How to Write Better Blog Posts and Engage Your Audience

Have you ever struggled to write a blog post? Staring at the blank document, thinking what to write? I have! I would say most of the bloggers have experienced this at least once before and it can get frustrating. However, if you put all your heart into writing a new blog post and it just ends up being ignored by people and you don’t get the engagement you were expecting, it shows that something needs to be improved! Whatever didn’t bring enough attention to your previous blog post, your next one will be a whole new level if you follow these 7 steps below to write better blog posts and engage your audience more!

Magnetic & Click-Worthy Headline

The headline gives the first impression of your blog post and you want to make sure, it will be a good one, right? The good magnetic headline brings readers to your blog because it draws attention to the topic you’re talking about and it resonates with them in some way. Every headline should give a sense of what is your blog post about and talk about the specific topic you are focusing on. You get people to click on it because it can be useful for them and a good headline makes people want to read the post and spend their time on it.

Make sure you create a headline that stands out, plays to emotion and uses action words or numbers. You can try to use Headline Analyzer by CoSchedule which can be very helpful in giving you feedback on how effective your headline is but also tips on how to improve it. Having the captivating headlines that are less than 10 words tend to perform the best and they will help you convince people your blog is click-worthy.

Engaging Introduction

Okay. You have the readers’ attention now and it’s only up to you if you keep them interested in your blog post. I’ve recently read that almost half of the blog readers admit to skim-reading content and the average person spends just 37 seconds reading a piece of content online.
So short but engaging introduction determines whether the reader continues to read or close the tab, so you need to draw people in and engage them in your story.

The introduction is a great start to mention what the blog post is about and create sufficient build up so that readers will want to know more about it! It’s a crucial part where you can tell a story, ask a question, and get the readers’ full attention. By writing a strong, compelling paragraph, people will continue reading because they will want to know more!

Heading Tags

Noone likes the never-ending text with no guidance where you can easily get lost in between the lines!

Help people to find what they’re looking for in your blog post by breaking text into separate paragraphs and using subheadings to name important elements of the post. This will help the readers to navigate and even get back to the point that resonates with them the most. You can also use bullet points within each subheading to point out its subcategories.

By optimizing heading tags with the specific keywords, it can help to boost your Search Engine Optimization (SEO), increase the chances of showing up in the search and getting more traffic into your post.

Informative Body with Engaging Content

The informative and valuable body is the key to great content! Draw people in by giving them the information they need and they can relate to but also back your data up with some previous research to make it more believable. Be unique and talk about the topics from your own perspective rather than copying someone else’s work. Every writer has its own style, so try to find your own way of telling a story. Be fun and bring your personality into the game!

I would also recommend using engaging graphics to make it visually appealing to break the text and illustrate points! Make sure there are not too many pictures, but definitely use at least 2-3 images in between text. You can use your own photos or choose from thousands of stock images available free of charge on websites like Unsplash, Pixabay or Pexels. Alternatively, I’ve also posted a list of the best stock photo subscription services.

Add Relevant Links

Use internal and external links to provide more value to your readers but don’t overdo it. Add a few links to direct them to your different blog section to further explain the topic or add someone else’s relevant opinion or statistics to support your content. Add links that will give your readers a more in-depth understanding of the topic.

The only thing to keep in mind when adding links is to allow links open in a new window, so the readers can stay on your blog.

Powerful Calls-to-Action (CTA)

Another element crucial for your engagement is to include calls-to-action at the end of your blog post. If the reader made it to the end, they most probably loved your post but you want them to take action not just close the tab! So what action do you want readers to take? What is the next step they should go for?

Relevant CTA’s will help you tell people what you want them to do and direct them to the right places. This could be to leave a comment, using an internal link to direct people to read another blog on your site, following on social media or you can ask a question relevant to the blog post to create a conversation with your readers. CTA’s can be a very powerful way of sparking engagement, however, try to avoid using more than two CTA’s because otherwise, it gets confusing for the reader!

Search Engine Optimization

I mentioned this along with headlines, but understanding your SEO is super important when it comes to your meta description. A meta description is basically snippet Google displays in the search results and if it’s not optimized, it will just automatically take the first one or two sentences from your blog post. However, this might not be the best way how to appear in a search and therefore I would recommend downloading Yoast plugin (mainly for WordPress users), so you can optimize the meta description for every single blog post by using well-performing keywords. This might take you some extra time of research and writing these descriptions but in the long run, it will help you increase your reach and appear on the top of the Google searches!

Your Turn

I know it can be really difficult to maintain the same high quality of posts all the time but once you establish a good base and structure of your blog posts, it will only get easier over time. You can also check and follow a general structure that most of the well-performing blog posts use.

Although, these 5 elements of a great blog post will help you improve your reach and increase time readers will spend on your site. Having magnetic headlines, the engaging introduction, optimized heading tags, informative body with nice visual images, relevant links and calls-to-action can really make a big difference in how well is your value-based content performing and how many actions are taken based on CTA’s.

Let me know if you use some of the above steps or you recommend some other ones that work for you!