Blogging continues to be an integral part of digital marketing strategies, helping to grow businesses, brands, and careers. The face of blogging has evolved over the years, with new trends like live streaming and social media only fuelling the growth of written blogs.
On Google alone, it’s estimated that there are roughly 63,000 search queries every second and a large chunk of those first-page results are blog articles. This shows us that blogging has become more popular over the years.
Considering that over 500 million blog posts are published each day, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that bloggers are looking for creative ways to build audiences and keep readers coming back to their websites.
With 2022 around the corner, why not start revamping your blog strategy with this round-up of trends.
1. Partnerships & Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is a growing trend as it offers a lot of benefits to both the writer and the host blog.
For the host blog, you get quality content to add to your website. You also get added exposure if the guest blogger cross promotes the piece on their own blog and social channels.
Guest blogging can also have benefits for your overall website performance through backlinking. Backlinking is when another website adds a hyperlink to your webpage. The more backlinks you build from websites similar to your own, the more credible your website becomes to search engines improving your rankings.
The host blog isn’t the only one who benefits though. The guest blogger does as well. They get exposure to a new audience which helps build authority as an expert and thought leader.
To maximize the impact of these types of partnerships, blogging guests should ideally be in the same industry so that each writer can promote their expertise to a similar audience and broaden their reach.
2. Writing Long-Form Quality Blog Content
The top-performing blog posts that appear on Google’s first page of search results have 1,500–2,000 words on average. Longer blog posts allow more opportunities to use more keywords (terms people type into the search engines).
Not only do longer blog posts have the potential to attract more organic traffic, but you often can also dive deeper into your subject and provide more value to readers.
But, don’t make the mistake of writing longer posts just for the sake of hitting a word count.
If you’re struggling to write longer content pieces, check out Answer The Public, a tool that helps you discover what people are searching for related to your article topic, which can help you cover a wider scope of your topic.
Another free tool to help you generate more content ideas is Google Trends. Google created this tool by collecting data from Google searches and tracking keyword usage over time. In the Related Queries section, you can discover other search terms related to your topic to help fill in any content gaps in your article.
This information can help you generate new headings for your blog post and provide your readers with more valuable insight, putting you ahead of your competition.
Rather than your reader bouncing around to other blogs for their answers, you can answer all their questions in one long-form blog post, becoming the go-to expert.
Another way to increase your word count without adding fluff to your article is by supplementing your insights with statistics and white papers. What’s even better, and we’ve seen trending in recent years, is bloggers conducting original research, leading us to our next trend.
3. Conduct Research to Present in a Blog Post
Research content pieces have increased in the last couple of years because they turn blog posts into a primary source of information.
By conducting and sharing research, you are creating original content that is more useful to your readers—Think of it as storytelling backed with evidence.
Orbit Media publishes many research blog posts on content marketing and has become an authority blog on the subject. As a result, its research articles are often referenced in other blog posts.
If the thought of conducting a study seems daunting, don’t fret.
Some examples of simple yet effective original research content pieces can include opinion surveys and sharing your business’ case studies for proven success, which work especially well for “how-to” style blog posts.
To make this information easier for your reader to understand, always present data visually, through graphics.
4. Supplement Your Blog Posts With Visual Content
As your blog posts get longer, it’s a good idea to supplement your text with visual elements.
Visuals encourage a faster and stronger emotional response than walls of text on a screen and help readers engage with the written content on a much deeper level.
Nearly 50% of our brain is involved in visual processing. In a study investigating the impact of illustrations alongside text for data retention, researchers found that participants performed 323% better than those who read the instructions without images.
Visuals don’t always have to be photos.
Including videos, infographics, and memes can give your reader’s eyes a break from long blocks of text, enriching your blog’s story and keeping readers scrolling the page.
Some of the best practices to follow for including visuals in your blog post include:
- Keeping the visuals relevant to the topic surrounding it.
- Creating your own unique digital assets instead of using stock images.
- Properly sizing your image—if the file is too big, it can slow down the page, negatively affecting the reader’s experience.
5. Cross-Platform Distribution & Multimedia
The rise of social media has changed the way people consume information online, and since web-logging (blogging) emerged in 1994, creators have adapted written blogs for people to listen to and watch, from podcasts to Youtube videos, and now TikToks and Instagram reels.
Posting written content to your website should remain a top priority as you own the platform and don’t have to wrestle with the constantly changing social media algorithms to fight for attention, but you still should consider cross-platform distribution in your 2022 blogging strategy.
The effort you put into your blog posts can be shared across different content channels to extend your reach in building an audience.
For example, one blog post can turn into a YouTube video, Instagram carousel post, a Tweet, or TikTok. However, it’s important to remember that not all blog posts will translate well onto all channels.
You may have to reformat your content to make it successful depending on the platform, which will require a bit of research on the types of content that will perform well on each social media channel.
For example, Instagram has recently announced that it’s transforming into a video-first app, which means the algorithm will favor video content such as reels and stories over static images.
Instead of posting an image with a quote from your blog post, you may have better luck reaching more users if you distill key points of your blog article into a 30-second reel with a trending sound.
You can also promote your blog content through email marketing. Email marketing helps you to reach your audience without struggling with algorithms. When you blast an email, it’s delivered almost instantaneously, keeping you and your brand top-of-mind.
The Takeaway: 2022 Blogging Trends
An expert content creator will tell you, the single most important thing in building an audience is to post high-quality content consistently.
Your blog holds so much potential for personal and professional growth by connecting to an audience and building relationships with other industry influencers. However, to achieve those goals, you need to keep your blog well-maintained and ahead of the trends.
It’s important to develop creative content ideas based on how readers adapt their internet use alongside social media to see continued growth in your blog in the new year.
Whether you’re blogging professionally or personally, you can find new ways to stand out from the crowd with these outlined tips, and if you need more inspiration or need help starting up your blog, you can find more resources here on my.blog.
Knock Knock WHOIS There 