A blog is one of the most cost-effective and easy ways to promote your business. But, with over thousands of blog posts being published each day, it’s become difficult to actually get people to read your content. It’s not just about writing a great piece of content, but getting it ranked and optimized for search and social which is key. A marketable blog should contain all the essential ingredients that will make it engaging and interesting to readers so that they want to click on it and read it. An effective, marketable blog can boost your blog marketing efforts, giving you success, in terms of traffic and leads.
But how do you go about creating a blog that’s marketable? Here’s the simple formula: Select the right topic, write an intro that’s captivating; an attractive and crisp headline can do wonders. Focus on the right keywords so that it’s optimized for search and social. Most importantly, write the blog in a conversational style so that it’s easy for the readers to relate to your topic and they get hooked to reading the entire blog. Also add beautiful images. And Voila! You have almost done blog marketing the right way.
We have created a list of 12 tips for writing a marketable blog. Constructing your article around these will help you create the most eye-catching, engaging and effective blog possible.
Know your target audience
Before you start writing the blog, have a clear understanding of your target audience. While deciding the blog topic, find out what your audience is interested in? What will they resonate with?
For instance, if your company runs the business of mobile development, your B2B audience would be looking to learn about the best practices or trends in mobile development. On the other hand, if your target audience consists of millennials, and your product is clothes, you would look for topics like “How to club contemporary fashion into 80’s clothing? Thus, it’s imperative to write relevant topics based on the preference of your target audience. Once you know what will hold the attention of your audience, adopt a writing style for your blog, like business or casual or professional and so on.
Write a catchy headline
After deciding what you should be talking about, look for an appropriate headline for the blog. That’s where all the attention will start developing for the audience. According to Copyblogger, 80% of people will read the headline, while only 20% will read the rest. Without an appealing headline, your audience may never even click on the article or be interested in reading it in the first place.
Make use of interesting adjectives, phrases and words that will make your title pop. Remember the saying, KISS – Keep it Simple Stupid. No one likes a very long title. If you want your blog to rank well in search, keep the title under 70 characters so that it doesn’t get cut-off in search engine results.
Focus on the right keywords
It’s worth thinking about what your prospective readers are searching for. Thus, including a relevant keyword or two becomes important for blog marketing so that you rank in the searches you deserve to be found for. Once you have a keyword in mind, include it in the headline and body so that it becomes easier to be found in the searches. Focusing on the right keyword will make it easy for the people to find you.
Also include LSI keywords (Latent Semantic Indexing) in your blog to increase the chances of your ranking in search engines. LSI keyword is the technical SEO term for related keywords or synonyms. LSI keywords are basically keywords that are semantically related to your primary keyword.
Include Meta tags
Meta tags are snippets of text that describe a page’s content; the Meta tags don’t appear on the page itself, but only in the page’s code. Three important things make up your Meta tag – Title tag, Meta Description tag and Keywords. (add the alt image tag to your image)
The Title tag is the title text that is shown in search engine listings.
The Meta description tag is an attractive teaser or summary of your blog, enticing readers to click on it.
The Meta keywords tag is where you put all of the keywords you use in your blog.
Including Meta tags in your blog is meaningful because the search engines read them in order to verify that keywords and the descriptions are relevant to the visible content, and if your keywords are present in the webpage. Wouldn’t you want to do everything in order to bring your page a little bit higher in the search engine rankings? That’s exactly the reason why Meta tags are important.
Create insightful and attractive sub-headings
A marketing blog should be easily scannable. Thus, writing relevant sub-headings will give the reader an idea of what the entire blog is about. Readers try to find out the gist from the sub-headings, and then decide to read the entire blog or not. Sometimes when they’re in a hurry, they just read the headings and try to capture the essence of the blog. Hence, sub-headings are important.
Write a captivating intro
If the reader loses interest in the first few paragraphs, they will not read the rest of your blog even if your blog is informative and relevant to them. First, grab the reader’s attention by captivating them with an interesting fact, statistics, humor or emotion. Then describe the purpose of the post and explain how it will address a problem the reader may be having. This will give the reader a reason to keep reading and give them a connection to how it will help them improve their work/lives.
Organize your content
You may end up with a lot of content after you have decided and researched about the topic of your blog. Find out ways to organize each fact so that your reader doesn’t run away after seeing a long disorganized length of content. You can write the blog in the form of tips, lists, sections or how-to’s.
The best way to organize your blog is to start writing an outline of it. Jot down the points you want to include in the blog and find out the best order in which you can do it.
Make your blog visually appealing
A visually appealing and relevant image is required to build up a blog. Just like the headline, your audience also loves to gloss over the images in your social content. If the blog is long, an image helps to break the long text and gives reading relief to a reader.
Remember to select a relevant image that matches the title of your blog. You can add more than one image to make your blog even more captivating for your readers. Creating graphs and charts to illustrate each point or sub-headings (if possible) inside the blog also make way for blog marketing.
Few things to keep in mind while selecting or creating an image:
- Relevant
- Size of the image
- Copyright
- High Quality
- Not too commonly used
- Attractive
Make sure to give a suitable title to your image to help search. And add alt image tags.
Make your blog conversational
A blog, in order to be marketable needs to build a connection with readers and increase their engagement. How can you make sure that your blog is “I want to keeping reading this” type or “No, I am not going to slog through this one” type? It’s by writing conversational content. Conversational style makes your reader feel that you are engaging him in your conversation. Make your blog simple and easy to read so that your readers are craving to read your content.
Follow the rule of 7C’s of communication
Blog marketing involves effective communication. To compose an effective blog post which gets people reading and reaches a wider audience, you must adhere to certain principles. This is where the 7C’s of communication are helpful. The 7C’s provide a checklist for making sure that your choice of content and style of presentation is spot-on, so that your audience gets the message.
According to the 7C’s, communication needs to be:
- Clear
- Concise
- Concrete
- Correct
- Coherent
- Complete
- Courteous
Provide Call-to-Action
Your readers have read your blog. What do you want them to do now? Subscribe to your blog, download, share, like, comment, register for an event? Typically at the end of every blog post you should have a CTA that indicates what you want your reader to do. Your visitors who click on the CTA might eventually turn into leads.
Proof-read, edit, format
Now that you have finished writing the blog, you are too tempted to go live with it. But, before you do so, make sure of sending out error-free content. Pay close attention to spelling, punctuation, grammar, the natural flow of your writing and see if it is making sense. Don’t forget to check if all your content, including images are copy-right free and legal for use.
A well written blog that includes keywords with the right title , sub-headings and so on, will show up easily in search results and make it readable and interesting for the audience.
A marketable blog = searchable, clickable, readable and shareable.
Once it becomes marketable, your blog is well positioned to be shared in different social media platforms and get traffic.
If you think you have mastered the steps above, you should be well on your way in creating a marketable blog.
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