Keeping a blog is more than just telling the world what you like. By posting useful information online, you attract many readers who become your customers in the modern digital age. When you gain a considerable community of followers on your blog, you can earn money from promoting your own products or publishing partners’ content as an influencer. There are several ways of attracting more readers to your blog, among them: developing meaningful and unique blog post ideas and then writing quality. The latter is, arguably, the most important component of creating a quality piece of content for your blog.
It turns out that you don’t have to be a professional writer to keep a successful and effective blog. Here are a few tips that will help you travel down the road of creating quality content.
What is High Quality Content?
High quality, original content is absolutely essential to building a consistent blog following. Making sure that your content quality is high will ensure that you rank more highly on a certain search engine, and will improve your chances of developing successful content that will continually drive readers.
What exactly does high quality content do, and why is it so important?
It Helps Achieve Marketing Objectives
From brand awareness to conversion rates, high quality content helps marketers develop the results they are searching for. Any content marketing strategy worth its salt will place a high emphasis on developing original content that adheres to best blogging SEO practices and follows the latest search engine optimization strategies. The precise type of content you produce does not matter quite as much as the content strategy you use, as consistently producing compelling, well-written copy can make even the most seemingly mundane topic a veritable goldmine. A content marketer would do well to focus on improving their content creation practices, while reducing spelling mistakes and avoiding awkward keyword stuffing.
It Demonstrates the Value of the Page to Web Analytics
All pieces of content that you create will be subject to web analytics tools. Web analytics tools are essentially automated marketing experts that review pages, including the length of time spent on the post, the page’s bounce rate, and the number of pages read in a single session. Quality content will improve user experience, which often leads to additional site surfing.
Whether you are providing a story of your own personal experience with a product or you are systematically working through a “how to” post, having high-quality images, few to no grammatical mistakes, and authoritative sources ensures that your post will rank more highly in searches. Original, valuable content is the key to quality content on a blog or website, and producing compelling copy is vital to getting noticed on social networks and search engines.
It Serves Your Reader
Ultimately, valuable content is copy that serves the specific needs of your ideal reader. Whether you are creating a blog to share on social networks, or you are constructing blogs on a variety of sites and in a variety of niches, you want to let your content users know that you are a solid, reliable source of information. Your content performance will usually tell you far more about you as content creators, rather than the attention span or nature of your readers. Serve your readers well by delivering high content production quality day after day, and post after post.
12 Quality Content Writing Secrets
Now that you understand exactly why quality content creation is so important, you can move on to identifying the content format and content types you should be focusing on. To successfully create cornerstone content for your website or blog, hold fast to the following 12 “secrets.”
1. Pick topics that resonate with your readers
Whether you write quality content about psychology, video games, or cooking tricks, make sure that your readers need this information. We recommend picking the field you personally like and take a great interest in. This way, you can decide what topic really matters and what is a waste of time. Even so, put the interests of your target audience as your top priority. The reader who is interested in your topic will figure out at once whether you are saying something relevant in your blog or just filling the page with words to generate traffic. Respect your reader’s time and energy. Answer questions and give useful tips in your post, while avoiding duplicate and poor content.
2. Create a catchy title
Of all the users who may come across your blog post, 80% will check the headline and another 20% will proceed to the article. If you want these figures to increase, you have to make the title striking. While an utterly sensational heading may look vulgar and remind you of cheap media, you still have to put some intrigue here. Tell your readers that you have an easy solution to their problem. Suggest an innovative approach to an old issue. Hook readers with an intriguing headline and include a subtitle to your post. This way, you can clarify your title and show how it is relevant to the reader.
3. Lead on with a story
People love stories. Whatever your problem is, many other individuals can relate to it. Perhaps you personally know someone who lived with depression and fought it successfully. Or maybe one of your mates just switched from eating burgers to following a strict vegetarian diet and did it in a few easy steps. And of course, you may share with readers your own experience of counteracting the problem. Oftentimes, your reader will see that the author is a lot like them. It is important to build your story on real facts and not make things up to hook the readers, however. If you are uncertain about your own experiences or ideas, you can ask your friends to share their experience to write a story for your blog.
4. Keep your structure comprehensible
Just as you do in college papers, write small paragraphs and subheadings for your posts. If you want to get a clear picture of how a nice structure should look, try ordering one of your posts from a professional essay writing service. You will see that experts break the text into neat sections to make even the most boring content look appealing and easy to digest. This way, you assure the reader that it takes only a minute to read a great article. When composing your blog post, use the golden rule: one paragraph, one idea. Keep your paragraphs short to make your post easy to scan. Your reader is your friend. Remember this when choosing the structure and style of your post.
5. Cut excessive words
When trying to write quality content for your personal blog, make sure that the amount of text does not make readers exhausted. People are not likely to read overlong articles, so you need to keep your post brief. Define several key points you want to cover in your post and decide how many words you need. Stick to your own estimate of words and make sure that you do not compose an entire novel. This technique will help if you are a writing enthusiast and can easily generate pages of text on your favorite subject. A lengthy article is not a guarantee of success, so try to make yourself as clear as possible and use a reasonable number of words to do it.
