It’s no secret that one of the best ways to increase visibility online is to employ a blogging strategy.
You can increase branding, authority, customer loyalty, keyword rankings, traffic, and ultimately engagement and sales through having readers “click here” at the right spot in the article.
While that may sound simple, the actual act of creating a great blog is more than just sitting at a keyboard. Here are some of the key ways that you can improve your blog and increase blog engagement when investing in your content marketing.
Good Research
A great blog first starts with good research. If you don’t know what you’re talking about, interested readers will see right through you.
In order to become an authority in your space, you have to prove to your readers that you offer something of value in the way of information.
Whether you are writing from personal experience, interviewing experts to get interesting insights, or searching the web for information wells that you can pull from to create a guide, your research is key.
The more you know, the more value you can offer the reader on the other end.
Great Writing
Having a knowledge base of the subject matter is definitely important, but transferring that to the digital screen through words takes a different skill set altogether.
If you are a writer and have experience crafting high quality blogs, then you can rest easy knowing that transfer of information to the page will be taken care of.
The truth is, however, that most subject matter experts are not also writers, so employing the help of a professional writer can be a great way to increase the quality of your writing. These professional writers know how to take good information and craft it into an interesting, compelling article.
Strategic Formatting
Words alone can be amazing in theory, but if they are packaged the wrong way you can turn off an audience that would otherwise benefit from it.
There is a lot to be said about how much formatting can do for a piece of content when trying to increase engagement. This is true both when trying to engage a reader as well as increasing traffic to a blog in the first place.
From an SEO perspective, adding keywords into headers can help to expand your organic reach and tell search engines what your article is all about.
From a reader standpoint, a large blog that is broken up with headers, bullet points and bolded sections allows them to skim the article to find what’s most important to them.
Beautiful Imagery
Now that you’ve got the written content on the page, now it’s time to improve it through the use of visuals.
These visuals can come in many different forms including images, infographics, videos, pdfs, gifs and more. Depending on what you’re trying to convey, you’ll want to pick the visual that works best.
Pictures and screen grabs are some of the easiest ways to make a point and show readers what you’re talking about.
For a more informational take on statistics and data, infographics can be a great fit. If you have a more in-depth guide, you may consider pairing the written content with a recorded video of you showing how the process works and what to expect.
Solid Call to Action
The last major way to increase engagement is to ask the reader to engage! A call to action, such as “click here” or “fill out the form below” gives the reader an invitation to act.
You can provide valuable information in the body of your content to increase your authority and brand, but then still ask the reader to contact you if they have questions or would be interested in learning more.