Published on June 20th, 2018 | by Guest

How to Make Your Blog Content Better

Content has become the talk of the decade in the field of online marketing. The majority of companies are trying to find ways to provide the best content in their niche. Some are more successful than others. And, there are also those who say that content marketing is the hardest and the most uncertain way to market your products and services.

You know what? They are most probably right. In the SHORT RUN, it may be considered uncertain and not really effective. But, wait a second, we are talking about business, our business plans talk about things years ahead. We say we value the vision, we dedicate our lives to grow a business hoping that one day it will be so powerful that it can sustain with no further investment of our time and energy. And yet we want to take the easy way out, choose something that will be certain and will give us immediate results.

If you value long-term results and are looking for ways to improve your content or maybe you just want your first steps in content marketing to be quality, here are some things to consider while creating content.

What is the purpose of your content?

I believe determining your goals is one of the most important things in achieving those. And, determining the purpose of content writing shouldn’t be an exception. Decide what is your post’s role in your marketing. Is it to start a conversation with the audience? Is it to provide them with useful information about your products or services? Or, is it to answer all the questions your audience had over some time? Whichever the purpose is, it is completely fine. Just make sure you take one and move on that specific direction, because when you try to achieve 2 things in one content piece you may easily confuse your audience and drive them away.

Pay attention to the brand’s voice

For this one, it is crucial to know your audience. How old are they, what are their interests, where do they spend most of their time, what is their profession, where do they prefer to spend their holidays, etc. You may think it is not really important to know where they spend their holidays or anything else out of this list. But, in fact, it becomes important when those things affect the language your audience speaks.

And, when I say the language of your audience I am referring not only to the actual language (English, Spanish, French, etc.) but also and mostly the vocabulary you use to address the topics you want. If you want to talk about real estate with your audience who are mostly lawyers you will be more successful in having their attention if you use legal vocabulary. And, if you are going to talk about the same topic and your audience are mostly real estate agents using legal vocabulary will only make things harder for them.

Make your blog visually interesting

Yes, I agree that we talk about text and blogs that contain text. But, let’s keep in mind that we are never limited to the text only. The main goal is to make the reader stay on that page as long as possible and if we can also direct them to other pages of the same website we can call it a day.

The best way to do that is to add more than one type of content. Don’t tell yourself you don’t know what to add. For starters, you can add relevant images to your text. There is also an option for adding complementary videos, audios, and maps. Many websites even add audio or video and then just add transcripts of those as text content to give the reader the opportunity to choose whichever is convenient for them at that moment. And even though making videos seems to be a complicated process, it is at all hard to do. Today, online video making platforms make it easy for anyone to put together a beautiful video in just a few minutes.

Structure and formatting

When I first started writing, I thought having clear structure isn’t that important and as long as my content is interesting and well written it is good to go. If you write fiction, then yes, you can do whatever you want and write the way you wish, however that is not at all how things work in marketing. Let’s look at this from the reader’s perspective, and let me ask you a simple question. Would you spend time reading a blog post about your field of interest which is 10,000 words in length and has no visually accessible structure? Probably not, because you wouldn’t know if you need everything in that post and you wouldn’t risk losing your precious time on that.

Like this post here, give some structure to your content. I agree it is very long but as it has short parts and is visually attractive, the length doesn’t actually matter.

Write short paragraphs which are no longer than 5-6 lines.
Use subheadings – this will help your readers skim the text more easily and choose to read only the parts which they really need.
Add a conclusion – this is one of the most important ones. Many people just scroll down, read your conclusion and if they find it interesting enough they go back up and read the whole thing.

Ask for an action

It doesn’t matter what type of content you create, asking for an action is highly important. After all, you are putting the effort into creating that content to entertain your audience, to inform, or educate them so they can do something for you in return. I know, I am guilty of sounding a little selfish, but I believe the relationship with your audience should be two-sided and you shouldn’t always be the one giving.

Don’t just ask for an action. First, you need to make them interested in you and your products so that when you ask them for an action, you won’t get a rejection, be it a subscription, a comment, a share, or whatever way they would choose to engage.

Conclusion

These are of course not all the things you can do to make your blog content better, but I believe these are the basics. Start with identifying the purpose of the specific blog post. Then choose the language relevant to your audience so they can fully understand whatever message you are trying to deliver. Make your blog post visually interesting, so that the reader won’t get bored. Pay attention to the structure and the formatting to make it easier for the reader to find the parts they are interested in the most. Be a little selfish and ask for action. As long as you write your own content without copying it from somewhere and you manage to follow these few points you will already have good blog content.

About the author:

I am Roman Daneghyan, Chief marketing officer of Renderforest, an online video production platform for creating professional broadcast quality videos. As a content marketing specialist and an expert in SEO, Social Media Marketing, and Link Building, I enjoy very much sharing the experiences I gained along working as a marketer and helping other entrepreneurs succeed.

My works have been published in different blogs and mediums like Crazy Egg, Forbes, Upwork, ShareThis, etc.

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