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So you want to create killer content for your website? Who doesn’t! Nobody said doing it would be easy though. Top bloggers spends hours researching for and preparing their posts. Just like a tree, growing a blog does take a bit of time and effort. But it will be all worth it as you get closer to reaching your goals.

In order to have a successful blog, you need to have a decent content strategy. You should nurture your existing content and strive to provide as much value as possible to your audience. Here are 7 ways to do just that:

1. have an update plan: your task as a blogger is not done when you publish your posts and promote them for a while. You should always have an update plan for your top posts. People don’t come to your blog to read outdated content so don’t feed them outdated articles.
2. incorporate new changes: if your niche has been going through major changes, chances are your old articles will need to be modified to account for those. Having a long-term content refreshment plan is one thing. But you have got to be ready to make quick changes to your top posts when major events happen in your niche.
3. take into account comments from your visitors: no matter how great your articles are, there is a good chance people will reach out to you with their suggestions on how you could improve your posts. Don’t ignore these.
4. add multimedia content: many bloggers feel hesitant about capturing their own photos and videos. When you are ready to do that, don’t forget to add your work to your older posts. Don’t just let your videos sit on your YouTube account.
5. link to newer articles you have written: this is my favorite practice. From time to time, I go through my old posts and add links to my newer articles. Plugins such as SEO Smart Links can be very handy here.
6. A/B test your headlines: your headlines matter big time especially if you plan to increase your conversions on your blog. There is no reason not to do some A/B testing of your post headlines to improve your conversion rate.
7. keep track of your links: be wary of broken links in your older posts. There are scripts out there that can find these for you. You can also ask your visitors to submit broken links to you so you can fix them quickly.

Writing vague blog posts can save you from having to update your posts all the time. The trouble is you can’t get too far with overly vague posts (it will depend a whole lot on the niche you are covering t0o). Having to update old posts from time to time is not convenient but nobody said maintaining a killer blog was going to be easy.

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Nobody likes to read a boring blog. People don’t come to your blog to find a cure to insomnia. There are some very smart folks who have killer content on their blogs but do not take time to add some variety to their posts. Formatting your content the proper way goes a long way towards keeping more folks interested in what you have to say.

The way your content looks is how you make a first impression on your visitors. Here are 6 things you can do (in addition to formatting) to get more people to appreciate your work:

1. Link to others: many publishers only link to their own content. That is quite understandable especially if you are involved in a highly competitive niche. It is true that the more you keep people on your site, the better chance you have of making more conversions. At the same time, linking to others can provide your visitors with more value. Who knows. You may get a link in return from those whom you are linking to.
2. Add video: people come to your website to read your content but some of them would not mind seeing videos or listen to audio clips. Getting started with video blogging is not as difficult as it used to be. Composing and editing your videos could take a bit of time but can set your site apart from others. If you don’t have time to create your own video, YouTube is your best friend.
3. Add photo: every blog post needs to have a photo or two. If you are reviewing a product, you need to have photos of that product on your site. Otherwise, just search for a free or premium image that could encapsulate what your post will be about. You will be surprised how effective images can be in making your posts more readable.
4. Embed documents/widgets in your posts: most top bloggers include presentations, PDF documents, widgets, and interactive tools inside their posts. You may not be able to do this for every post. At the same time, this type of content can make your blog more interactive.
5. Link to your own work: if you are not ready to link to the articles that you have worked so hard to write, you are missing the boat. Linking to relevant articles on your site can keep people interested for longer and increase your conversions.
6. Pay attention to your visitors’ feedback: those of you who own popular blogs get a ton of feedback from your visitors. It never hurts to quote your commenters in your posts. Some even create posts just around the comments they get from their Twitter followers, Facebook fans, and blog members. This is a great way to build a more solid community around your blog.

How do you go about keeping your blog posts more interesting? Please share your favorite tactics below.

