Publishing blog posts on your website is an excellent content marketing tactic. This technique utilizes your knowledge and expertise in your industry as a way to educate the readers while also promoting your offerings. If blog content is written in a compelling way, it serves this purpose quite well. You can grow your audience and also get your products advertised. If you are struggling to do that, don’t worry. In this post, we’re going to help you out by providing some useful tips.
What Type Of Content Can You Publish In A Blog?
Blog content is very diverse and can come in many forms. You can publish different types of articles in a blog, such as product reviews, how-to tips (like we’re doing right now), information content about your brand, and so on. The exact way you have to write the content differs depending on the type of content you are writing. Our focus will be on providing tips that you can follow for each type of blog content and how to write to make your content high-quality.
Tips For Writing Compelling Blog Content
1. Even if you don’t feel like it, do some research and gather some useful information
Let’s explain this one using my own example. After spending some years in the digital marketing industry, I often think that I can write a blog post from start to finish without any research by using just the stuff that I already know. It can be SEO, content marketing, email marketing, etc. However, even when I feel like I can do this, I find that doing research helps me learn a new fact or figure that adds value to the content. So that is what you should be doing as well. When you think of a blog post to write, take the topic and do some research on it using the Internet (and an AI assistant, if you feel like it).
For example, if I am writing this post, I could throw in a statistic about blogs and their effectiveness. I could do some research and find out that there are more than 600 million blogs existing across the Internet—a stat that I could use to emphasize the importance of being compelling. Here is how I found this information:
2. Make a ToC (Table of Contents)
There are two benefits of a ToC. One of them is for your readers. And the other is for you.
A table of contents basically contains all the main headings and sub-headings that the blog contains. Here is an example:
Table of Contents
Type chapter title (level 1)
- Type chapter title (level 2)
- Type chapter title (level 3)
Type chapter title (level 1)
- Type chapter title (level 2)
- Type chapter title (level 3)
When you create a ToC, it gives you the benefit of not having to brainstorm later on and getting a clear direction on how to proceed with the blog. Don’t get me wrong, but when I first started a blog, I did not create a ToC which is why I had to constantly think of the next tip I wanted to share with my readers. On the other hand, the benefit of a ToC for your readers is that it lets them know the exact contents of your blog. Suppose that you’re writing a blog on digital marketing. A reader comes along who needs some specific guidelines about keyword usage. If you have a ToC for your blog, then the reader will be able to jump directly to the section dealing with SEO and find the information they need.
3. Add Many Internal Links To Your Blog
Jumping from ToCs and research to internal links directly might look strange, but it’s an important tip to keep in mind. As is the case with tables of contents, internal linking has two types of benefits. One is for your readers, and the other is for the search engines.
If you add links in the right places, you will be able to guide your readers to other resources and blogs on your website that they can find helpful. For example, if you are writing about email marketing, you could throw in a fact about content marketing and then tell your reader to click on the hyperlinked word to find other stuff related to it. This helps in making your blog content helpful and user-centric, which makes it more compelling. Here is an example of good internal linking:
Moving on, the benefit of internal linking in SEO is quite popular and well-known. When you put links on one webpage pointing to other web pages, the search engine crawler comes crawling along and (this is an analogical explanation; don’t take it literally) starts hopping from page to page following the trail of the links. That makes your site get crawled more. The more it gets crawled and the more it is able to establish its relevance to the search engine, the higher of a rank it gets a chance to get.
4. Make Sure Your Blog Content Is Readable
This is another important point to keep in mind when writing compelling blog content. Your blog content can only compel people if they are able to understand what it says. Oftentimes, when I read something written by a rookie, I find different instances where they’ve used difficult words…just to make an impression on the reader. That does not work. Difficult words only impress the reader when they are used subtly and in such a way that not knowing their meanings does not detract from the overall understandability of the content.
Consider this: The terminology used in the dictionary was recherche and recondite.
Hard words in a sentence…that no one can understand. But if I were to take this same sentence and write it like this:
The words and terminology used in the writing were somewhat outdated and recherche.
Hard ones in a sentence... that can actually be understood thanks to the presence of assistive synonyms. But of course, writing simple words is just one aspect of readability. There is a lot of other stuff as well, but we will summarize it briefly in bullets:
- To ensure that your blog is readable, you should not make your sentences too long. As a general rule, your sentence should be no more than 20 words in length.
- Make sure that the passages and paragraphs in your content are short and readable. Ideally, the length of a paragraph should be 3 to 5 lines.
- Your content should be properly structured. It should be broken down into headings and subheadings. It should also have bullets and numbered lists so that the data it contains can be conveyed easily.
5. Ensure That The Content Is Unique And Free From Plagiarism
If there is one thing that can instantly make your content less compelling, it is plagiarism. If your readers find plagiarism in the content that you are putting out on your blog, they can instantly lose trust in you. They will most probably go off to another site and read original content instead.
Now, if this sort of thing happens to someone who deliberately plagiarized content, it makes sense. But the bad part is that if someone ends up plagiarizing some text without knowing it or without having the express intention to do it, they can still end up facing the same consequences. This type of plagiarism is known as accidental plagiarism. It occurs when a person writes down some sentences or words in the exact same manner in which they exist elsewhere online. To make sure that this sort of problem does not arise in your content, there are a couple of different things that you can do, such as:
- Don’t take inspiration from one source and one source only when you are first starting to write . Rather, spread your research out and garner information from multiple sources so that there is no danger of you copying anything verbatim without realizing it.
- Then, when you are writing your content and you feel like using someone else’s words or data verbatim, you should take care to either add a citation or put the stuff in quotation marks so that everyone knows it.
- Finally, when you are done writing your content, you should also use an online plagiarism checker. An online plagiarism checker is made to scan the provided content and look for any copied sentences that it may contain. It also shows the sources for the copied content so that you can track them and provide a citation if necessary.
Writing compelling blog content is very necessary if you want to make a good impression on your readers. There are different things that make blog content compelling or otherwise. In the article, we’ve looked at various tips that you can follow easily to make your blogs look impressive and perform excellently in terms of SEO.
