You’re wasting your time with your blog. At least you are if you’re not writing using the following tips.
Your blog content should be about more than just listing keywords – it should serve value to your customers and get traffic to your site. In a perfect world, it would even be a major channel for conversions.
We don’t live in that perfect world, yet, but you can use these blog writing tips to get closer. Learn how to make your content better below.
1. Write To Solve a Problem
This is going to sound harsh – but no one cares about your opinion if you’re selling a service. They want facts and answers to their problems.
If you make each of your blog posts a solution – then they’re going to get read and you’ll build up trust.
To make this strategy work, you’ll need to know the pain points of your audience. That means what they’re lacking from other or their current providers.
Part of that comes from scoping out your competition and finding their weaknesses, but the rest of it comes from the tip below.
2. Know Your Audience
Unless you have a lot of luck, you’re not going to get the kind of success you want without knowing your audience. Knowing your audience tells you what services to deliver, what their pain points are, and how you can fulfill their needs.
Not only that, but it tells you what tone to write in and which marketing strategies to use. It even tells you which social media or another platform you should run your ads on.
If you take anything from this article – let it be that you must know your audience to succeed.
Here’s a quick rundown of how to do that.
Create audience personas. Who are the two or three most common people that buy your product or service? Maybe it’s Sally, the mid-40’s stay at home mom turned entrepreneur and then Claire, the late 20’s business assistant.
Flush out all the details you know about Sally and Claire. Then when you make your ads, know who you’re targeting and change the copy/images to match that persona.
As you’re starting out you can have up to five personas, but after five, things start to get confusing. Start with your heaviest hitters and then flush out the details on the little guys as you go.
3. Write Great Headlines
We’re going to tell you a secret right now. The fact that you’re reading this article and not the one directly above or below it on Google’s page isn’t a mistake.
We know how to come up with a clickable headline. It’s not rocket science – there are even headline tester tools you can use to test the title strength.
People like headlines that have some personality and a promise to provide valuable information. It’s why you see so many articles titled “a comprehensive guide to” which don’t read that comprehensive at all. Try not to do that.
Use numbers in your headlines and stick to odd ones. They seem to get more attention than their even counterparts.
Finally, try to get one powerful word in your title. Like comprehensive – people like that word because it tells them they’ll get everything they need (whether or not it’s true).
Other power words are things like Free, only, success – any word that creates emotion on the part of the reader.
4. Know Your Formatting
Have you ever clicked through to a post on Facebook – by one of the sites that are trying to be Buzzfeed? It’s a listicle of fun products or silly pictures – but you only get to see three at a time before you have to hit “next page”?
That’s obnoxious. We understand that the publisher is doing that to show more ads, but that serves them – not their readers.
Readers don’t want to click “read more” and they definitely don’t want to enter their email or go through a paywall to get the rest of the article. That’s looking at you New York Times Online.
Keep the post all on one page and then break it up into digestible sections.
If you’re writing a post on what your service is and why it’s needed, someone who knows what you do should be able to easily scroll to the “why” section.
A good rule of thumb is to keep paragraphs to three sentences max. Our eyes (especially now that they’re trained to look a quick internet content) skip over big chunks of text.
Use titles and subtitles in each section – and don’t forget about bullets!
Bullet points don’t need to be full sentences, and they don’t need punctuation. Capitalize the first letter of each bullet, that’s all the formatting you need.
5. Know the Purpose of the Post and Have a Call to Action
You shouldn’t write a post and try to come up with a call to action at the end. You should have your call to action (what you want the reader to do) before you sit down to write.
That way the entire article serves your goal – it’s not just an afterthought.
Most blog call to actions either refer to a contact or services page. If you’re a blog-blog, then you can link to a similar article or to the one you mentioned in the article you just wrote.
Ask yourself if your CTA makes sense. Would you end a conversation in person that way? If you wouldn’t, work on it until it sounds contextual. You want the person to want to learn more.
Blog Writing Tips Delivered
We can’t wait to see what you do with these blog writing tips. If you know your audience and you solve enough of their problems with your work, who knows – you could be the next Neil Patel.
Or the next whoever is the lead blogger in your industry. Ready to get started on your audience persona and pain point research? Use this similar page checker.