Before writing and publishing your blog post, it’s essential to research what it is that makes a good blog post in the first place. If you really want to grab your readers’ attention and secure leads for your business, then the time you put into developing good and effective blog posts will be invaluable in the long term. Every day, internet users are inundated with thousands of marketing campaigns and most of them are barely registered by the eye before they are scrolled past. So how do you make sure that you not only get seen, but get read?
In these times of limited attention and floods of competitors trying to grab the attention of potential customers, you need to make your content engaging and compelling, and at the same time descriptive and direct. Check out the following tips for maximising the quality and efficacy of your next blog.
The Importance of the Title and Subheadings
The very first piece of text that your visitors are going to read. This can literally make or break your visitors engagement with your blog. Any successful blog post achieves three main goals from the first point of contact – attention, clicks, and continued reading. Grab your reader’s attention by making your headline relevant to their interests.
You can do this by researching keywords. Find out what keywords are most searched online relating to your business, and centre your headline around those words. This serves to boost your visibility on search engine result pages and makes you stand tall among your competitors. While your headline should be catchy and sum up the content of the blog, it also needs to increase your search engine optimisation, or SEO. Again, the right keywords, which should be researched, are vital in boosting your SEO and driving more traffic to your post.
Aside from your main heading, or title, put some time into developing engaging subheadings. These serve to break up the body of text and add a narrative element to your post.
Compelling Imagery
Just as a powerful and relevant headline will grab your readers’ attention, so too will the blog’s graphics. Effective and compelling imagery holds the eye, meaning users will spend a little bit more time on your page than they would if there were no images.
Images are also a means of breaking up your body of text and telling a narrative along with your text content. As we mentioned earlier, attention spans are short today, so a mix of engaging content and aesthetically pleasing imagery or imagery with a narrative will serve to hold your readers attention and draw them further into your post.
Imagery within the blog post is one thing, but at that point your visitors have already clicked on your blog. Consider the moments leading to the click, those microseconds before the decision to read has been made. When you post a blog link on your social media pages, for example, the image you include with the link is just as important as the imagery within the blog. This is your readers’ first point of contact with the blog, so it’s potential to draw a reader in should not be underestimated.
The Meta Description
As you may have gathered by now, there are a multitude of factors that influence a user’s decision to engage with your blog post, but it all comes down to relevance. After your title and main image, the next element of your post that you should consider is the meta description.
The meta description is the short body of text that is displayed under the link to your page. By default, this is often the opening lines of your post. However, this doesn’t always serve your business’ best interests.
Spend some time developing a meta description that is relevant and engaging, just like your headline and imagery. A quick scan of your meta description is usually the final influencing factor in the decision to click, so make sure it’s enticing.
The Power of a Call to Action
A call to action, or CTA, is an imperative for users to further engage with your business. Subscribe, Call Now, and Sign up for a Weekly Newsletter are common examples of CTA’s that encourage user engagement.
First, decide what action you want your readers to take, and then provide that option within your blog post. This can be inserted as a sidebar, as a header, as a footer, or even after each paragraph.
CTA’s make it all the easier for users and readers to get involved with your business. You could have the most engaging and informative content within your blog, but without a CTA you risk losing a lot of leads. In general, people don’t want to spend extra time searching for ways to find out more about your business or sign up for more information, so make that process as easy as possible. This also demonstrates an understanding of a reader’s limited and valuable personal time.
The Body of the Blog Post
Here’s where your knowledge and expertise come into play. A reader that has already clicked on your post and has begun to read is not hooked just yet. The content they are reading is still being evaluated for its usefulness and relevance by the second.
Keep the content of your blog engaging by using short, arresting paragraphs. Avoid overcomplicating sentences, and be as direct as possible when it comes to the information you’re providing. Like an effective CTA, a good blog post overall will respect the reader’s time. People come to your blog post because they found your title and description relevant to the queries. Satisfy their curiosity by providing them with the information they want to know, in bite size servings. At the same time, for the purposes of encouraging further engagement and securing leads, it can be worth leaving a little left unsaid, to be discovered through interaction with the CTA.
In Conclusion
The above tips on writing a good blog post are key in boosting your online visibility, generating leads, and securing customers. We’ve all read through blogs that failed to engage us, leaving us uninterested and bored. Soon to follow is an exit from the page and no intention to return. Implement these tips on your blog posts to avoid the risk losing your potential customers and instead draw them into your business.
Blog writing is one of the skills we pride ourselves on at Mint Content. We live to write and write to live. If you would like to chat to us about how we can help you or your company with their blog posts, please don’t hesitate to contact us for a chat!
