Here’s some info on better blog posts that may, effectively, take food from my five-year-old’s mouth. No, I’m not kidding. What follows could actually lessen the work I get, by giving you better writing skills.
How? Well, lots of my clients are beginning to prioritise regular blogging, as a route to more website traffic, industry thought leadership, or even better customer service through added value. This trend is good news for me, because it usually translates into regular work.
But what if – gasp! – you don’t want to use me for this, and you’d prefer to write your own stuff? That’s okay too. Here are 4 quick ‘n easy ways to write much better blog posts, yourself:
1. Use a hook
Open each post with a simple sentence that’s easy to read and builds curiosity. It should be short ish (8-12 words). You can also open with a question that ‘calls out’ the audience (‘Has your toddler ever eaten sand?’) or the problem your post will address (like mediocre blog posts).
2. Open loops
To create absorbing content that people read to the end, learn to ‘open loops’ by revealing a benefit that will be explained further down: ‘What follows could lessen the work I get…’ Like cliffhangers in episodes of a TV show, loops help to hold an audience’s attention.
3. Style carefully
You don’t want a post to look intimidating to the reader, so try to avoid paragraphs that are longer than 1-2 sentences. In addition to generous white space between text, you can also use:
- bullets
- numbers
- pull quotes
- subheads
- bolding
- italics
- images
4. Start strong
Write your headline last. Often there’s a good headline idea hiding in your post, and if you dig around for compelling benefit statements, you’ll be able to avoid headlines that are boring (Blogging Advice), bland (First Post of 2017), or excessively ‘cute’ (4, 3, 2, 1… Blog Off!).
Best wishes,
Tiffany