Tip 1: Spend more time writing headlines

On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent 80 cents out of your dollar. –David Ogilvy, Confessions of An Advertising Man

You must understand the readers. If they don’t consider your headline worthy, they will never read your article. Remember that your headline almost always will be visible with many others. You want it to stand out.

When writing a headline, think about incorporating these types of words:

- Numbers

- Strong adjectives (simple, fun, free, incredible, surprising, strange, awesome)

- Smart rationale (reasons, ideas, facts, hacks, lessons, ways, tactics)

- Instructional (when, how, why, what)

- Beneficial (what readers will take away or why they should read)

Tip 2: Build on top of proven ideas

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. – Ecclesiastes 1:9

Also known as the Skyscraper Technique as presented by Brian Dean, this tip’s main principle can be expressed as: “If it worked for someone else, it should work for me too.”

You primary task is to find content that already generated a lot of traffic and shares. Then you can build on top of it – create content on the same topic, but make it even better, bring it to a new level.

Here are some options that you can consider:

- Go deeper than the original author.

- Create a visually oriented post.

- Expand on what’s poorly covered.

- Sustain your information with facts, statistics, and links.

Tip 3: Make sure your content has practical utility

The time has come to ask yourself another simple but important question: What are the benefits from reading my post?

You have to understand the psychology of sharing. People share content to lift or to sustain their authority in the eyes of their audiences. While they are not the authors, they are the ones who found it and gave it away.

A HubSpot study reported that the most shared types of content were:

- How-to articles

- Lists

- “Why” posts

- “What” posts

You see? These types of content educate people, answer their questions, and give them explanations and helpful lists. They all have practical utility.

Tip 4: Add more ways to share

Put yourself in the reader’s place. You found an insightful post that you think your Facebook friends would like. What do you do? Click on the Facebook share button on the blog post. But if there is no such button, do you take the extra steps to copy the link, write something, and paste it into your feed? Probably not.

Ensure that you provide relevant social-share buttons for your posts. But that’s not the only way that people share. Add some more options:

Make your images shareable. Visual-only shares can still link to your blog post. Consider making your images easily pinnable by adding one of Shareaholic’s image-sharing WordPress plug-ins.

Add tweetable quotes and sound bites. Highlight quotes from the post –the author’s, a celebrity’s, influencer’s, etc. You also can highlight your own sound bites, summary, or important notices.

Tip 5: Want a share? Ask for it.

It’s surprising that many people don’t use such simple and obvious opportunity. Calls to action really work. Take a look at how a call to action influenced retweets in this chart from Dan Zarrella:

Follow these five tips when you craft your next blog post and the post after that and the post after that. Remember, blogging is hard, consistent work. That’s the only way to success.