Have you wondered why you’re not getting much traction on your blog?

No-one’s signing up for future posts and you can’t get anyone to comment?

Blogging is a modern day diary, it gives you the opportunity to add your thoughts and opinions to any subject and to be read alongside experts on your chosen topic. Blogging for business is an excellent way of demonstrating what you do as you can write about case studies to show your expertise. Doing it well is somewhat of an art form.

This blog post will help you with the Title, Content and Look & Feel of your blog post:

Title

1. Short and snappy – make it easy for people to make a decision whether they want to read it.
2. Keywords – needs relevant keywords in it for SEO purposes (but don’t force it)
3. Attention grabbing – can come from a sentence within your blog post – what kind of title would make you click on a blog post?

Title examples – Twitter is dead in the water, 10 Top Tips to efficient energy use, Has retail shopping had its day? 5 guaranteed ways to boost your bottom line.

Content

1. Keep the language simple – write like a young teenager will be reading it (unless your target market are intellectuals!)
2. Make it a conversation, not a preaching session.
3. Lead paragraph – needs to be the attention grabbing bit, especially if the post is quite long, grab your readers attention with a summary of what they will read or pose some questions.
4. Calls to action – Ask questions, it make people think of an answer (and therefore more likely to leave comments) – especially leave the end of the blog on a question if possible.
5. Not too long – Overall length ideally 300 to 500 words max (forgive me, this one is longer, but worth it!).
6. Keyword rich – if you want a particular segment of your audience to read it, make sure you have those industry keywords in to make it easier for them to find you.
7. Sign off the post – e.g. ‘that’s all for now folks’, ‘next post coming soon’, ‘TTFN’– makes it more intimate and conversational than just finishing it with a sentence. Critical to sign off with your name when more than 1 person will be contribution to the blog as there will be different styles which could confuse readers.
8. Internal Links – Use links to other pages of your website. Link to other relevant blog posts or another relevant page, where do you want your reader to go?
9. External Links – Use links to external websites (and where relevant let that site know you have linked to them – they may help you promote your blog if you’ve given them a positive mention (but make it genuine!).
10. Add videos – (where available – media rich blog posts are more interesting to look at and it all helps from an SEO perspective).
11. Don’t sit on the fence – bland is boring in the blogging world, if you’re going to give your opinion on something, commit to it – you want to get a reaction (good or bad).
12. Write with passion – if you can’t get passionate about your product, service, industry, how on earth are you going to maintain readers’ attention?
13. Review your post – draft it in word, spell and grammar check it – nothing looks worse than a blog post with mistake in!
14. Get personal – if you are your brand, your blog is therefore partly about you, don’t be afraid to add your own experiences, you’ll often find the best response when you admit you got something wrong or are struggling with something.
15. Short & snappy – keep your sentences short to keep your readers attention.

Look and Feel

1. Use bold, italic, colour to break up the text and highlight the key points for skim readers
2. Use bullet points and numbering to break up text
3. Use sub headings every few paragraphs to make it easy to read
4. Use at least one image to add colour and interest to the page (and give credit for use)
5. Paragraphs should be no more than 4 or 5 lines long.

The Result?: Richer, more engaging, aesthetically pleasing and easy-to read blog posts!

This isn’t an exhaustive list (and don’t try to achieve all of them in 1 blog post!) – it would be great to get your top tips and thoughts in the comments below….

Posted by: Jan Minihane

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