6. Take care of visuals
The modern blog cannot be imagined without visual content. Videos are especially appreciated, and they can even bring more traffic to your post. Make up a presentation of your own or give a reference to existing video materials on your topic. Playing a video is an easy way to engage the reader. In many cases, it is still better to complete your story with pictures, rather than videos. Use appealing images for your article. Don’t forget about copyright laws when choosing visuals for this post. If you need permission to use pictures, try free photo stock websites. They update regularly, can provide a suitable illustration for any of your ideas, and they often keep up with current events.
7. Keep your writing personal
With every post, you are trying to build trust in your blog. Speaking personally is an essential component of developing closeness and trust with your readers. There is only me, the author, and you, the reader, here in this post. I’m telling you a true story and sharing some insights that will help you make your life better. Perhaps your reader would not discuss some arguable issues in public, but they would eagerly read your blog if you speak on these issues while writing quality content. When composing your article, cut out generalization, impersonal sentences, and sections that don’t come naturally. Write your story as if you are telling it to your friend. Is it interesting and engaging for both of you? Continue writing if the answer is yes!
8. Add value to your article citing credible sources
Besides a true and engaging story, you need some facts to support your point of view. Of course, a blog is not a research paper. No one will ask you to pick 7 scientific sources and cite them properly. However, make sure you refer to some opinion leaders or experts in your field. You may provide links to their posts on Facebook or any other social media platform. Demonstrate that famous or trusted personalities share your opinion. You don’t have to be a professional writer, psychologist, or chef, but it is always worth mentioning one in your post.
9. Keep your word
Going back to the beginning of your article: you promised to resolve a problem or answer a question. It is very important to actually do it with your writing. Make sure that you give the reader valuable advice that will help them in some way. It is important to give solutions that will work for an average person, without any extraordinary knowledge or resources. After all, the target of your blog is not only to get money. In the first place, you create meaningful and quality content and share it with people who will benefit from it. Money and notoriety are secondary and come later.
10. Create a summary
If you’ve managed to write a lengthy post, it will be worth highlighting the most important points at the end. Sometimes it can work as a short guideline, and it actually depends on the article as to where exactly you need to put a summary. You may start your article by naming how many steps it takes to solve the problem, or you may narrate the entire story first and only after that, draw a summary. What does your reader need to remember after reading your blog? Make a short list for people to fix in their memory or save for later referencing.
11. Encourage readers to leave comments
It is always exciting to receive feedback from your readers. Make sure that users can easily leave comments under your post. You also need to encourage people to start communicating with one another. Ask a question. Encourage people to share their experience or point of view on the problem at hand. After all, you’ve composed this post to interact with readers in some way. Do not be afraid to answer comments, even if they are critical. A lively discussion may raise a bigger interest about your topic and your blog.
12. Introduce yourself
When you have written a meaningful article that deserves attention and response, do not shy away from writing a few words about yourself. Make it a final section and include your photo and some basic facts about your interests here. An introduction may be a common part for all pages of your blog. It is a great way to put a few words about yourself if you do not want to use an entire page for this purpose. It will be also useful if you post someone else’s writing in your blog.
Instead of an afterword
Writing quality content is much easier when you know your subject field well and understand the needs of your readers.
Research your blog topic and target audience to develop better awareness. Be honest with your writing. You can also read more articles about improving your content writing skills and find ways to give extra promotion to your blog if you need additional help. Ultimately, writing quality content is the first step on your road to creating a successful blog.
This is a post contributed from one of my marketing partners.
Hero photo by Vitolda Klein on Unsplash
Thanks, Neal for such an excellent piece for writing quality content.
By the way, your take on “Introducing Yourself” really took my interest. This could help make my posts more inspiring and personalized to my readers.
Once again, thanks
Thank you Jatin! In all honesty I have yet to complete that very long page, but hopefully will do so soon thanks to your encouragement!
Hi, Neal,
Thanks for this post. It’s quite relevant to me.
You recommend creating a summary at the end of the post. Have you experimented with positioning the summary at the end versus the beginning of the post? What are your thoughts on that?
Also, you suggest writing on topics that resonate with readers. To find the topics that most matter to readers, I use Google Analytics to figure out what terms our customers use most frequently in search. Is that a good enough strategy? Is there a better strategy?
Best Regards,
Robert
Hey Robert,
Thanks for commenting! I am not the best at keeping to my own advice, but I think the best way to think of it as the Intro is what draws people in while introducing them to the topic,. whereas at the end you summarize and then lead them into your call to action or deeper into your blog. Does that make sense?
As for writing topics, yes, Google Analytics is a great place to start. But why not look at what posts are getting the most traffic, what posts people are staying on the longest, and what is the lowest bounce rate per blog post? There are a lot of ways of analyzing this – and then if you include data from social networks analytics about what content people click, like, or comment on, you’re going to get a good idea as to what content is resonating with people.
Hope this helps!!!
– Neal
thanks for sharing for us
Sure thing my friend!