It is time for the letter ‘I’ of the #AtoZChallenge for April so today’s post is about how to ensure that your blog posts are interesting for your audience.
How can you continually create interesting content for your blog – content that people are going to want to read, return to, and if it is a business blog, buy from you?
1. Create Content That People Need
People will be interested in your content if it meets their needs. One way to do this is to answer their questions and solve their problems, perhaps even before they realise they have a problem. The easiest way to do this is to make a list of the questions that customers ask you, be it on the phone, in person or by email and write blog posts in response to those questions. You can bet that if a couple of people are asking a particular question, there will be many more searching for the answer too – and now your blog post will pop up in the search results.
2. Emphasise Benefits, Not Features
If you go on a sales course, you will be told to emphasise the benefits of your product or service, concentrating on them rather than concentrating on the features. Remember this if you are writing blog posts about a product. For example, if I am buying a household gadget such as a new vacuum cleaner, I want to know that xxx power means it can hoover up pet hairs effectively – that’s the benefit of that particular hoover.
3. Tell Stories
People love stories, they hook them in, they want to read to the end, it makes them feel that they know the business all the more. This post by Amanda of Spiderworking shows how to put your staff at the centre of your storytelling and I love the Pinterest example of the zoo.
4. Break It Up
No matter how interesting your content is, if people are faced with a wall of text on their laptop screen they are going to struggle to read it. Remember that we read differently on the laptop to a book or a newspaper. Break up the text with subheadings or images to create some white space and visual interest.
5. Ending
If yours is a business blog, you need to reward your readers at the end of the blog post for staying with you. That reward might be encouraging engagement by asking them to comment or perhaps that they like your facebook page so they can see your updates there or perhaps you can tell them where to buy the product you have blogged about. Yes, these are calls to action but if people have read a long blog post, they are interested in your content so reward them by offering them more.
And my ending today is this banner image with our free ebook from We Teach Social. I hope you enjoy it – it has ten social media tips to boost your business.
