Getting thousands of people to read your blog post and pulling them in immediately requires hard work. Nonetheless, there is no need for you to spend hours polishing your writing skills or coming up with a unique idea for a post.
The key to engaging as many readers as possible is actually quite simple: just produce quality content and format it appropriately. While formatting isn’t complicated, polishing your content is much more demanding and time-consuming. A guide to writing an impressive blog post to attract users and generate leads is provided below.
Plan your post thoroughly
No matter how sharp your writing skills are, creating a blog post can take up to several days if you don’t draft it in advance. Start by outlining the plan of your future blog post and make sure you mention everything you want to cover in it. To make a carefully structured, catchy post, forget about free-flow writing. While it is especially helpful to use brainstorming or finger exercising technique, it rarely works for writing proficient posts. Don’t forget about the length of the post. Try to keep it between 500 and 2000 words.
Record all ideas that you have. For instance, you may utilize mind-mapping tools or simply write down some points on paper. Don’t puzzle out how to start your post. Instead, draft all your ideas and you will have a brilliant 5-minute plan.
Edit a title and make sure it sounds intriguing
Undoubtedly, engaging people and making them want to read your article can be challenging. As long as thousands of posts are being published each day, your responsibility is to make your post stand out and distinguish itself from the rest.
Avoid using cliche titles that sound raw and non-personalized. Make sure to make it sound empathic and plain.
Writing a long complicated title can often push readers away. Also, long titles are not displayed in search results due to Google’s display limit. With this in mind, think of a short title that will sound both engaging and sweet.
Get to know your audience
Writing a blog without having considered your target audience and its preferences is pointless. Find out what your audience seeks and what it indeed needs. You do not need to conduct complex research or observe your audience for a long time span. Instead, feel free to use software for industry research.
Begin with keyword research to find out what users often search for and use these keywords in your blog post. In addition, you can use Quora to discover the issues that users in a specific industry are interested in.
Come up with a blog post idea
Your task is to generate an idea that will be accepted and loved by your readers. Blogging trends make it possible for you to create an attractive blog with top-quality content. Below are some blog post ideas that work today.
- Step-by-step guides. Breaking down text into small steps makes it both readable and useful. Just find some issue and outline a how-to guide.
- Most current events. Readers are primarily interested in current events and seek new opinions on them. Writing an opinion post can be especially beneficial since people are already discussing it.
- Checklists. Bulleted lists are easy to read and perceive. Just think of some checklists that will be relevant to your industry. If you write about traveling, come up with a checklist for traveling on your own with a limited budget.
- Controversial issues. The heated debate about many controversies provide good fodder for discussion and you can choose and write about any of them. But be careful and don’t accidentally get emotional or rude.
- Reviews. Since people are living in the IoT era, most purchases are conducted online. Before making a purchase, people often address reviews to make sure that the product is worth the money, or if there is any good substitute. That is why reviews will always be popular since this is the type of post people always read.
- Influential storytelling. Discover people’s inspirational stories or some recent breakthroughs in an industry. Such posts often go viral since they motivate readers and make them eager to do the same inspirational thing.
- Summaries and take-aways. Reading a book or some complex text is time-consuming, so many readers seek summaries. For instance, you can come up with 10 key takeaways from some book or guide related to your industry. Readers will be grateful!
- Interviews. Find some famous people in your industry and talk with them about things your readers are interested in.
Add helpful links
Since you cannot physically cover everything in a single blog post, you sometimes need to omit information. But, as long as you strive to make your article helpful and useful for the reader, feel free to include links to relevant websites.
Also, if you have done research exclusively on your own, it is still recommended that you add external links. Readers always need to get proof of the validity of your points, so add some extra explanations in the form of outbound links.
Check whether your blog post is readable
Formatting is the final step, but the most fundamental. Even the most impressive article won’t be read if it doesn’t look readable. First and foremost, make your paragraphs short and on point. Giant walls of plain text will likely provoke irritation or at the very least bore the reader.
Keep your sentences short. In some cases long sentences are okay when needed, but do not abuse them. When possible, make bullet lists and provide numbers for better visual perception.
Finally, read aloud what you have written and check whether all sentences flow logically. Remove everything that is out of place.
Making sure your content corresponds to your audience’s expectations and covers current issues will guarantee reader interest. All you have to do is to approach your potential post with responsibility and keep the steps outlined above in mind.
