Business tips
7
min read
The goal of every business is to promote and sell the product or service it offers.
To achieve this, you need to get people to know about you and trust you.
A blog is one of many ways to do that. It serves as a platform for sharing experiences, promoting your brand's value, enhancing its reputation, and even drawing in more customers and revenue. But here's the challenge: the blog needs to be really good to make all of this happen.
TodayMade is a graphic design agency created by Eleken's founders, who, in turn, know a lot about content marketing. So, if you want to figure out how to write a great blog, read further!
There's no one-fits-all approach to blogging. At the end of the day, it all depends on your industry, target audience, and the goal of your blog. However, there are several general tips that can help you with writing.:
To make the most out of your writing, you need to know who you are writing for. Having a clear understanding of the audience allows you to pick the right tone of voice and address their pain points and concerns precisely.
If your brand has a digital marketing strategy, this strategy most likely includes a target audience description. However, this description isn't set in stone. Your audience, its needs, and preferences can change over time, and tracking their perception of your blog posts can help you adjust your content strategy accordingly.
Speaking to your audience in a way that resonates with them is great. However, sometimes, it is still not enough to persuade them to take the desired action, whether it is commenting on your blog post or buying your product.
That's what call-to-actions (CTAs) are made for. The tip to include CTAs in your blog posts has been offered to writers for ages — and is still very relevant.
To come up with a strong CTA that works, try to think like your readers. If you had the same background and needs as them, what could encourage you to take that desired action?
As time goes on, people find it harder and harder to perceive long forms of content, both visual and written (especially written). The Microsoft study showed that since 2000 (or around the beginning of a mobile revolution), the average human attention span has dropped from 12 seconds to 8.
People rarely read blog posts word-for-word like we used to read books. Nowadays, they prefer to scan them quickly, searching for the main points and pieces of information they find the most important.
You can make this easier for them by making your posts easy to skim through. To achieve this, use subheadings, keep paragraphs short, and use bullet points.
Visuals make your posts more appealing and interesting. They break the monotony of text and engage readers. For instance, when a person scans your post and stumbles upon an illustration, a meme, or an infographic, they are likely to pause and check out the text supporting the image.
What's more, visuals help people understand the information in the post better (assuming they support and explain it clearly, like IKEA instructions).
Images also help people memorize information better. Studies show that three days after learning new information, users remember only 10-20% of it, if it's text or voice. However, when information is presented visually, they retain 65% of it.
Writing a great blog post isn't enough if it doesn't reach the audience. SEO optimization helps the target audience find your content and start reading it.
For many, the process of SEO optimization is quite a headache as the algorithms get smaller updates almost daily and have several massive updates during the year. But you can start by adding a focus keyword to an article and its title, write an SEO title and meta description, and create alt texts for the images so the readers would understand what's pictured on them even when the images don't display.
Of course, simply offering tips cannot be enough to help you make your blog posts great. That's why we want to also provide a practical example of a great content piece along with an explanation of what exactly makes it so good.
This is a longread from Steve Kamb for Nerd Fitness that managed to receive nearly 2,000 comments and 45,000 Facebook likes. The post was written 13 years ago but is regularly updated (last updated in January 2023) and, therefore, still useful.
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This is the first lesson to learn from Steve Kamb's text: a post can remain relevant for years if you regularly edit it and update it according to new information and tendencies. This practice is called content reuse.
Steve Kamb's blog post is long — like, very long. So, the author used several techniques to make it easier to process:
Knowing how to write catchy blog posts and implementing these tips in your writing can greatly improve the quality of your content. Still, you should also keep in mind another essential component of your blog's success — consistency.
Not only do you have to write great posts — you also have to publish them regularly. Otherwise, those readers who came to you for quality content can unsubscribe or simply stop visiting your blog.
Keep in mind that consistency doesn't mean frequency. You definitely don't have to post daily: two or four monthly blog posts can be enough, assuming they are well-researched and well-written.
However, even this number of posts can be a challenge, especially for small business owners or teams without dedicated writers and designers. To overcome this challenge, consider the following tips.
Not all content can be planned in advance. There are certain things (like viral events and breaking news in your industry) that need to be covered as quickly as possible if you want your blog to look up-to-date. But even in these cases, having a clear content plan and editorial calendar can save you.
An editorial calendar ensures that you have enough content to post for at least a month ahead. In this case, when something viral happens, you can focus on covering this event. Knowing that even if this takes you some time, you'll still have enough blog articles to post, which can help you work on urgent pieces calmly.
A content plan, on the other hand, helps distribute your content evenly, ensuring that you won't post articles on similar topics in a row. It also helps you prepare content for various regular events, such as Black Friday, Christmas Week, and Halloween.
If you don't have enough in-house writers, consider reaching out for external help. Freelancers and outsourced content agencies can create high-quality content for your needs.
To make the most out of such collaborations, ensure that your requirements are clear and detailed, and maybe opt for a small paid test task or one content piece. This will help you figure out if your vision and the writer's truly match.
Sometimes, outsourcing texts is not the best option. For instance, you might feel like no one can write about your brand better than your in-house team. Or you're currently figuring out the brand's positioning and, therefore, not ready to outsource.
However, this doesn't mean that you cannot entrust your visual content to professionals. This can reduce your content workload and also ensure that your powerful messages will be supported with eye-catching graphics. Because after all, it's the visuals that capture people's attention first and encourage them to check out your blog posts.
TodayMade is a subscription-based design service that helps brands ensure a stable flow of visual content. We understand how challenging it might be to handle all types of content at once, especially if you're a startup or a company that has to launch several marketing campaigns at once. And we're ready to take on part of that workload for you.
Purchasing our subscription grants you monthly access to an unlimited number of visuals. Need different types of designs (for instance, branding and banner creation)? We can handle it. Maybe you need us to work on several projects at once? Sure, no worries!
Reach out to us for a free consultation, and let's create amazing content together!