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Nobody gets up in the morning to write articles that actually suck. Writing articles that you know people won’t want to read is just plain stupid. At the same time, many bloggers do not even know that they are producing this type of work. Some people are just too attached to their work to realize their errors. Even if you have not produced a single decent article yet, it is never late to start. You want to do your homework to make sure people will read your articles. Here are 6 ways you can do just that:

• Keep up with your industry: this is just a no brainer. Not keeping up with your industry is the fastest way to lose your audience and damage your blog’s credibility. It’s OK to make small mistakes here or there (nobody is perfect). Those happen all the time. At the same time, if you make major mistakes, you are going to have trouble keeping your readers coming back for more. People value their time. You should too. Tools such as Google Reader and Google Alerts make it so easy for bloggers to keep up.
• Don’t Be a Parrot: doing blog research is more than just reading a couple of posts on a topic and reporting the exact same thing. Let’s say you are a tech blogger. If you are just repeating what’s being said on sites such as Gizmodo or Engadget, then what are you bringing to the table? You can maintain a small blog with that approach but forget about growing it without unique content and your own unique takes.
• Offer value others are not: if some killer tactic looks hard to pull off, then you should probably try to do it. A lot of people just want to make some quick cash with blogging without taking any risks or going out of their comfort zone. If you are ready to do that, you are going to always have a leg up over the majority of bloggers in your niche. 
• Shed your fears: when I started blogging, I was somewhat hesitant when it came to sharing my controversial takes on some things. It took me a few months to realize that it was holding me back. If you know something about some topic, you should not be afraid to share it with your readers as long as you can back it up. You are never going to realize your full potential without taking risks.
• Link to other great resources: we all want people to stay on our blogs forever. But your main goal should be to provide as much value to your readers as possible. Linking to other top blogs and articles is one way to do that.
• Pay attention to grammar and formatting: I am guilty of this myself. Grammar and spelling have never been my thing. That does not mean I don’t spend hours every week going through my posts to catch as many errors as possible. If you can afford a dedicated editor, by all means you should go for it. At the very least, read your articles a couple of times to make sure there are no major mistakes. An article that does not make any sense grammatically can hurt your blog’s credibility.

Unless you just want to make some quick cash from blogging and are not in it for the long run, you want to take time to do your research and produce high quality articles on a consistent basis. Trust is hard to earn and easy to lose.

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When I started blogging many years ago, I never thought I would reach 1000 blog posts one day. It’s tough to see that far ahead when you only have 5 or 6 posts on your blog. Once you start blogging twice a day for a few years, you are going to pass that number very quickly. Creating fresh, valuable content for your blog should be at the top of your agenda, but you should not forget about your older blog posts. Just because you are putting a lot of effort into writing new stories does not mean that your old posts can’t help you grow your business. You just have to let people know about them (and update them to help them keep their value).

WordPress has various plugins and scripts that you can take advantage of to promote all your content and get the word out about your older blog posts. You can integrate these scripts into your sidebar or after each post to point your visitors to the right direction.  The more you can keep your visitors going through your content, the better chance you have of making a loyal reader out of each of them.

Here are 6 ways you can breath new life into your older posts:

• Display your all time popular posts: displaying your most popular posts on your blog can help your visitors find some of your old, classic stories. You can find plenty of such plugins on WordPress .org. Some of these plugins actually let you define how far back you want the script to go. I personally prefer popular posts by hits rather than by comments. Both ways do work though.
• Refer your visitors to similar posts: these plugins may slow down your site a bit but can help your visitors find other stories that you may have written about a certain topic. Chances are your visitors can gain a lot of value for those related articles too.
• Don’t forget about random posts: if you are just showing your similar and popular posts on your blog, you are really taking the surprise element out of the process. Random post plugins help your visitors find other stories that they may be interested about. You can use tags and categories to make these plugins act not so random (choose from posts you want to display to your visitors).
• Implement a post recommendation system: Amazon has implemented this beautifully on its website. Plugins such as WWSGD let you do the same for your posts. WWSGD recommends posts that people have visited after reading a certain article on your website.
• Use Facebook Recommendations: Facebook has a ton of social widgets you can integrate into your website. Just add Facebook like button to your website and add the appropriate widget to your blog. If you have an established blog, there is a good chance your old classic posts will get some love on Facebook.
• Use social media to renew old content: from time to time, you’ll have to update some of your older posts to keep them relevant. Once you have done your job, you can retweet your post or ask your newsletter/feed list to retweet it for you.

