Earlier this week, we showed you how to increase your efficiency when writing a blog post. Now we’d like to discuss how to increase your effectiveness, because speeding up the process isn’t helpful if the quality of writing is poor.
1. Break Up The Content: To make your blog posts more user-friendly, you should create posts that are easily scannable. By that we mean writing shorter paragraphs, using subtitles when the points change, and by adding in one or more relevant images. If people arrive on a page and see one big block of text, it’s unlikely that they’ll read all of the content. Breaking up the content makes it easier for the visitor to skim if they’d like.
2. Use Lists: People love lists—in part because it adheres to the first point about making the content easily scannable, but also because there is no ambiguity as to what the blog post is about. If your post is called, “5 Ways to Drive More Traffic to Your Site,” then you’ll likely receive more visitors than a post titled, “Give Your Business a Boost!” With the first option, people know exactly the type of content they can expect to read about (assuming you deliver on what you promised in the headline).
3. Tell Stories: The use of stories works when you’re trying to teach your readers something or when trying to encourage them to buy. That’s because people can relate to stories and they’re often more engaging than distant, technical writing. You can use stories in the descriptions of list items, in replacement of them if you don’t write a list post, or in addition to them.
4. Use Calls to Action: At the end of each blog post should be a specific call to action. Whatever you’d like visitors to do after reading your content, make the next step they should take clear. If you want people to interact with your post by commenting or sharing it on social media, then ask them!
If you still struggle to meet your goals when writing a blog post, we would love to help. Our content strategists can help you come up with an effective plan to make your blog posts more effective and can even create the content for you. Give us a call today!
