Key To writing an engaging blog

The Key To Writing An Engaging Blog

Everyone in the marketing industry will tell you that content is king. Why? Content, especially in the form of a blog, is a way for you – and your business – to stay in touch with current customers and entice new ones.

But coming up with the right content for your blog or email newsletter is not always easy. You need to capture your reader’s attention right away. When your audience needs something, your business or service will be top-of-mind.

Keep these tips in mind when you write:

Be conversational

When you sit down to right content, write as if you’re speaking to your audience in person. Make the written content casual by using language you use in everyday conversation. With this tip in mind, you’ll not only have an easier time writing, but your audience or reader will feel more connected because it’s been written with them in mind. On that same note, try not to use too much jargon – industry-related words. Keep your content simple and understandable.

Think quality over quantity

Don’t assume you need to write a 1,000-word blog post or email newsletter. You want to capture your audience’s attention, but you run the risk of losing that attention when a post is too long. After all, don’t you have a limited time to sit in front of the computer to read or check emails?

Carefully craft your headline

After reading the headline, it could be the difference between continuing reading, or deleting the email or switching to a new webpage. In one simple line, summarize the point of your content, the main reason why someone should read it. Then, think about whether or not you would read it. Publish your content when you’re comfortable with what you’ve crafted.

Use proper formatting

The content itself should be easy to read, but so should the way the content is presented. If you’re writing a longer piece, format it so it’s easier for your audience to consume.

Finally, consider bolding key words to capture their attention. Bolding draws the readers’ eyes in to an important part of the content. It will also help them identify key points within the piece.

Add visuals

Your content is important, but your audience will appreciate a visual. Adding an image within the blog post or newsletter will not only break up the content, but also gives your reader something else to focus on, especially if that reader is a visual thinker. If you plan on repurposing this content on social media, the added visual is necessary to increase engagement.

Create call to action       

What’s the point of what you’re trying to tell your audience? You don’t want your reader to finish reading the email or blog post and ask themselves, “so what?”

Provide a call to action or solution at the end of the content to convince your audience of what they should do next especially if you are trying to get them to purchase one of your services. Not only will your content provide your reader with valuable information, but you’re also offering help or a solution at the same time.

Be honest!

You’re establishing a relationship with your audience by communicating with them. That’s why it’s important to be upfront and honest. Give your audience specific examples of what they need to know and don’t shy away from revealing some facts about yourself and your business. For example, if company revenues are an important part of your content creation, be upfront about it! Being authentic gives you an authoritative voice, one your readers will appreciate and seek out again.

To market yourself or your services, you need to tell people about it! If content marketing isn’t your forte, why not hire an expert in marketing? Intact Marketing has the tools and expertise to market your business. Check out our website to see what we’ve done for other business. Contact us to find out what Intact Marketing can do for yours.

 

Blogging for SEL

Are you Blogging for the Wrong Reasons?

There are a lot of reasons to be a blogger: some of you are blogging for personal reasons to share your personal life and passions with others while others blog for business reasons.

If your blogging for your business online presence with time you can develop a great network, expand your company’s reach and influence, and change your industry.

 

Regular blogging is one of the best things you can do to help your business grow – businesses that write on their blog regularly receive 55% more website visitors and have 437% more indexed pages in Google than business that do not.

But even when you’re blogging for business, there are important mistakes you want avoid if you really want to see the desired success.

Let’s examine some signs that reflect the real reasons behind your blogging.

  • Your blogging only to keep your website “fresh for SEO.”

A mistake often made by bloggers who can’t comprehend why their blog isn’t having the impact on their business that they thought it would. More likely they heard that fresh content is critical for SEO, and that Google and Bing both love to find fresh content. This is all true, but to have their content have the impact they had hoped for they need to stop writing to try to impress search engines, instead they need to focus on their human readers. You need to create great content that people want to read and share, instead of writing short, lower-quality blog posts just to make the site have some appearance of activity.

Instead of trying to trick the search engines into thinking you have great content, actually have great content.

Produce articles that people will want to read and share with their peers. Far more important than being “fresh” is having high-quality content for people to read.

If people don’t like your content enough to link to it, share it, or comment on it, it’s not going to have the same impact on your business as truly great content will. If you want the benefits of having great content, you must put in the time and effort to produce it.

  • You post all your company news and press releases on your blog.

Great blogs exist to share useful information, unique insights and help you express your leadership and expertise on a subject to your audience. They can be narrowly focused on one topic, or cover broad subjects. Blogs shouldn’t exist just to put your company’s news and awards online. There’s nothing wrong with doing that from time to time, especially for unusual events, but if the majority of your content has no educational value for your audience, that’s not a good sign.

Make sure that you’re providing content on your blog that is interesting to people at all levels of depth.

There’s nothing wrong with posting exciting company news or announcements on your blog. But if that’s all you post, your blog just won’t attract a lot of repeat readers. Great bloggers know to mix up their content and keep things interesting so that they can attract readers without relying on too much promotion.

  • You used to blog every week, but it’s actually more like once a month.

You’ve got a lot of things going for you, but you need to be regular and consistent if you want to see some real growth of your blog. Without regularly adding content, it will be difficult to attract subscribers or inbound links.

If you have pressing demands on your time that make it difficult to publish new content frequently, you still have good options for making your blog vibrant and successful. Try creating shorter content that’s still high-quality, such as useful top ten lists, or take older posts from your blog and update them for new and improved versions. It’s also useful to make sure that you set reasonable expectations for yourself so you don’t get discouraged.

Blog readers love to be able to come back to sites that they enjoy to read more content. If you’re only updating your blog sporadically, it’s hard to build a real fan base. Keep creating great content, and set reasonable expectations for the frequency and volume of your blog so that it can fit into your schedule.

For great results gather topic ideas or questions from your sales team or contact form to learn about what your potential leads and customers are asking about and what their needs are, and write posts that answer those questions.

It’s great to use your blog to encourage your customers to continue to learn more, and to share content with them. Make sure that you write for a broad audience by varying the types of content you produce, and use your blog to generate leads as well as to help your existing customers.

Have you ever faced any of these problems on your own blog? How did you solve it or change your content?