Does your blog consistently provide quality content that gets results? If you want your readers to take action based on your blog posts, then follow these eight steps for remarkable blogging results.
Step 1: The Headline Matters the Most
As stated in Copyblogger, 8 out of 10 people will read a headline, but only 2 out of 10 tend to proceed to read the rest of the post. First impressions really do count!
- According to CoSchedule’s blog post 33 Ways To Write A Headline That Will Make You Successful, a powerful way to capture audience attention is to write headlines that promise results. They listed the following examples:
- Orbit Media’s own Andy Crestodina wrote How To Write A Headline That Won’t Get Ignored: 7 Point Checklist. These tips include using numbers in your headline so readers know exactly how much content to expect and using power words to increase traffic.
Step 2: Provide Useful Content
You are only as valuable online to your blog readers as your content is useful or entertaining. Hopefully your content is both!
- Do you offer actionable advice that solves your readers’ problems?
- Do you break it down into easy steps? For instance, Andy Crestodina blogged about “How To Make A Survey: 10 Steps For Winning Traffic, Shares and Links.”
- Are you giving them information that cannot easily get elsewhere?
Step 3: Make It Visually Appealing
Our minds process visual information much faster than we can by just reading. This Food Network post about their 5 Best Macaroni Salad Recipes shows a colorful picture of a macaroni salad that instantly inspires readers to want to make these delicious looking recipes!
- Do you have appealing colorful images?
- Do your pictures relate to your content?
- Do your pictures inspire the emotion you are seeking from your readers?
Step 4: Be a Story Teller
Telling stories puts you in a position of someone with experience and authority and you instantly become more relatable to your audience.
- Addicted2Success blogged about 6 Ways Your Personal Story Connects You To New Clients. Personal stories may be the fastest and most memorable way to connect with others.
- Since you revealed something personal, readers may feel like they know you and your company, therefore they can trust you.
- WordStream shared 8 Ways to Tell Your Most Compelling Brand Story to teach companies how to reveal important milestones and tell their passion story.
Step 5: Use Different Formats
Blog posts can include useful lists, video testimonials, amazing infographics, and so much more!
- Mix up your content formats so that your content never appears stale.
- For each piece of content, ask yourself the best way to format this particular information.
- Readers appreciate learning information in a variety of different ways. For example, Social Media Examiner’s Michael Stelzner (SME Founder & CEO) has a regular podcast like this one with Mari Smith about Supporting Customers With Facebook: What Businesses Need To Know.
Step 6: Take a New Approach
Fresh topics or topics addressed from a different angle will stand out to readers.
- Do not be afraid to challenge commonly accepted opinions with evidence that differs.
- The amazing advances made in the fields like science and technology offer great new topics. For example, Green Biz presented 5 Ways Companies Are Defending Bees to share safer practices.
Step 7: Quote Experts in Your Field
Quoting people identified as experts in your field gives you instant credibility.
- Do a round-up blog post where you interview several notables about one particular topic.
- Video testimonials from celebrities about you, your products, or your service makes you look good. Sales For Life, an authority on social selling, compiled advice from twelve different personalities in their blog post, “Inspire Your Social Selling With These 12 Expert Quotes.”
Step 8: Spread Your Content on Social Media
Social media can amplify your message and cause it to reach others faster than we ever imagined.
- Regularly promote your own blog posts on the most common social media channels your audience uses. After you create a piece of content, you must share it several times so more of your audience sees it. Check out this online networking guide.
- Make your content so valuable that they feel compelled to share it with others. In his book Contagious: Why Things Catch On, Jonah Berger says that people share cool things out of a desire to look good in the process. He refers to this as “social currency.”
- Add a plug-in to your website that makes it easy for others to share your blog posts. WP Chronicles listed The 30 Best WordPress Social Sharing Plug-Ins for 2015. The WordPress plug-in Shareaholic (shown below) is one of them:
Readers, now, it is your turn. Share your tips for creating blogging content that gets results in the comments below.