Tips for successful blog content
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How do you write blog content that resonates with an audience and stands out from the crowd?
Boosting SEO, building brand awareness and driving organic traffic, blogs are the original web content.
For many businesses, blogs are also their first foray into the world of digital content marketing and creating great content. It remains one of the most important and popular content types. In fact, 86% of companies use blogs as part of their content marketing strategy, compared to other forms.
Writing may be second nature for some, but to others, writing good blogs is a huge hurdle. Not everyone finds it easy to pen their thoughts, much less in an articulate and engaging manner meant to attract potential customers.
The truth is you don’t need to be a skilled wordsmith when writing a blog post — you just need to be able to share your knowledge in a way people can understand. Here are some tips.
Make it newsworthy
There’s a lot of noise out there on the web — how do you make sure your audience is able to cut through it all and reach your content? Pepper it with just the right amount of relevance and serve it to your audience from an angle that’s interesting enough to hook them.
Rather than putting out a cheesy sales pitch, take a more journalistic approach to your content by crafting a story.
There’s a reason why anecdotes are so popular: stories are memorable, and telling a story makes your blog content stick out in the minds of your audience.
An analysis of the most popular TED Talks revealed that stories form at least 65% of their content, proving to be a persuasive and engaging method to share ideas.
You don’t need to be a veteran journalist to decide what’s newsworthy. If people in your industry are discussing a topic, that is usually a good indication of value.
What are the current buzzwords in your field? What’s the latest development? The skill is to utilise your technical knowledge to create work that is interesting and engaging for customers and colleagues.
Keep your tone conversational
The nature of business these days is global. Your audience and potentials can come from everywhere in the world from South Africa to China to Brazil, so you need to ensure your copy is not getting lost in mistranslation.
Skip the jargon and euphemisms, go straight to the point. Don’t forget to use a conversational tone. This is a blog, not an academic journal — no one wants to feel like they’re back in school reading something that leaves them lost and confused.
Always be crystal clear with your writing: simple language and shorter words or phrases make it easier for your reader to understand your meaning, especially when you’re writing for mobile readers.
Remember, you’re trying to keep their brains engaged. You’ll want them to feel involved, so go ahead and start establishing that connection between them and your brand by using personalised language, such as writing in a second-person narrative.
Appeal to your audience’s values to build trust
Your content needs to be benefits-focused so that readers gain something meaningful from reading your blog — you don’t just want to write fluff. Content that actually helps the reader, answers their questions or simply entertains builds trust.
Well-researched articles that offer solutions and answer questions can be a great way to demonstrate your field of expertise, helping attract new customers and keep other customers returning.
Selling a product? Perhaps a How-To blog can educate your audience and offer them valuable information. You can also better understand your customers via product and service feedback or reviews.
All these go a long way in establishing your business’s reputation and reinforcing your position as a trustworthy brand in the minds of your audience.
Use data to inspire your stories
Source: Infogram
Data tells you what is happening within your business or industry while the story explains why it is happening, so leverage on facts and statistics to tell your story.
They’re not only a testament to the reliability of your claims, they often also reveal patterns or points of interest that lay the basis for your blog — the solid foundation on which a strong story can be built.
Incorporating data into your content may seem like a VIP ticket to Snoozeville, but it doesn’t have to be boring. Start by sharing the context of the data, or drawing attention to the data by highlighting it in the key part of the article.
You can also guide the reader through your data by formulating a question before leading them towards the desired conclusion in a step-by-step fashion.
Our point? Stories exist in your business insights and data. The trick is to bring those stories to life.
Visualise each story
A picture is worth a thousand words, especially in the digital age where it might just be worth a 1290% increase in clicks as well, especially if there’s more than one photo.
We live in a visual world. Visuals are essential in today’s digital landscape, so break up chunks of words in your blog with illustrations, animation, visual effects or even photography. We’re all on a screen anyway, so liven things up and make your content more enticing and immersive.
Especially for blogs that rely heavily on data (see our previous point), condensing them into an accompanying infographic also makes all that you’re saying easily digestible, while keeping your site much more aesthetically pleasing.
Did we mention how great infographics are for sharing across social media platforms, which would help drive further traffic to your original blog piece?
Prompt readers to take action
Successful blogs encourage users to take an action. Blog content should be premised around a ‘FOMO’ (Fear Of Missing Out) element, where the fear that today’s specials are better than tomorrow’s.
In fact, FOMO is so strong to the point that 56% of users worry that they’ll miss out on something important if they don’t keep a constant eye on their social networks.
This fear might make people want to fill out lead generation forms and download assets while they can. An example could be making an exclusive report available only for a certain period of time.
If you show the right people the right messages at the right time, those readers are much more likely to return due to an experience that they find helpful and memorable.
Check out your competition
Take the time to review the top blogs from leading firms in your space and monitor their social media channels to see where you’re fighting for attention.
Are you in the business of selling insurance? Do a quick search on Google to see what other insurance companies show up in the top results organically and trawl through their site and social media handles. Look at the content they’ve published over the past few months. What topics do they talk about? What kind of blogs do they have?
Make a note of the content that received the most engagement from customers — there’s nothing wrong with learning from them and incorporating elements into your own site.
Track and review your performance
| Metric | Definition | What it tells you |
| Pageviews | Number of times a specific blog has been viewed | Which blogs are popular and which topics your readers are most interested in; which blogs are not popular, which you can then consider revising in terms of headline, update, or SEO |
| Average time on page | How long the reader spends reading on average | It gives you an idea if readers are reading your content, whether in part of in full. Beware though if they are spending too long to read what should be a simple 5-minute read — you might need to look into the readability or engagement level of your content. |
| Scroll depth | How far down a post an average reader scrolls | If your readers are not scrolling to the end of the page, it could mean that your content is not engaging enough and perhaps needs some restructuring |
| Traffic by channel | The number of people entering your blog via your various social channels | How your readers are discovering your content, whether it’s through the website or searching on google. If you’re actively sharing on social media, it tells you which channel your readers are mostly on |
It’s not enough to write thought-provoking content and upload it, you need to track how successful your content is too. Improvement is only possible when you know what’s working and what isn’t.
You’ll need data analytics to keep you on track. What are the posts that get clicked on most often? How long do your readers spend on your page? What’s the bounce rate for each article?
Assessing the success of your content can include keeping tabs on follower and share metrics, so you know just how and where your content is being distributed. Creating an effective meta description can also boost your click-through rates. Additionally, linking to, retweeting or sharing your posts, or providing advice on Facebook, Reddit or other forums can help boost traffic.
When you know just how your blogs are performing, you can then adjust your approach, refine your delivery and improve performance further.
Use the data as a gauge to determine which topics resonate with your audience and which miss the mark. You’ll want to put out only content that’s relevant to them so they keep them coming back.
Stay nimble
At the end of it all, perhaps the most important feature you need is to have when crafting your blog is to be adaptable.
Planning your blog, either through content calendars or content workflows, means you have the ability to pivot when new data shows unexpected trends. You don’t want to keep missing the mark — you could end up producing outdated content, or worse, provide false information that has since been debunked with newer facts.
Need some help? Contact our CEO and founder Simon Kearney at [email protected] today.
Read more from Click2View:
- Are you aware of the content gap? Get ahead with digital content.
- Storytelling is important. Here’s why.
- Have you asked yourself, really what is content marketing?
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