Captivating Your Audience with Blog Content

What I love best about blogging is that it’s not like English class where you have to use perfect grammar and syntax. It’s more like a conversation where you use your own voice and language for your posts.  Don’t get me wrong. You still want people to understand your message so you want to write well and you also don’t want to use too much lingo or techno jargon that not everyone is going to understand unless that is the only audience that you speak to.

So let’s take a look at what you need to consider when writing blog content:

Your Target Audience – Every single blog post should be written directly for your ideal audience. If you don’t know who you’re writing for, it will be hard to know what to write. If you keep in mind that it’s all about them and not you, you’ll write more captivating blog content.

Focused Topics – If you know who you’re writing for, you also need to know what you’re going to write about and how you want your reader to feel about it before you start. If you can’t say in one sentence what you’re trying to tell your reader, you may need to stop and focus more.

The 5 W’s – The basics each post should answer: The who, what, why, when and where of the topic Don’t leave things out that you think they already know, because your reader doesn’t have ESP and not every reader has the same level of understanding that you do.

The 3 S’s – Each blog post needs to be short, simple, and scannable. People have short attention spans these days, especially if they’re reading on the run or while at work. By creating a blog post which has bullet points, your reader can stay focused on one topic at a time. Also, be sure to use plenty of white space in between to make it easier to read on screen, this will help you create a captivating blog post!

Optimized Images – Using images and graphics is an important part of making a blog post look interesting to your readers. However, don’t forget good SEO, and always include alt image tags. Instead of just naming the picture, use the alt tag as a way to describe the picture. This not only helps disabled people enjoy your blog better, it also helps search engines or people who’ve disabled their images on mobile devices to read your content better.

Your Voice – One of the most important aspects of writing captivating blog content is to remember who you are. While you’re writing for your audience you need to remember to write how you talk and don’t pretend you’re someone you’re not. Reader’s want to understand you and know you, and follow and read who you are. Only you can be you, so be the best you and bring on that wonderful personality of yours.

Link Smart – Don’t put too many links within the readable content because it will be distracting to the reader. Maybe consider linking to like articles and blogs after the main content instead if it makes sense. Avoid links that go outside your blog if you can. I know that it’s no always possible. If you do link outside your blog make sure to create a new window so that your blog posts stays open while they are reading the connected content.

Keywords – The meaning of your content is more important than keywords in many ways. You don’t want the concern about keywords to override the good information you want to impart on your readers. Plus, you don’t want to use more than three per page anyway. Any more than that and it can just get too crowded and make Google think your keyword stuffing which was a popular way of getting ranked before the new algorithms.

Edit – After you initially prepare your content take a break and then come back to it and edit it. Usually, the editing process will produce far different and better content than you started with. If you have a virtual assistant or someones else you work with also have them read it.

Promotion – The most important part about compelling and captivating blog content is to promote it. You can hardly know if the content is having the impact that you desire if no one reads it. Share it in places such as social media, RSS feeds and on emails going out to your tribe.

Finally, it’s important to simply “do it“. So many people want to be money making bloggers, yet they never even get to the fundamentals of being consistent.  They learn, and learn, and think about it, but they don’t do it. Doing is what’s going to get you there. Doing is going to give you the practice you need to produce captivating content that gets results. I’ve seen what consistent blogging does for a business. It can be transformational in your traffic, opportunities and followers. So create a plan and stick to it!