet another meeting that should have been an email, but it does illustrate a point:

Most people will not understand technical or niche-specific acronyms in your content.

The last thing you want your content to do is leave people confused.

So unless it’s an incredibly common acronym (like “US” for the United States), do your readers a favor and define them.

2. Make Sure All of Your Links Still Work

This is one of the simplest tasks on this list (but still not as simple as tip #3).

Go through each page of your blog and click on all the links. Do they all still go where they’re supposed to go? Do any of them take you to a 404 page? (Alternatively, you can use a link-checker website to automate this—there are a ton of free options.)

Bad links cause your readers’ experience to suffer.

The internet is constantly changing. Websites and pages come and go. That means links go bad. And bad links cause your readers’ experience to suffer.

So it’s worth taking a few minutes periodically to review and update your links.

3. Break Up Long Paragraphs

A majority of your blog’s guests are visiting your site on their phones.

Now, have you ever tried to read a dense, “wall of text” article on your mobile device? It’s not very fun, is it?

Thankfully, the fix for this is so easy, it only requires pressing one button: the return key.

A majority of your blog’s guests are visiting your site on their phones.

Read through your posts and note any long paragraphs. Then start breaking them up into two- or three-sentence chunks. (Don’t worry, your high school English teacher isn’t going to hunt you down and scold you, I promise.)

What you’ll soon notice is your blog posts are much easier to read, which means more people are likely to do just that!

4. Always Include a Call to Action

If you write online content for your business, you likely have some goal in mind—and one that needs your readers’ help.

But here’s the thing: your readers don’t know what your goal is or how to help…unless you tell them.

That’s why including a call to action is so critical.

Otherwise, we’ll all read your content and just move right on with our day, leaving you no closer to reaching your goal.

Your readers don’t know what to do next…unless you tell them.

You don’t have to be pushy about it either. It can be as simple as:

• “Click here to read the next article!”
• “Follow me for daily tips.”
• “Want to learn more? Sign up for my weekly newsletter.”

You just need to give your readers an opportunity to take the next small step on your customer journey.

So do a simple audit of your blog. Is there a call to action in each post? If not, add one.