Smart Editing Tips that Make your Blog Post Insanely Readable

Well, you publish a great idea. Yet no one gives a damn. You scream out, why?
With the countless blog posts published everyday, your piece is nowhere!
In order to give a good identity for your sweat, you need to improve yourself in the areas where others are missing. Editing and proofreading

are some of the most overlooked areas in blogging; that’s an opportunity for you.
Most of the bloggers skip out editing in their blogging process. If you properly edit every article of yours, then you’ll definitely stand out of the rest.
Your posts should be easier to read and glide through. I mean, I’m asking you to leverage the unique-smart-simple tips, that you may have never heard of. If you are editing your blog posts on any online editors like WordPress visual editor.

Make use of Grammarly extension

If you are editing your blog posts on any online editors like WordPress visual editor, Google Docs or any others; Grammarly Chrome extension comes handy. Along with the great spell and grammar checking features, it has one great feature.
While editing, you may find yourself stuck in finding that perfect word replacement for a weak or ineffective word. No worries. Just double click on the word. Grammarly pulls out the possible synonyms for the selected word. All you need to do is now just click on the ideal word that suits the context. With perfect word choices, you can easily resonate with your audience. By making the correct word choice, you ensure that you mean what you want to mean.
Also read: 5 Free Online Proofreader Tools for Error-Free Writing

Vary the lengths of the sentences.

By doing this, you are easing out your readers in gliding through your blog post. Sentences with the same length seem boring and irritating to read.
Hemingway Editor is the online tool that comes handy in the process. It marks the very long sentences, and possibly hard to read sentences. Then you can analyze how to shorten or simplify those sentences in your blog post.

As you can see the above screenshot, the tool highlights very hard to read complex sentences in red color. You should consider shortening it. If the sentence is highlighted in yellow color, you need to reconsider it.
If the sentence is highlighted in yellow color, you need to reconsider it.

Don’t overuse any single word or phrase.

Instead, use variants. For this, you need to know what are all the words that are overused in your content. This tool from WriteWords presents you the frequency of the words you have used in your content in descending order.

It also has a phrase frequency checker that presents you frequency of phrases in your content. There’s an option to specify how many words a phrase should contain.
Using this tool, determine the phrases that are overused in your content. Try a unique way of presenting what you got. Use alternative words or phrases instead of repeating stuff.
Most of the newbies end up using same words and phrases over and over again. Through practice, you should get rid of this habit.

Don’t try to make weak words stronger.

Instead, use strong words or phrases.

• I am very hungry – I am starving.
• He was very frightened – He was like a rabbit caught in headlights.
• He is a great fool – He is a blockhead.

Minimize the use of words like very, great, and others to intensify the meaning of weak words. Make use of strong words.
If you are trying to express any emotions, state, try to use similes. Compare it to any real world objects, animals, which are obvious.

I often see people struggling hard to convey an emotion. I advise you to make use of beautiful similes. Similes make the process of expressing complex emotions, experiences way easier.
For finding similes, you could use Google search. Just search for “similes for frightened“. You will be presented with all the similes that represent the frightened situation, with a quick search.
Singers while writing lyrics for their songs, make good use similes to mean more in few words.

Don’t edit or proofread immediately after writing your draft.

When the topic is fresh in your mind, you tend to not proofread your content on the shoes of your readers, your brain automatically corrects your mistakes. You are likely to skip structural errors.
I advise you prepare your final draft ready a day before publishing. On the day of publishing, edit your content in the eyes of the readers, preferably in the backward direction.
This little hack helps you find out grammatical errors and clichés in your content more effectively.

Use the power of Google.

If you find yourself hard to find a word to complete the phrase or a sentence, make use of Google search. Place asterisk in the place of the unknown word, enclose it between “double quotes”, and hit search. In the search results, the completed sentences are marked in bold.
Notice the screenshot you’ll get an idea.

Change the font.

While editing by changing the font of your content, you likely catch more errors.

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The font should be different from that what you used while writing.
It tricks the mind to catch more errors. Subconsciously you think that the article is different than what you wrote and likely read more detailed
Some even suggest printing out the final draft to mark errors on paper. I’m not a big fan of it. Have not tried it either.

Update and edit your posts more often

Most of the bloggers publish articles one over the other and sit quite. By this, they are missing an opportunity to drive good traffic to their site.
Old content should be refurbished, updated with relevant content and proofread.
Harsh spend, 1-2 hours daily to work on old posts and make them better. He discussed this in his blog post on Panda update. Google sees fresh content as of high-quality.
After updating your old posts, make sure you proofread it.
I also recommend you to alter the “last updated date” on your post, to avail SEO benefit.

