How to write an eye catching blog
With 200 million people (and rising) using ad blockers, blogging is, now more than ever, a vital marketing tool for businesses. With ad blockers restricting the effectiveness of paid advertising, more and more companies are investing money into content marketing, with average budgets for content marketing having increased every year since 2010.
Writing a great blog can be difficult enough, but where bloggers can really struggle is writing valuable content that actually stands out amongst the two million blogs being written each day.
We look at some of the techniques you can use to write an eye-catching blog:
Find your tone of voice
The size of your target audience can vary between blogs, but whenever you write a blog, you need to ensure you are aiming it towards a particular audience, rather than just writing for the sake of it.
Once you discover your target audience, you need to find the right tone of voice – try putting together blogs in different tones and see which ones perform best. Using a certain tone can have more of an effect on some blogs than others but you also need to find a general tone for your brand. It can be a difficult task and it can take a while to discover the most effective tone of voice for your business, but it really is worth it.
Try writing different types of blogs
When done correctly, blogging can be a massive part of any marketing strategy. If it’s not working for you then maybe you need to have a look at the type of blogs you are writing. ‘How to’ blogs and infographics can be great for targeted audiences but list blogs can really be effective for increasing blog views.
List blogs tend to be more visually appealing than other blogs as the content is not in large chunks, making it easier to read. These blogs are generally used for listing tips, gadgets, tools, etc. and can be great for including hyperlinks to any information sources or to the websites of any companies you mention. For example, in our recent blog, top 99 tools for digital marketing strategy & ROI, we mentioned various different digital marketing tools, so we included hyperlinks to their websites.
Whilst list blogs can be extremely effective, it’s essential that you vary the type of blogs you write otherwise your readers are going to get bored. Use a variety of list blogs, ‘how to’ blogs, infographics and more to keep your readers entertained.
Use numbers
‘Adding numbers to your title’ is one of the most common tips for writing a blog – and rightfully so, as it can increase your page views by 12-25%.
Although using numbers in your blog title is a well-known way of increasing traffic to your blogs, using numbers in the actual blog content can also be very effective. When reading blogs, people generally scan the text looking for links, headlines, lists and anything that stands out. Numbers are naturally more appealing than words, and using numbers in the form of statistics can also add a sense of reliability to your blog.
Promote your blog
This is one of the biggest mistakes people make. Sometimes they can spend hours writing a blog and then simply send out one social media post to promote it. You need to be spending at least the same amount of time promoting your blog as you do writing it, otherwise how can you expect anyone to see it?
Using social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram to send out posts on a daily/weekly basis is only the basic promotion you need to be doing – constantly keep an eye out for new opportunities too. Perhaps you’ve written a blog on the ‘top Christmas marketing tips’; if you then saw someone tweeting about struggling for marketing ideas at Christmas, you could politely reply with a link to your blog.
When promoting your blog, you need to remember that it really is quality over quantity. Refrain from being spammy and focus your efforts on people who fit your target audience and would find value from reading your blog.
Include an image
Finally, an eye-catching image is an essential part of your blog. Images are more attractive and more memorable than text, and using an image in your blog can increase page views by 94%.
You can insert an image at the top of your blog to intrigue people to read the full blog when they click onto the page. An eye-catching image can also be included on your social media promotions to attract people to your blog in the first place.
What other techniques do you use when writing an eye-catching blog?
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[…] on from our recent blog, ‘How to write an eye-catching blog’, these are some of the ways you can increase brand credibility through […]
[…] on from our recent blog, ‘How to write an eye-catching blog’, these are some of the ways you can increase brand credibility through […]