How to Increase your User Experience with Trending News Topics on Your Blog 

A big part of creating an outstanding user experience for your audience is publishing and sharing content that is relevant and valuable to them. One type of content that you want to publish or share on your blog is trending news. People always want to know what’s going on in their area of interest and are constantly looking for news stories that are relevant to them. If you’re not the one providing them with the latest news in your market or industry, the chances are likely that they’re going to look elsewhere. If you want to improve your blog’s user experience and be the go-to news source for your audience, here are some of things that you’ll need to do.

1. Set Yourself Up as a Content Curator

In order to make sure you’re always keeping up with the latest news, you need to set yourself up properly. Start by installing and setting up a RSS reader. Then use a blog search engine to find quality blogs related to your market or industry and follow them through the RSS reader. Finally, set up a new email account and use Google Alerts to notify you of any stories related to your blog topics. For example, Google will send you alerts for news stories related to cloud hosting, WordPress security issues, and other related topics if you’ve set the keyword for WordPress hosting. By going through with this process, you’ll have an endless number of news stories that you can share with your audience. Related image

2. Be Consistent with Your Posts

If you want to be recognized as the go-to blog for getting the latest news on your topic, then you have to be consistent with your posting. Obviously, you’ll want to mix up news stories with your original posts to ensure that you have a voice and have some kind of connection with your readers. Figure out how often you should be posting news stories by measuring the engagement numbers from your shared stories. With that said, your posting frequency shouldn’t come into play when there is a big news story that is important to your audience.

3. Give Readers the Option to Share

If there is a great story that’s trending, it’s very likely that your readers will want to share that story with others. That’s why you want to make sure that you set up social sharing buttons with all your news posts. Don’t pick any random plugin to install social sharing buttons to your blog. Find one that makes it easy for your readers to share your posts. There are a large number of plugins that are feature rich but require users to take too many steps to share a simple blog post.

4. State Your Opinion and Ask for Feedback

Don’t just report trending news stories on your blog, add your own unique commentary to your post. This will allow you to add your unique voice and engage your audience. Your commentary can offer better insight, alternative opinions, add on top of the news story or disagree with it altogether. This is also a great opportunity to ask for feedback from your readers in the form of blog comments. Opening up your blog for comments is another great way to engage your readers and enhance your blog’s user experience. Just make sure that you follow up and interact with the readers that comment on your blog.

5. Create Original Content Using Curated Content

A different approach to sharing content is actually creating original content based on the curated content. For example, you can use five different pieces of content on strength training as reference for your own content that talks about the biggest causes of strength training injuries. You can extract expert commentary and important statistics from the curated content to create content around a topic that’s completely different from those five sources.

6. Create a Community Built Around News Related Conversations

A great way to increase your blog’s user experience even further is to set up your own online forum. If you are using WordPress, there are many plugins that help you set up a forum on your WordPress site. You can take news stories you’ve curated and link it back to your forum to start a conversation. There are many sites that have used this strategy and have built a sizable community. When using elaborate forum plugins, make sure you have a reliable WordPress hosting provider that can help you through the installation and setup process.

7. Cite News Stories for Your Own Content and Sales Presentations

News stories that have been published in reputable media outlets can be used to help support your own credibility. If you are presenting a piece of content to your readers, you can cite news stories to confirm that what you are saying is actually true. These news stories can also be used in your sales material to add context from an authoritative source of information. Doing this will cause your readers take your content and sales material more seriously. They’ll even click to the news stories to learn more about the topic themselves.

These are some of the best ways to increase your blog’s user experience using trending news stories and topics, but you should be thinking about other creative ways to use news to add value to your readers. It’s important to note that before you go out looking for sources to curate content from, you need to understand your audience. You want to ensure that you’re sharing content that is relevant and valuable to them before you do anything else. If you’ve done the work, you’ll see the user experience of your blog improve as you continue to share great content, add your own unique commentary, create original content and set up your blog for engagement.