Is it enough to gather your resources and give a spin on the information you want to provide to your readers? In short, no. Great blog posts should convert your readers and encourage them to visit your site repeatedly. You need to make an impression.
Here are some clever and quick tips from the experts at Focus DMG to help you craft outstanding blog posts with just a little more effort than usual.
Understand Your Audience
Bloggers will often put a lot of thought into who their ideal readers are and define their voice around that. However, if your ideal audience doesn’t match up with your actual audience, you can have a huge disconnect.
There are many tools to help you find out what your audience wants and what the people in your niche or industry need.
SEMRush – A paid tool that allows you to use some features for free, SEMRush helps bloggers spy on their competitors and plan out keywords.
Quora – Not only do you need to know what the people in your industry are asking, but you need a way to connect with them. Quora acts as a great resource to find questions to answer and usually gives some context in what the user is looking for in the answer as well.
Advance Search Twitter – Twitter has an underutilized search tool. To use Twitter to help gain insight into your audience, search for your primary keyword and then filter to “questions.” You’ll have a treasure trove of questions and concerns from the people you want to read your blog.
Extra Extra! – Skim All About It
People aren’t reading anymore. They skim, they look at headlines, captions, and occasionally will read the section that they feel is most relevant to their interests. The struggle for many bloggers is to write that one compelling headline because, without it, no one will read or share your post.
What tools can you use to make sure that your headlines are great? Use EMV Headline Analyzer which can tell you about the emotional value of your headline. Then try using Headline Analyzer from CoSchedule which can help you tweak your headline to make it just a bit better.
Writing a great blog is hard, but following certain steps can make it much easier. Call Focus DMG for help today.
Subheadings and Bulleted Lists Are Your Friends
Formatting plays a substantial role in how your readers will take in the content. Imagine if this page had no subheadings and everything was just under one title? It’d be boring.
Use subheadings and bulleted lists when appropriate. These two useful aspects of formatting can make people switch from skimming your content to actually reading. If the formatting is easy on the eye and the material seems like it’s in bite-sized chunks, then you will draw in more readers.
So, you probably know what subheadings do and when to use them, but what about bulleted lists? There are rules involved with bullets, and they can make or break your post.
Follow these rules when using bullet points:
- Make each bullet consistent, use either single items or short sentences.
- Don’t replace a paragraph with bullets. It makes for clutter.
- Each bullet point should be visually symmetrical.
- Each bullet point should have one, clear, benefit.
You can now see how the bullets above work well as a list and would be too much information for a paragraph. They are all a short sentence and are visually similar in length.
Use Images
Visual content is taking center stage when it comes to posting online, but that doesn’t mean that the written word has died. You should work with your readers in mind, though, and your readers will definitely want pictures.
There are a few rules that people work with, such as including an image every 300 words or using an image for each subheading. Use whichever works best for you.
Find images for free on sites such as Pexels, Unsplash, or even Pixabay. Otherwise, you might turn to paid options such as Shutterstock and Dreamstime.
Understand Optimization
The holy grail of blogging, optimization is everything. It’s also elusive, and every time Google has a major algorithm change, you risk losing a lot of hard work.
For effective optimization, always include:
- Meta title with your keyword
- Meta description with your keyword
- Variations of your keywords
- Images with an alt attribute
- Links to your content
Using your keyword to optimize your text should come naturally. If you’re having a tough time using your keyword in a natural way, then it’s likely that your post won’t be found by Google easily.
