Blogging – 7 Ways to Conclude Your Blog Pos

A good blog post has a clear structure that includes a compelling title, appealing introduction, well researched body and a good conclusion.

How you conclude a blog post is an important part of running a blog successfully but it can easily be overlooked. Here are some suggestions on how you can conclude or close your blog posts for best results.

1. Ask a question

Asking a question towards the end of your post serves several useful purposes. It helps keep users engaged. It also encourages readers to participate in the discussion. Comments are important and add to the overall quality of the post. Many studies have shown this indeed works. By asking a question e.g. asking them to share their experience or offer suggestion on the topic by leaving a comment leads to increased participation from readers and the rate of comments can increase.

2. Ask readers to share your post

Social media is a great way to build loyalty and readership. Studies have shown that explicitly asking readers to share your post on social media increases your chances. As you see in the statistics of a study on Twitter below, asking users to “please” ReTweet your content gets four times more ReTweets than without. Similar trends have been reported throughout social media including explicitly requesting readers to share your post, typically at the end of posts.

If you want more tweets or Facebook likes, you too can take advantage of this technique by including a Twitter tweet button or a Facebook “Like” button at the end of their post. You may be surprised with the results.

3. A list of related posts

Most blog platforms including WordPress offer plug-ins to automatically display related posts at the end of your posts. It encourages them to remain on your website to explore further rather than navigating away after reading only one post. This can have a significant impact on your total page views. It is particularly important on blogs as readers typically arrive directly at your post rather than the homepage.

4. Promote a resource

You can close your post by promoting another useful resource. It can be anything from another article, eBook, App, Video or Podcast related to the topic of the post. Users who take the time to read the post are already interested in the topic and are likely to explore further if pointed in the right direction.

5. Promote a product

The end of your blog post is a great place to promote a product or service. You can also promote affiliate products if it is relevant to the topic.

6. Promote Subscriptions

Subscriptions are one of the best ways to retain visitors on website. It is also a great place to promote your RSS feed or other form of subscription you offer to your readers. Even if you an RSS icon at top or newsletter or RSS email subscription form on your sidebar, you can benefit by including this information or its link just after your blog post finishes. Doing this will encourage readers to register and can improve the conversion rate for sign-up.

7. Summarise Your Topic

It is a good article writing principle to summarise your ideas with a good concluding paragraph at the end of an article or blog post. You will be surprised at how many posts end abruptly without a conclusion. You can use the last paragraph of your post to re-enforce your message.  From an SEO point of view, some experts recommend on including your primary keyword in your concluding sentence or paragraph.

Conclusion:

Blogging success depends on a number of factors. The closing paragraph or conclusion of blog posts is a very important part of your blog and plays an important role in the overall success of your blog. It can be used to keep readers engaged, increase page-views, retain customers on the site for longer as well as increase conversions.