Writers and bloggers got tons of write-ups on their to-do lists. They are juggling a dozens of strict deadlines. And the last thing they want after sitting down to write a blog post is to face fierce writer’s block fleering at them.
Writing can be intimidating, especially if it’s not in your comfort zone. But writing is a skill that can be learned, and like any other skill, you can get better with practice.
In this article, we’ll look at five tips that will help you level up your content. The idea isn’t to turn you into a competent author whose content goes viral overnight.
But by learning to implement these five elements of effective writing, you’ll find it easier to create compelling blog posts that people want to read, engage, and share.
Let’s get started.
5 Tips to Level Up Your Blog Posts
Here are five tips to help you create better blog posts and get more engagement:
1. Understand Your Audience
In order to write great blog posts, you have to know who your audience is — not just who they are in general, but who they are while they’re reading your blog and what they are actually looking for.
Your audience could be the potential customers, current customers, or both. It might include people from different industries or people with varying levels of knowledge about your product or service.
So, to find out what your audience is seeking, you must try data-driven computation such as in-depth industry research for competitive analysis. Don’t know how? It’s pretty simple.
You can simply find the type of your audience by skimming through;
- Online communities
- Social media platforms e.g., Facebook groups, Twitter, Pinterest boards, etc.
- Message forum in your niche
- Read comment sections of the most popular blogs in your niche
- Influencers profiles, fan groups in your niche
Do an in-depth analysis and find out;
- What products are they using or looking for?
- What are the most important FAQs they ask?
- Their problems.
- What are new trends in your niche?
Moreover, it is a fact that your audience’s needs will change depending on where they are in the sales funnel when they read your blog post.
If someone is at the top of the funnel and just learning about your company for the first time, their needs will be very different from someone at the bottom of the funnel who’s ready to buy.
Therefore, it’s important to know where your specific readers fall in the funnel so you can write a post that addresses their specific needs and concerns at that stage, only then you will swim through the deadly competition.
2. Choose an Exciting Topic
Now you know your audience, the next step to move on to is choosing an exciting topic that would not go by the reader’s eye without clicking on it.
For the reason that the headline is the first — and only — chance you have to get the reader’s attention.
A boring headline can keep readers from clicking through and viewing your content, so spend some time brainstorming ideas before settling on a title for your post.
So, how can you get there?
Open up Google Trends.
To check how popular a certain keyword is, simply type it into the top search box.
Furthermore, you can use the categories feature to see what’s currently popular and write a blog article based on those facts.
Go ahead and try a search for the keyword “content writing tips.”
It gives ideas about your topic trend by offering options to select region, time period, and topic category, through multiple search options.
If not this, you can simply search your topic on a search engine and see what you come up with. Read out the top-ranked posts and try to hit the topic in a more unique way.
You can also grab the ideas through LSI keywords that google shows at bottom of the page. These are the most searched terms on search engines that ultimately uncover the searched concerns your audience wants to know.
3. Make It Skimmable
The average reader only spends 10-20 seconds on a single web page. They don’t read every word or sentence meticulously, they skim and scan it with a bird view eye. They are looking for specific information that can help them complete their task as quickly as possible.
In addition, Google doesn’t just want its users to find helpful information; it wants them to find that information in less than one minute.
Here are some tips to make your content easily swimmable:
- Use subheadings, bullet points, and numbered lists: This not only helps readers scan your content for relevant information, but also gives Google an idea of what your post is about.
- Write short paragraphs: People tend to skim blog posts rather than read them word-for-word, so help them out by breaking up your text into concise paragraphs with headings and bullet points.
- Use simple words: Nobody likes to use google or a dictionary while reading your post. So, use simple terms to make your content easier to digest.
- Formatting with bold, italics, and underlining: helps readers to grasp the important points quickly.
4. Split Text with Featured Images
After you’ve nailed down your content, it’s time to tackle the visuals.
When you’ve put so much effort into creating relevant posts with enticing titles and finding readers, you deserve a little reward. You want to make your articles stand out.
Visuals are the finest practice to convey your message directly to readers.
Your featured picture is the first thing your visitors may see when they land on your website. Furthermore, studies show that the brain processes visual information 60,000 times faster than text, so it’s no surprise that images are a key part of any successful blog post.
Tools like Canva and free source websites like Pexels or Shutterstock can help you find the most relevant featured images for free.
Graphics are important because:
After reading a large chunk of content, your readers may give up and leave the rest of the article. On that account, your content should be well-organized and pleasing to the eye. And the best way to combat this is to use graphics to break up the parts and keep your text blocks apart.
5. Read and Final Editing
Once you’ve completed writing an article, step away from it for a while so you can return to it later with a fresh set of eyes. Check for mistakes in grammar and spelling, duplicated text, and make sure your statements flow sensibly from one to the next. To top it all off you should re-evaluate your title to see if you can include a relevant keyword or phrase in it.
When it comes to reading your own work to make the final editing, here comes a couple of helpful tools you must try:
➢ Grammarly
In addition to providing a grammatical check, Grammarly offers recommendations to make
your writing style better, more professional, and more accurate.
➢ Hemingway App
Keep your writing style bold and clear with this simple-to-use online editing app. Using this tool will guide you through the process of eliminating any irrelevant, and complex sentences and words with relevant, easy, and most suitable terms.
➢ Check Plagiarism
Check for all types of duplicated text with this free plagiarism checker and make sure your content is 100 percent unique. Paste your text or upload the file and run a plagiarism check.
The plagiarism report will be shown with percentages. It is absolutely free to use duplication detector tool.
Conclusion
It might be difficult even for experienced writers to produce high-quality material at times.
Remember to plan your next blog post using these five handy tips: track your audience, make it scannable, stick to exciting titles, use high-quality relevant graphics to split up the content, and then of course do the final editing.
If I had to ask about the most important tip among these, I would choose number 5, proofreading and editing.
Making it free from all grammar errors and plagiarism issues will get you the best possible results, even if you have slightly overlooked any of the above tips.
Once you have a grip on these tips, you’ll have more time to think of fresh ideas and less time to fuss about the text structure or format and ultimately, your content creating skills will level up.
