blog writing tips

blog writing tips

Effective Strategies for Writing Engaging Blog Posts

1. Introduction to Blog Writing

If you want to run a successful blog today, you cannot afford to just manage your blog on a casual and part-time basis. Successful blogging needs you to deal with a multitude of tasks and roles. First of all, it’s about PR and networking. You need to be constantly in touch with your readers and other bloggers based on niche commonalities in order to leverage business opportunities. As a matter of course, the quality of your blog content is absolutely vital, both from a genuine information perspective and in terms of the writing style applied in that content. In our experience, delighting readers with excellent content is the most important of all tasks to execute—irrespective of all other efforts. Good content still provides the perfect conditions for a growing readership, just like a strong foundation provides perfect conditions for a growing house.

2. Understanding Your Audience

Even when you already have an established audience, it’s important to stay up-to-date on the wants and needs of your readers. Consider distributing surveys, conducting quizzes, hosting a live Q&A session, and engaging in social listening to better understand your current audience and continue to improve your target reader personas. Visit relevant subreddits, Facebook groups, and forums to see what kind of topics people discuss most often. Look at what grabs their interest and gets their feedback and think about how you can spin some of the debates into articles.

The first and most important step in creating engaging content is to understand your audience. What is your audience searching for? What are their needs and wants? What solutions can you provide to help them? Without a clear understanding of your target audience, it’s difficult to determine the types of content that will resonate with them. Developing target reader personas can help you identify your ideal audience, including characteristics like age, gender, marital status, education level, income, hobbies, and problems experienced. This will help you align your blog posts with your readers’ interests.

3. Crafting Compelling Headlines and Introductions

After your headline, the introduction is written next and this fulfills a dual purpose. It lets the reader know what your post is all about and should serve as a taster designed to help the reader decide whether they wish to continue and read on. The introduction of your post should intrigue your reader to make sure they continue and read on to find out more. This is accomplished by creating strong ‘hooks’ in your introduction that will make people interested in reading more. For example, phrases like “did you know that…”, “most people do this without realizing it”, “here are the best tips and hints to avoid this” could work very well to draw in your readers.

Headlines are the first thing your readers will see and will determine whether or not they click through to read more. People are more likely to share your post on social media if the title is engaging. Make sure that your headline captures the essence of your post and is as compelling as possible. It should really come alive and make the reader stop and think about a certain issue or situation you could be solving for them within your blog content. You can also consider using a number in your headline to appeal to a certain demographic, for example, “10 ways to improve your written English”. A headline like this fuels curiosity and will draw in many interested readers.

4. Structuring Your Blog Post for Readability

Another break from posts in newspapers, for example, is the length of a blog post. On a blog, posts become attractive based on their practical application. This means that the post either gives in-depth information about the subject or else the post is very brief and gets the information out quickly. The other side of the coin, however, is blog owners who do not treat their posts with respect.

It is vital for readers to easily read whatever you write on your blog. To make it easier for your reader, the individual post should be structured in such a way that the reader can go to any part of the post by simply clicking on a link and not scroll endlessly looking for the information required. The trick is to use headers to divide the post into sub-sections. Each sub-section is then given a hyperlink that appears at the start of the post just after the introduction paragraph. This is why every long post online appears to promise to be the most informative page on the subject, with assurances like “these are the topics we are going to cover in this post.” The point is to show the reader that you have a wide breadth of coverage, so they are more inclined to continue reading.

5. Incorporating Visuals and Multimedia

You’ll also want to make sure multimedia assets are properties in similar ways that text is; check the copyright or rules around an image, don’t forget to name your image files meaningfully, and just make sure you give others’ intellectual property the same respect as if they were the ones writing the article. For instance, just because an image is tagged as ‘free’ in Google Images doesn’t mean that should give you free rein to use that image. Always check that the image is available as creative commons or public domain.

Using other multimedia, like slideshows, audio, video, and polls, can add a unique type of value to a blog post. For example, if you are making a point about design, you may want to create a slideshow with visuals that help drive the point home. If you have a live event to report on or a podcast to share, consider breaking up the text-only nature of your articles with other interactive features. Multimedia can provide support and bibliographic references for the ideas presented in a post, and provide clarification. They add value.

Images can serve several purposes. First, they make your blog post pretty to look at. Second, they can be used to break up text, which can be particularly important for very long posts. Blogs are social, and text is harsh on the eyes, so the addition of images can be very useful. Finally, images can help to drive home an idea – whether it’s a high-quality image effectively illustrating the point you’re making in your article or a meme, cartoon or infographic that drives home a key idea. Never shy away from using images just because you’re not a professional photographer – the internet is full of incredible resources for good images that don’t require a heavy wallet.