We’ve taught you before about the importance of optimizing your blog posts for SEO in order to make your content shareable. But beyond tags and keywords, there are ways you can structure your blog posts in order to generate traffic and shares. This perfect blog post blueprint from Business2Community shows you how to structure your posts for success. Follow this blog post blueprint to outline your content ideas and ensure you’re prepared to include the most important features when you publish them.

We may be biased, so we certainly agree that social sharing buttons are key. Recommending related posts at the bottom of your post and including a comments plugin like Livefyre are also quite important. One tip I’d add is to include a call to action to subscribe to your posts, either by email or RSS. However, the infographic creator may have left that out as you can include that in your sidebar and not below each post.

Top 3 Blogging Tips

These were my favorite blogging tips and takeaways from the infographic.

1. Blog post title: It should be creative and include your main keyword or phrase

The blog post headline is one of the most important parts of your post. It’s what potential readers see as a preview to your content when it’s shared on social media, and it plays a huge part in their decision of whether to click that link or not. So make it count.

2. Body copy and opening paragraph: State your purpose and objectives. Include keywords and variations of those phrases.

There’s so much content for your readers to consume these days. If you want them to share your content, you’ve got to have a hook to keep their attention so they read your piece and pass it along – versus quickly closing the page and moving on to the next intriguing link in their newsfeeds. Stating your purpose is a great way to hook them because it’s setting the value proposition right in the beginning. Answer these questions: What will your readers learn from your post? Why are you talking about the trend, research, or tools that you are talking about?

3. Include a list.

Breaking up your content into a list format makes it easy for your audience to digest. It shows off the teachings of your post in a simpler way than long paragraphs. Bold text, headings, H2 text and bullet points also serve this purpose. Give it a try.

What blogging tips did you glean from the infographic? Let us know in the comments!

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On our blog, we talk a lot about the importance of creating shareable content. This infographic from ProBlogger shows you exactly how to achieve that. Some of the tips that I love are in regards to kinds of content: Infographics, videos (vlogs), audio and interactive content (games, quizzes) are known to go viral. Check out the infographic for more tips:

Have you tried any of these viral content tips? Let us know in the comments.

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Want to make your content easier to share? Try Shareaholic on your blog.

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Adding More Sharing Services to Your WordPress.com Blog

Use the Share API to make adding any sharing service that is not supported by WordPress.com (or Jetpack) really easy!

What You Need to Know

If you would like to add a sharing service to your blog that is not available in the standard set that WordPress.com/Jetpack provides, you can add it using the “Add a new service” link in the “Available Services” section.

The three things you need to define a sharing service are:

• Service name – used for the text label. It will appear in the link to the service in the share bar and in the blog sharing stats. ex. Google Buzz
• Sharing URL – is the URL address to the sharing service submission page. No need to go hunting for the correct URL. All you have to do here is use the Shareaholic URL below, and replace the “service=” value with the one for the service you’d like to add. A complete list of 250+ available service codes are listed here.

  For example:

  http://www.shareaholic.com/api/share/?v=1&apitype=1&apikey=8943b7fd64cd8b1770ff5affa9a9437b&service=257
&title=%post_title%&link=%post_url%&notes=%post_excerpt%
&shortener=google&source=Shareaholic

  If you’d like to get fancy by specifying your own bit.ly url shortener keys, etc – you can. Read up on documentation of lots more advanced settings for the Share API.

• Icon URL – URL of a 16×16 icon that can be used for the service. ex. http://www.someserver.com/images/buzz.png

  An easy/fast way to get the service icon for the service you’d like to add is to use the following favicon API:

  http://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=evernote.com
  (just replace evernote.com with the domain of your choice)

Save the service and the new service will appear in the Available Services section. And you’re done! Fast, easy, safe.

Useful Resources:

• http://en.support.wordpress.com/sharing/
• http://www.shareapi.com
• http://www.shareaholic.com/api/data/