What new trends can we expect to emerge in blogging in 2023? While blog writing has been around for a long time, and its basic premise doesn’t change much (put words on screen, publish), it does go through developments and fads. Some of them come and go, others stick around for longer or become a permanent fixture of the medium.
To make sure you stay up to date on what’s going on in the blogging game, in this post, we will examine five of the trends you can expect to encounter this year. Knowing this allows you to stay current on the latest practices as well as gain inspiration what you could do better or differently on your own blog. Either way, here are the latest blogging trends 2023.
1. Custom Visuals
Visuals have always been a key part of blog content. They provide your readers with necessary breaks from long walls of text, present information in a different medium, and make your content more pleasant to consume. Need proof? Orbit Media found that bloggers who use ten-plus images in their posts report higher rates of success.
So, do we agree that using visuals is good? Good. However, why the need to go for custom graphics and not more generic images?
First of all, because we as humans have gotten pretty good at filtering out certain imagery on the Internet. For example, eye tracking studies show that stock photos are all but ignored these days.
One of the biggest advantage of tailored graphics is in branding. With custom-made visuals, you can use color palettes and fonts that resonate with your blog’s design and philosophy. Doing so makes sure your posts and pages look coherent and not pieced together. You can also create visuals that refer directly to the content they are part of, like charts, graphs, or infographics.
But what if you’re not a designer? Can you still take advantage of this blogging trend?
Thankfully, you do not need to be a Photoshop master (or hire one) to get the ball rolling. Tools such as Canva, Visme, and Prezi are perfect for beginners who don’t know much about design. These tools come with pre-built templates, color palettes, and fonts that make putting together custom graphics easier. They also have the option to create/import your own color palettes and fonts.
2. Increased Interactivity
From twelve seconds in 2000 to only eight seconds in 2015, human attention span has drastically dropped over the years. In a world where your audience’s attention span is shorter than that of a goldfish (nine seconds), how do you keep them interested? The answer: interactive content.
With built-in interactivity, your readers get a chance to engage with your content in new and innovative ways. If you are looking to add some, here are a few good options.
Videos
Embedding videos in your content has always been one of the easiest ways to boost audience interaction. The rise of visual content in the last few years (TikTok anyone?) has only intensified consumers’ thirst for moving images. As a consequence, up to 86% of businesses already use videos for marketing in some form in 2022 and it’s a good idea for your blog to be among them.
While just including videos in your content already makes your blog posts more interactive, you can even go a step further and add interactivity to the videos themselves. This can be in the form of hotspots and time triggers, such as popups and CTAs, that prompt viewers to move their pointer to certain areas of the video in order reach a particular time stamp. Vimeo is a video platform that can do this out of the box.
However, it is also possible make YouTube videos more interactive, for example in the style of a choose-your-own-adventure approach.
GIFs
If you want to add a sprinkle of fun and interactivity to your blog, GIFs are another way to go. These animated images can add a spark of color and humor to your content and make it less boring.
If you want to dip your toe into this, websites such as Giphy are a great place to find GIFs. Once you’ve chosen one, inserting it into your content is fairly simple – either use autoembeds (like in the image above) or add it via an image block.
Quizzes
Have you seen those Buzzfeed quizzes about all sorts of weird topics?
Say what you will about Buzzfeed but their formula seems to be working. And you can use it for yourself as well. Adding short exams to your content is yet another way to make it more interactive. It does not just engage your readers — it also lets them test out their knowledge!
If you want to do the same on your blog, WordPress plugins such as Quiz And Survey Master or Quiz Maker can come in handy. With these plugins, you can create quizzes for different topics, categories, and pages.
3. Originality
It’s easy for websites in a niche to become echo chambers that repackage the same information over and over again. In such a landscape, being original can immediately make you stand out. Originality does not just add freshness to your blog, it also establishes your thought leadership and displays your commitment to your readers.