Don’t ever publish blog post without editing

Always proofread in a quiet place; no music, no talks. This is essentially important. Because while proofreading you need to analyze your content in all aspects.
It may be difficult for you remember all the techniques to use while editing your content. So prepare a checklist of editing points. Refer to it. It minimizes the work to your brain when editing next time.
Remember that editing while writing can be a great blunder. It kills your productivity as well as the quality of your post.
Next time, don’t ever publish a post without proper editing.

Research: The Core of Content Marketing

According to Zemanta, 44 percent of business marketers are using research as part of their overall marketing strategy.

This reveals a growing trend that solid research is the basis for developing an effective, results-oriented content marketing strategy.
Research is the first and most vital step when developing and executing a content strategy. Without complete research, the steps of Ideation/Planning, Creation, Connection, and Measurement will be based on insufficient data.
Three reasons why research is crucial for your strategy’s effectiveness

1. It’s how you will get to understand your audience and their pain points. Once you achieve this you have a proper guideline as to what content to generate to reach your business objectives, when and how to distribute it, and how to measure its effectiveness.
2. It’s how you will discover the language your audience speaks and how to use that language to attract them through your content. When you understand the language of your ideal client, it is easier to speak in it and build trust, a crucial factor that drives purchase decisions.
3. Research gives you a headstart. According to Copyblogger’s Content Marketing Research: The First Crucial Step, “research is the often-ignored, frequently avoided red-headed stepchild of content marketing.” This means that if you do sound research you’re already ahead of a large percentage of your competitors who just don’t bother.

How to do top-tier research for content marketing

Divide your research into foundational and ongoing, and make a clear distinction between what you’re doing and why you are doing it.
Foundational research takes place at the beginning of content marketing planning. It’s the basis on which the rest of your tasks will be focused. It answers the Who, What, Where, When, Why and How of your audience.
Ongoing research is research you produce throughout the other steps of ideation, production, and distribution of content. It lets you measure the effectiveness of current efforts, revise those that didn’t work, and come up with new strategies that will be more results-oriented.
Also read: How businesses should create a blog for marketing & profit

Read. A lot.

Research is 50% reading and 50% shaping your strategy. You need to read a lot on websites and industry magazines (print and online) in order to:

• Familiarize yourself with the latest trends and topics in your industry or niche. The faster and more efficiently you read the more valuable knowledge you can accumulate. You can use tools like Feedly to subscribe to updates from top blogs in your niche or you can also use Flipboard which is great for content discovery.

• Get to know the technologies, platforms and web tools your audience is using and your competitors are tapping into to reach your target market. You can use this free tool call Built with to see the tech used by any website on this planet.

• Do keyword research to learn what language your current and potential customers are using to find solutions for their problems and challenges. Find the keywords your audience is using and then sift through them to find the most competitive and appealing ones. Here is an awesome trick to discover keywords using your existing blog traffic.

• Check your competitors. Do an audit of your competitors’ online content, products, and other offerings. Check their language and SEO strategy. It’s not just about getting to see what they do well, but also what they’re doing wrong. You can use tools like SEMRUSH to check their content strategy & Whatrunswhere to see their PPC strategy.

Content marketing research gives you priceless insights as to what specific actions you can take to help you reach your target market. Make time to improve your reading skills so that you can handle the amount of reading you need to do, then invest time and effort to doing that reading – and your content marketing strategy will succeed.
This post is contributed by Chassie. If you would like to submit a guest post for ShoutMeLoud community

OptinMonster Review: Lead Generation Plugin For Smart Bloggers

              

When it comes to Email marketing, there are various WordPress plugins out there which you can use to increase the number of sign-ups. One reason which stops most of us from using them is due to lack of graphics and coding knowledge. I started eMail marketing using Aweber long back, but I never used any pop-up email sign-up before because I thought such pop-ups are annoying. I was so wrong with this thought of mine and I realised this after using OptinMonster plugin.

One more reason for staying away from using Pop-up plugin is due to lack of graphics and coding skills. Having an eMail list is quintessential for any serious blogger and moreover you need to ensure that you get a great number of new sign-up every day.  You can read this guide to start with eMail marketing for your blog, and read on about this awesome lead generation plugin which you will end up using after the review.