Building a killer blog is more than just writing fresh content all the time. You should also take time to renew and promote your older posts. The above steps can help you do just that.

Anybody can have a blog these days. Solutions such as Blogger or WordPress make it so easy to set up a blog and start writing. In order to build a decent blog, you need to write good content and find a way to get people involved. In short, you’ve got to work at building relationships with your visitors and provide them with the value that makes them want to come back to you for more. Tynt Tracer is a cool tracking system designed for bloggers to allow them to track what their readers do on the site and what sections of it they found the most engaging.

Tracer makes it so easy to find out what people have been doing on your blog. You can easily figure out what keywords or images have been copied. Even when someone decides to highlight a portion of your content, Tracer will let you know about it. Tracer can also help you identify what pages people spend most of their time on. That can give you some more ideas about your future blog posts.

What I love about Tracer is its “credit” feature. It’s all too normal for folks to come to a site and copy/paste a portion of your content on their very own blog. You can always try to reach out to these folks and ask them to take your content down. But you can’t catch them all. With Tracer, every-time someone copies a piece of your content and pastes it to their blog, you are going to get a link back to your site. That way, you at least get credit for your work. And let’s not forget that you get traffic from all these links as well.

Overall, Tynt Tracer is a cool blog analytics platform that lets you find new ways to engage your users and build a more solid community around your blog. It also helps you fight content theft. If you are a blogger looking to get your site to the next level by engaging a larger number of your visitors, you should try Tynt. It’s free!

You can’t expect to provide value to your users without using content that is available online. Whether you want to source a news story or share a video with your readers, you are going to need for content that you can share with your readers. Lizzer is a cool Web 2.0 service that has taken the Web by storm by providing bloggers with a super tool that makes it easy to find and insert content into blogs. We are not just talking about articles and news items, but videos and pictures as well.

Lizzer is compatible with WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, and Tumblr. And you are also covered with Facebook and Twitter. It’s one of the easiest tools that I have ever used, and it really makes finding cool content easy. Here is how it works. The folks behind Lizzer are working hard to add lots of content sources to their widget. But right now, you can add Google Blog Search, Flickr, Google Video, YouTube, and Google News to your Lizzer widget (there are many other sources available). Once you have done that, you can launch Lizzer on top of your favorite blogging platform and use the search functionality provided with the widget to find content on the fly.

As you can see, Lizzer sits atop of my WordPress page and lets me find and post content to my blog easily. You can post videos directly to your blog or use the embed function available on the widget to get the code. If you like a piece of content, you can add it to your favorites and refer to it in the future.

Lizzer is still in its infancy. The sky is the limit for these guys. The more content sources they add to their widget and the more platforms they support, the more value bloggers can get out of it. If you haven’t tried Lizzer already, you owe it to yourself to do it today. It’s a life saver!

I’ve got to admit. I am a software junkie. I try everything there is under the sun to find anything that can help me become more effective. Recently, I came across yet another cool web solution that helps me blog more effectively. Ensembli, which was still in beta when I signed up for it, grabbed my attention as it was very easy to use, yet very helpful in giving me ideas for my own blog posts.

Ensembli is a content aggregator. Most people already use Google Reader, Google Alerts, Bloglines, or other web solutions to manage their content. With Ensembli, you have a smart aggregator that learns from your behavior and customizes the content that you want to see. All you have to do is provide it with a keyword phrase, and it goes to work for you. Let’s see how that works:

Ensembli scans, filters and collates stories, from across the web, that relate to the interests you define in your account. The more you read, discard, or even ignore the stories Ensembli finds, the more the system learns from you. It’s sort of like Google Reader on steroids. Now, the system is still in early stages, which means you can expect it to improve dramatically in the upcoming months, but that doesn’t mean you should not try it.  I can’t tell you how many post ideas I have gotten after using Ensembli. It’s definintely worth a try, and it’s so simple to use even a caveman can do it!