In recent years, blogging has increasingly been used by businesses to connect with their customers or potential customers. Because of blogging’s increased popularity, it can be difficult to combat the digital fatigue that most users feel. So how can you break through all of the clutter and write a blog that your clients will actually read?
Examine Your Why
The key to writing blog posts that people will read is to provide value to the reader and you can only do that by examining why you are writing this post in the first place. What do you want the reader to gain, learn, or do? Once you have your topic, but before you start writing, you should decide the purpose of your blog post and determine your “Why?”. You may want to persuade readers to purchase a product or service that you offer. Or you may simply want to entertain the reader. Or, you may want to inform the reader about something relevant to the success of their work. In my opinion, a good blog post can do all three.
SEO and Other Research
Now, imagine you write an amazing blog post. You’ve researched your topic, found a fresh perspective, and created an engaging and well-written article – and no one ever reads it. That would be nothing short of a tragedy. It also highlights the importance of SEO so that you can get eyes on the blog you worked so hard to write. SEO is a vast concept but it’s important to understand the fundamentals. Using a keyword planning tool you can determine which keywords are popular and likely to be searched by your reader and getting other relevant sites with high authority to link back to your new blog as part of a backlinking strategy will also help your rankings.
In addition to keyword planning and other SEO research, it’s important to research your topic to see what has already been written so you can write a fresh perspective. Popular topics (like this one for example) have been written about a lot. It’s important to add unique perspectives that haven’t been covered. This brings me to my next point.
Standing Out
There are several ways to make a blog post stand out in a sea of other posts.
Humor: A lot of bloggers shy away from using humor because they don’t want to lose credibility or authority in the eyes of the reader. However, humor can be a great way to grab the attention of the reader and break the ice, when used appropriately.
Multimedia Content: Another great way to make your post stand out is to use multimedia content in your posts such as infographics, images, and video content, to support your prose.
Layout: Especially, in longer posts with lots of text, varying the layout with headings (also good for SEO), bullet points, and pull quotes is another way to capture and keep the attention of the viewer.
After reading this post you may be thinking “blogging is a lot of work” and you would be right, but the opportunity to engage with and create value for potential or current customers makes it well worth it.