There are different ways to make your content original. You can talk about a unique topic, provide an uncommon perspective, or do your own research. In fact, the third option is the easiest way to level up your blog — with authentic research, chances of success rise by up to 41%.
However, we get it — not everyone has the bandwidth to conduct original research. If you want a quick way to boost your content’s originality, another way is interviewing Subject Matter Experts (SMEs). This allows you to enrich your content with the latest information in the industry and add a unique flavor to it.
There are several tools available to reach out to SMEs. Examples include Help A Reporter Out (HARO), Help a B2B Writer, Terkel, and Qwoted. You can also reach out to people in your industry and conduct your own surveys using Google Forms and Typeform. Lastly, another easy way to talk to an expert is to tweet about your queries with the hashtag #JournoRequest on Twitter.
4. Focus on Content Experience
One of the bigger blogging trends in 2023 is the shift from consuming content to experiencing it. Running a successful blog no longer means simply delivering accurate information to your readers. You also have to consider other factors to make the content more appealing.
But how can you enhance the overall content experience? By focusing on core web vitals and improving your overall content ecosystem.
Core Web Vitals
Imagine clicking on a blog post to read it and encountering countless issues with the page. It’s taking forever to load, every click and scroll takes minutes to process, and the page is constantly shifting and jumping.
With reader attention span at an all-time low, this nightmare can quickly make your audience lose interest. To counter this, Google introduced core web vitals in 2020. These are measurements of key aspects of page speed and user experience that also influence search ranking.
If you want to learn more about this topic, check our article on how to improve core web vitals.
Your Content Ecosystem
Your content is not detached from the ecosystem that it is part of. Even if your writing is brilliant, if you present it in an environment that sends readers running for the hills screaming, it won’t perform well.
Besides lack of core web vitals above, what are examples of a bad content ecosystem?
- Masses of popups or other interruptions and distractions (multi-step cookie notices anyone?)
- Autoplaying videos or audio (seriously, who still does this in 2023!?)
- Low contrast or other web design problems
- Bad website or information architecture that leaves visitors clueless about what to do
In short, the goal is to make sure that each piece of content is part of a larger puzzle that makes sense. To create such an ecosystem, it helps to be clear on your audience’s journey. That means possible entry points and how to push readers further. Aside from that, look into building content clusters.
5. Cross-Channel Promotion
Simply churning out blog posts was once enough to be successful on the web — but that’s no longer the case. These days, you also need to invest your efforts in other marketing channels like SEO, email marketing, and social media.
Therefore, one of the blogging trends that will be dominant in 2023 is cross-channel promotion. This marketing strategy integrates all your marketing channels and unifies their plans, data, and goals across the board.
This is different from multi-channel marketing, which also uses several channels to attract customers. However, here, each channel works independently. In contrast to that, cross-channel promotion uses all channels to push out the same message at the same time.
How can you do that?
The first thing you need is a Customer Data Platform. CDPs can help unify, consolidate, and organize consumer data from all your channels in one place. Some good candidates to check out are Bloomreach, Insider, and Segment.
After that, you can carry out micro-segmentation and group your audience according to different demographic details, characteristics, and buying behaviors. This can help you hyper-personalize your content and marketing channels to meet prospects where they are in their journey.
For example, you can open emails with a reader’s name, adjust the mailing frequency to their preferences, craft content that targets their needs, and otherwise cater to what your audience is looking for. In an environment as saturated as the online space, this kind of personalization is a good way to stand out.
Hop on These 2023 Blogging Trends Right Away!
Even an established medium like blogging still sees trends come and go. Being aware of the developments above allows you to decide which ones you want to partake in and which you want to ignore.
As you can see, many of the trends above heavily focus on user experience. Therefore, if you want to follow any trend this year, let it be figuring out how to better serve your audience with the content you provide. This goes both for what you write about and how you present it.
If that is your main takeaway, you can make sure you end up with a better blog at the end of 2023 than you started with.
With 2023 upon us, what blogging trends do you consider most important? How are you planning to improve your own blog this year? Let us know in the comments below!
