If your blog is lagging, stagnant or you merely want to bolster your success, you only have to look to the most popular article and news sites available on the web. Article sites like Ezine, Ehow and ArticlesBase offer advice, tips and informative news to individuals all over the world. News sites like The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Washington Times and Fox keep the populace up-to-date on the goings on in the world. If you visit these sites often and you glean as much as you can from each site you visit, your blog will surely become stronger as you progress. Here is how to use article and news sites to their maximum advantage.
Take a Good Look
You might think that learning how to use article and news sites involves an extensive amount of reading, but you would only be partly right. Your first assignment when you visit your favorite article sites or news outlets is just to stop, take a good look around and pay attention. Look at the colors used, the header, the footer and the way the comments are set up, if applicable. Yes, besides just providing valuable content, these sites are also popular in their own rite. You should take notes if you hope to attain their same levels of popularity.
Titles Come First
When people visit your blog, they typically notice the titles of your posts first. Your blog will become infinitely stronger if you can learn to craft even more engaging titles for each subsequent post you create. Keeping this in mind, we are going to move onto the second tip for learning how to use article and news sites; start going through the top articles and news stories and pay attention to the titles.
Don’t read a word of the articles yet; just look at the titles. Which words are used? How are they structured? Which titles seem to stand out to you more than most? If you want to get the most out of this exercise, make a list of the title attributes that stand out to you. You might notice a few patterns emerging.
For instance, most article and news sites use articles that are concise, powerful and highly-targeted. The most popular article titles involve how-tos, lists, top tips, mistakes to avoid and industry updates. The hottest news titles are also concise, exciting and informative all on their own. Yet both types of titles have one distinct goal: To entice readers to commit and read the actual article posted.
Emulate these same titles for your own blog posts and your blog will experience higher traffic numbers, more comments and more referrals on social media. You might not strike gold on the very first try, but just keep at it and you will surely improve. Test your results by paying attention to the blog post titles that seem to get the most clicks and comments, and keep referring to the list you made when you first learned how to use article and news sites. You might want to continue to visit the sites month after month and year after year, so that you can keep up with trends as they develop.
Subject Matter, Layout and Flow
Learning how to use article and news sites doesn’t begin and end with the titles; you are also encouraged to actually read the articles and absorb what you can.
Pay attention to the top articles and what they’re discussing. Why do you think those articles are so popular? Look at the top news sites and examine the top breaking news or the news articles that seem to have the most comments or that seem to be the most controversial.
All of these elements can be used in your own blog posts to help them resonate and improve the clicks, comments and overall attention you receive over time.
Comments and Social Sharing
Don’t just allow the article and news sites to tell you which articles are hot or not; pay attention to those articles that are shared the most on platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google+. You should also look to see what people are saying about the articles they post. The more you can learn about developing content that gets shared and read around the web, the stronger your blog will become. It only takes constant effort, a desire to please your audience and a little knowledge on how to use article and news sites to be successful. Start with the article and news sites and surprise your readers by providing titles and overall content that brings them to your blog in droves.
Image Source: BluEyedA73 on Flickr
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