Want to get more value from your blog content? Follow these 10 steps to craft engaging blog content and resonate with your audience.
When you start blogging, you want to know it will be worth it. The best way to ensure it is worth it is to craft engaging blog content.
Many elements contribute to how engaging your content is. Here’s the comprehensive guide that will help you prepare.
If you’ve been writing blogs and seeing limited results, it’s time to evaluate how engaging they are. Follow this guide to ensure your content is resonating with your audience and encouraging them toward the next step.
The first step in creating engaging content is to ensure you’re writing about topics that matter to your target audience. Spend some time listening to what your audience has to say and learning about their needs.
One of the best places to look for topics is your customer service team. Ask about pain points that customers regularly contact you with. Engage in focus groups or send out surveys to gain a greater understanding of what your target audience is experiencing or what they want to learn more about.
This is one of the most time-consuming and expensive parts of drafting engaging content. But if you skip this step, you’ll likely end up rewriting content that’s already out there as you simply try to keep pace with your competitors. Your goal should be to set the trends and be the ones your competitors try to keep up with.
Reading your blogs should not feel like a chore. But it will if you use lofty language, complex sentences and chunky paragraphs. Keep your blog language simple, inviting and easy to read. This will make your blogs more inviting.
Research shows you have 10 seconds to hook the reader before they decide to stay or leave. Attention spans are continuously shrinking, so be sure you are putting the most important information at the front or making an enticing promise to your readers that you’ll fulfill in the coming sections.
Despite trying to write a great hook to open your blogs, you also want to ensure you are making it easy to read to encourage your readers to continue.
Reading can lead to fatigue. People want to gain the information as quickly as possible and visuals can help them do that. Whether it’s just a classic photo that breaks up the content and makes it more interesting or it’s stats and figures in the form of graphs, you’ll make your content more attractive when you include visuals.
As you consider your visuals, also think about how share-worthy the content is. Encouraging social shares of the content, such as re-pins on Pinterest or posting the content on an Instagram story can help you reach more readers who want to learn more once you pique their interest with your visuals.
Regardless of where your audience comes from or how they land on your content, the headline will be what lands them on your blog page. Whether that’s because you sent them an email about the new blog or because they found you via a search engine, the headline should be compelling.
When drafting your headline, use strong emotive language to elicit a response from your customers. Consider what emotion you want your audience to feel when they read your headline.
Here are some sample words alongside the emotions they evoke:
Stories make content relatable. It makes a topic come to life and helps readers retain what they’ve read. Humans are natural storytellers. It’s how we carried news from person to person and shared experiences long before the internet or any modern form of communication.
Another great quality that stories have is that they are immersive. They a person put themselves in the story.
Some ways to tell stories in your blogs are to include personal experiences, case studies, quotes from customers and more.
The most boring blog topic can come to life with the right formatting. All blogs, no matter the topic need headings, subheads, short paragraphs, white space, and bullet points. The easier it is to skim your blogs, the more likely you are to engage your readers. Help them jump to the information they want to know with an index that anchors to the various sections.
If you want a response from the customer, you need to tell them what that response is. Before closing an article, make it clear what the reader’s next steps are. Summarize your ideas and then provoke the reader to act. Some ways of doing this include inviting them to share the blog, sign up or purchase a product.
Before drafting a blog, ask yourself what the call to action will be. It should connect strongly to better encourage that next step.
Consider how you can get the reader to interact with the content. Some ideas for interactive content include:
Gather their thoughts and collect some contact information to help them learn more about your company and what you’re offering. You can offer custom advice based on short quizzes to help make your content resonate more completely with your target audience.
You can foster community and invite your readers to engage with you more when you invite feedback. This is a win-win strategy because you’ll learn more about the types of content your readers want from you.
Ideally, you want this to be at the bottom of every article via comments. But you can also make social media your community forum. Some companies find it easier to manage only social media comments and not open another area that they must moderate.
A total of 16 percent of the worldwide population is living with a disability according to the World Health Organization. If you want to engage the most people possible with your blog, you’ll need to make it accessible. Consider how easily a screen reader can share your content with vision-impaired individuals. Always include alt text on all images to give screen readers greater context as to what your blog looks like. Consider how you can welcome all people with your content.
Ultimately, working with a team that knows how to engage an audience will ensure your blogs resonate with your audience and gain you the most exposure possible. It’s possible to see traffic and new business from blogs that are several years old when they are well-researched, based on audience interests and engage the reader fully.
New Light Digital offers a team of SEO and content experts to help you get more from your content. Schedule a free consultation now to get started.
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