How To Write Blog Content that Sells?
Good content is the foundation of a great blog. It is what draws the readers and eventually, the perks that come with it!
As a blogger, it is important that you know what features make for great content.
Informative, Engaging, And Unique
Quality content must be informative, engaging, and unique.
It must be informative and useful to attract readers. Its importance depends on the blog’s niche. A humor blog would be helpful to readers if it always has funny posts. A fashion blog would be valuable to fashionista readers if it posts the latest style and trends in fashion.
The bottom line is to always prepare something useful for the readers.
- Great content must be engaging. It needs to coax a response from the readers and get comments and shares from them. You can even use those comments as ideas for your next posts.
- Informative content must be unique to get the reader’s’ attention and hold onto it. If they can find it on other sites and blogs, why would they waste their time on yours?
Super ‘Killer’ Content
Killer content is something that the readers find hugely helpful. It usually prompts them to bookmark the article and share it to their friends and followers offline and online right away.
There are killer articles that are long and structured, but there are also short ones that pack everything that you need to say in one go. As long as they contain something that is largely informative to the readers, it can be considered a killer content. It could be about a trick on how to save on grocery shopping, how to cut off on phone bills, or how to curb insane cravings.
Killer articles can further establish your content development strategy because of the traffic, backlinks, and authority that they often bring with them to your blog. Some examples include how-to articles, interviews with experts, lists, resources, rankings, and breaking news.
However, you need to invest a lot of effort and time to create killer articles. The hours you spent brainstorming, researching, writing, and editing these articles would pay off in terms of the traffic that they would attract.
Make sure to post at least one killer article each week. If you can’t make time, post at least one every month.
Regular Posts
Although killer articles may bring in a flurry of readers to your blog, you can create a community by frequently posting regular articles. These are the type that will connect you to your readers.
Regular posts are necessary in maintaining your blog, especially since you need a lot of time to create and publish killer articles. Some great examples are quick tips, opinion articles, quick links, polls, questions to the article readers, blog updates, and events.
Headlines
To get your readers’ attention, your articles must have great headlines. Remember that the headline is the first thing that people get to read. If it is not compelling enough, your readers won’t be encouraged to read the main article.
The headline will determine if people will continue reading your post if they see it on article directories or other sites, or if they will try reading the other posts on your blog. If they find your headlines dull, they would easily assume that the rest of article is uninteresting as well.
A great title uses the right words that speak to the readers. To know the specific words that can speak directly to your target audience, look for the right keywords on Google AdWords Keyword Tool. You can use it for free and it will give you 150 related terms. You can even find the most popular based on their Google search volume.
Another element that makes a great title is its appeal to the readers’ emotion. It should stir up an emotion in the readers, pushing them to click on the link that leads to your blog or to the entire article.
Finding new ideas for content writing
Coming up with new ideas about your future posts is one of the hardest tasks of blogging. But you can overcome this obstacle if you always have a pen and paper on hand so you can write down all of your ideas and thoughts right away. This is just so you won’t forget your ideas.
It also helps if you start your possible posts by making drafts in your blogging software. It would be even better if you can prepare a headline and bullet points of all the main ideas. If you’re ready to write a full article, you can work on the draft right away.
If you can’t still find new ideas using the first two methods, you can go to Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Search for keywords related to your blog’s niche and look at the long-tail terms to inspire possible ideas in you.
You can also scour social bookmarking sites to find what’s trending and what’s hot. You could go to Delicious.com, Reddit.com, Digg.com, or StumbleUpon.com.
When to Post Content?
New bloggers often ask just how frequently they should publish articles on their blog. There is actually no ideal posting frequency. Some popular blogs are updated once a week, while others get new posts more than once every day.
But the most important thing is not the quantity of the posts. It’s the quality that counts. Make sure all your posts are useful and relevant to your audience. Not posting anything if you’re not sure about its value is a safer option that posting a bad content that might ruin your credibility and discourage your readers.
For bloggers who want to monetize their blog, there should be a balance between the quality and quantity of posts. Even if you can’t update your blog every day, at least do it regularly.
Follow a schedule to the day and even the hour of the posting to assure your readers that they will find new posts at that certain time of the week and visit your blog during at that specific hour.
I hope this helped 🙂