Doesn’t it bother you when your well-researched and excellently-drafted blog posts don’t find that many readers? You probably ask yourself how to enhance your niche’s engagement and convince them to view your articles!
Maybe your headlines aren’t interesting enough for the average reader. Or you’re unaware of the topics the target audience is interested in these days. The problems differ with the writer. So, here are some general suggestions to create engaging content in 2022:
How to Create Engaging Blog Post - Nine Tips
1. Publish a series
What’s better than a single blog post? A series of interrelated and sequential blog posts! Publishing an entire series prevents you from running out of fresh ideas. It also keeps your readers engaged since they retain the information conveyed to them in the previous article. Posting sequels to the most popular content on your website also increases the audience’s engagement and followers’ loyalty to the brand.
It attracts new readers too and allows you to include more information regarding a particular topic. Moreover, it’s relatively easier to publish ten consecutive articles on the same subject instead of dividing your attention to ten different themes.
2. Use Statistics
Do you know that last year there were over 30 million active bloggers in the USA alone? Make your content more valuable to the reader by providing fresh statistics to support your opinion and analysis.
You can find statistical information on Gallup/Statista, which is accurate and current. Including numbers with your claims shows the audience that you aren’t making general statements.
Your blog posts become more authoritative, trustworthy, and – by this logic – more engaging. And you don’t necessarily have to search on Google to find statistics.
You can also present case studies before the audience to show – for instance – how many subscribers you have amassed in one month. Also, infographics make numbers more interesting since humans process visuals faster.
3. Break it all down
Don’t create a “wall of text” that horrifies an average reader and exhausts his/her interest in your content. Break it all down into small-sized chunks your audience finds easier to digest. Since most people tend to skim through blog posts and only 20% read the actual content.
The audience doesn’t like committing to a tedious and extensive piece of writing. So, divide the article into smaller paragraphs and give them all nice subheadings.
You should try the expert-recommended SEO tips for beginners to increase the readability of this digital content. These suggestions dictate how you can expand your audience by leveraging backlinks, meta descriptions, and featured snippets.
4. Use bullet points
Using a bulleted structure makes your content more understandable for viewers by enhancing its readability.
It also helps you highlight the crucial information you wish the readers to acquire. Thus, visitors can decide in a glance whether they want to give your blog post a read or not since a bulleted structure enables readers to browse through an article in a few seconds.
However, there are some ground rules to remember while you transform the information in the shape of bullet points:
- Begin these points with a verb.
- Don’t clutter the post only with bullets.
- Keep them short as if they’re like headlines.
- Avoid using shapes other than the bullet (•).
- Make sure they’re symmetrical (limit to 1-2 lines each)
5. Use short sentences
Make your sentences short (20 words maximum on average). Your ideal reader doesn’t have a large attention span, and his/her patience will expire with prolonged sentences. Experts believe that a sentence containing 30-40 words will decrease the content’s overall readability.
Similarly, sentences that contain less than ten words are also harmful to the comprehensibility of your article. Furthermore, interlink your sentences by adding transitional words and phrases such as:
- Then
- Since
- Besides
- Thus/hence/therefore
- Moreover/furthermore
In the paragraph above, there are 15.8 words/sentence on average.
6. Add images
What purpose do images serve in content marketing? Science believes that our brain processes an image under 13 milliseconds.
In other words, the mind processes visual content 60,000 times faster than written content. Similarly, around 90% of the information we perceive is illustrated.
Make sure that you’re using high-quality copyright-free images only from reliable sources such as Pexels or Pixabay. But it’s better to take original pictures of your product/s since they’re more engaging for your followers.
You can also utilize Shutterstock to create a custom picture for the blog post’s feature image. These images improve the readability of your content.
7. Grab a reader’s attention
The very first sentence of your blog post should be attention-grabbing and awe-inspiring. If your article’s beginning is tiresome for a reader, he/she won’t bother to read the rest. There are many ways to make this opening excellent and overachieving.
You can ask a question (like Neil Patel does) in the introduction. Or you can begin with a famous person’s quote/saying. You can also reveal the conclusion in the very beginning. Some content writers tend to make a promise to the audience that boosts readers’ curiosity.
Commencing with facts/stats also invokes a visitor’s attention. However, the most effective method – in our opinion – is to tell the audience the problem they’re facing so they’d hope for a solution.
8. Become a storyteller
Storytelling has replaced traditional reporting as the preferred method of communication in the content marketing industry.
Since reporting hasn’t remained as effective as it used to be and people are more influenced by a “good story.” It isn’t easy to convince your audience by dry facts and mere statistics.
A human’s heart craves an attention-grabbing chronicle that appeals to their inner passion for readership.
So, share great stories with your audience in your blog posts. Such posts help people create memories that they tend to remember more easily than factoids. These stories also help readers relate to your brand, find value in your service, and become loyal to your company.
9. Add CTAs
Also, don’t forget to add calls-to-action (CTAs) within your content. These words guide a customer of what steps the marketer wants them to take after finishing the article. An average website has CTA buttons visible to its audience in just 3 seconds, Go-Globe reports. So, ensure to include unique, readable, and distinguishable CTAs to your website.
These buttons productively improve your posts’ click-through-rate and increase the number of conversions.
What sort of action do marketers require their readers to commit? Well, you can simply ask them to share the blog post with their social media contacts. That’s how to enhance your blog’s engagement.
Conclusion
Remember a single principle of success when it comes to content marketing. Concentrate more on quality than on quality. Focus your attention on making your blog posts grammatically correct and visually appealing. Polish your search engine optimization expertise to drive more organic traffic to your website.
Leverage your networks to participate in webinars and podcasts where you can promote your writing. Share your blog posts on social networking websites.
Moreover, use your connections to get high-quality hyperlinks back to your content. All these strategies will help increase your readers and retain the existing ones.
If you have any other interesting tip on how to create an engaging post, kindly drop in the comment section below and if you find this post useful, share to others.
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