You might blog just for fun or do that because you want to turn your blog into a successful business. Either way, you probably want to not only be able to express your thoughts and share your stories but also to have someone who will read and react to them.
In order to build up that audience, every blogger needs you have to understand how to write posts that generate maximum impact. Learning how to do so might not be the most obvious and easiest thing to do, especially if you are a beginner blogger. But don’t worry - we’re going to help you with that.
Here’s what you need to focus on in order to make your posts really good and build up an audience.
So you want to write good posts? That’s understandable - and is quite a natural desire. But why exactly do you want to do so? Maybe you intend to launch your own product later or to turn yourself into a brand or to become a niche expert? Maybe you want to grow a loyal audience or maybe you want to raise awareness about something?
Your goal needs to be clear and specific - but this doesn’t mean that it cannot be changed later. It’s also natural to move on, to want more or to focus on the other aspects of blogging. So pick the one goal that matters the most at the moment - and don’t hesitate to adjust or to change it in the future.
Everyone says that - but not all actually explain what does it mean. When you pick a niche and start blogging, you need to realize who you’re writing for - and the clearer you can picture this audience, the better it is for your blog.
Knowing your audience allows you not only to come up with the best topics for your blog but also to pick the right tone and length for them. For example, there’s no need to write a detailed guide on a certain topic if you know (or at least suspect) that your audience is already well familiar with it. Instead, you can focus on reacting to the latest trends with the help of shorter posts.
The same goes for the tone. A less formal and possibly even humorous approach to a serious topic could actually help you stand out among other bloggers - but only if you know that your audience will react to it well. If you don’t know that for sure, it’s better to avoid such risks.
Also, identifying the audience could help you pick social media for promotion better. For example, if your audiences are young entrepreneurs, you could invest time and efforts in LinkedIn promotion. However, if your audience is less businesslike, maybe it would be more rational for you to pick Facebook or Instagram instead.
There are plenty of bloggers out there - and so many new blogs created daily. Therefore, it’s very important to come up with a way to stand out among them.
Sure, this might not seem like an easy challenge - but actually it could be easier than you think. After all, you are already different. There’s no other person like you and so the worst you can do for your blogging career is to copy someone else instead of finding your own unique approach and turning to others for inspiration, not for copying.
Your style is the first thing that has to be unique. It needs to be honest and interesting to the audience. If you want to, you could make it even more interesting by coming up with your own illustrations for your posts, your own interesting examples (for example, you could include pop-culture references in them instead of real names and brands), and your personal stories to illustrate your point of view.
You might think that posts are all that matters but that’s not true. The appearance of your blog matters to the audience as well, and so you need to pick a platform wisely and to spend some time looking for the perfect design.
Though there are plenty of platforms you could pick, WordPress is probably the safest and the best option. It is used both by beginners and professionals, is easy to understand and to customize. Moreover, you can start with a free account and then upgrade to a premium one: that would be a great option for those who’re just wanting to see how well would their blogging career will go and so aren’t ready to invest money yet.
WordPress also has a lot of themes, both free and paid. You can pick any you want but don’t forget that they have to look good and have to make it easy for the audience to read your posts and navigate your blog. Be careful because not every free WordPress team you can find online could help you achieve that goal.
That’s why we recommend using D5 Creation Themes for your blog. They all, free and paid, are coded maintaining all WordPress standards. Therefore, any standard WordPress plugin runs with them smoothly.
Once again, almost everyone says that. The definitions of «useful» and «interesting» could vary from niche to niche. However, there are some general recommendations you might want to use for your blog or as an inspiration.
So, you can post:
- personal stories (for example, describing some kind of transformation, either personal or professional, that you underwent);
- tips and life hacks;
- other useful information (researches, book summaries, studies, and so on);
- reviews;
- honest analysis of some of your failures;
- recommendations;
- inspirational posts,
and many more.
Always remember that your audience doesn’t see the content of your post first. Furthermore, they might not even see your blog itself - for example, when stumbling upon a reblog on social media. In such cases, their decision on whether to read a certain post or not is solely based upon the most basic things - the title, the description, and the header image (or the image you choose to add to the post).
So unless you do your best to make it look interesting and worth reading, there’s a chance that your audience won’t even get to the content itself, no matter how good it could be. Presentation always matters, just like in case with the design of your blog, and it’s important to invest some time to learn how to present your content in the best way possible.
The most important thing to keep in mind here that you shouldn’t use clickbait to drive audience to your blog. Sure, shocking titles do attract initial attention - but also tend to disappoint, frustrate, and even anger the audience when the content doesn’t seem to meet them (or to be related to them). So work to make the title look appealing yet informative at the same time.
However, you could use attractive images that illustrate the topic of your post either directly or metaphorically. For example, if your post is dedicated to how people could overcome challenges, you could use a picture of a person climbing a mountain or running an obstacle ways. Such images will attract attention and will relate to your post too.
Managing to grab the audience’s attention is only a part of the job done - now you need to do your best to hold it. While this is no easy thing to do, there are few tips that could help you with that.
First, work on making the introduction interesting. It might start with the story that seemingly has nothing to do with the topic of your post itself, slowly leading to the main idea of the post.
Second, do everything you can to ensure that your audience will be interested in reading until the very end. According to the statistics provided by Bufferapp, 55% of the visitors read the posts only for 15 seconds or less - so how can you change that?
This could be achieved by asking questions - they encourage your audience to think and immediately make them more engaged in reading. You could also try saying something controversial that either shakes the audience beliefs or makes them strongly agree or disagree - this way they’ll feel more emotions during the process and will continue reading to either prove themselves right or to have something to argue with you about.
Third, don’t forget to finish the post with the strong conclusion that wraps everything up nicely. If your blog allows commenting, always encourage the readers to comment, to share their stories, and so on, because this is good both for SEO and for your blog. If you want them to do something, include a call-to-action - even if you think that it would be too obvious, this never hurts.
This could be achieved with the help of blog’s metrics and with the help of comments as well. In order to make your posts better, you should always know how you can improve - and that wouldn’t be possible if you’re not paying any attention to the result.
Some of your posts would probably drive more traffic than the others. Some would generate more comments. Be sure to monitor and to analyze this to adjust your content strategy.
Speaking of strategy - you definitely need to have one to succeed. First, it helps to ensure that you’ll always have something to write about (at least, for the next couple of weeks or months). Second, it helps you make the content more diverse. Third, it is an amazing planning tool that could help you write posts in advance and to ensure that your blog will be updated regularly even when you are busy or plan on going on vacation.
Of course, such strategy can and probably should be changed and adjusted as you’ll analyze the result and see what you can improve.
These tips could help you improve your blogging and write better posts. However, these tips shouldn’t be the only ones you listen to. The blogging itself is complex and diverse - and, just like many other things, it changes with time. So once you feel more confident in it, don’t be afraid to experiment, to try different approaches, and maybe even to invent your own ones.
Which tips do you find the most useful? Maybe you even have your own ones that you would like to share with the audience? Please write about it in the comments below.
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