The power of content as part of your marketing strategy cannot be overstated. Without consistent and targeted articles, your SEO will flounder,and you won’t have anything to promote on your various social media channels. When it comes to building trust with your customer base, generating leads and raising awareness of your brand, solid content has few rivals in terms of efficacy.
A great company blog post is engaging, full of value and aligned with your overall business strategy. While there are many different types of content you can write, this article will cover how to write an engaging ‘How to…’ blog post.
Know Your Audience
The first step is to take the time to clearly define your target audience. To determine how your business can become the solution to their problems, you’ll need to flesh out the wants and needs of your customer base. What do they want to know more about? What kind of topics will resonate with them? Creating a buyer personais a great first way to get inside the heads of potential clients to understand what would motivate them to come to you.
As an example, if you are in real estate, a great way to get started is producing articles to help fledgling homebuyers understand the more complicated aspects of the home-buying process.
Optimize Your Content for Search
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a big reason companies develop content. For this reason, you must write SEO-driven pieces to help search enginesfind them. An ideal blog post will follow basic SEO best practices: such as identifying keywords with strategic value and containing a solid keyword ratio along with anchor text that links relevant pages of your site.
When you’re just starting out, you’ll find mastering SEO will take a bit of practice. However, learning as much as you can about optimizing your content will go a long way. If you’re developing an ecommerce brand, many free ecommerce websites provide detailed insights for optimizing your blog.
Develop a Topic and Title
Once you have an optimization strategy in place, you’ll need to come up with a topic for your blog post. It can be quite simple. For example, if you’re a plumber, you can write about how to deal with issues your customers can solve on their own—like leaky faucets or clogged sinks. From that point, there are several options you can take as far as developing a title and direction (and you should probably eventually write all of them). It’s usually best to narrow the topic’s overall scope down to a specific angle like, “Most Common Causes of a Leaky Faucet” or “Tools Needed to Fix a Backed-Up Sink.”
Write the Introduction
As is taught in every English course, the introduction is where you hook the reader. If you lose them in the first few sentences, developing the piece was a waste of time. To avoid this, there are a number of ways to capture a reader’s attention. Start by telling a story or a joke, offering an engaging fact or statistic, or simply expressing empathy for the problem you’re addressing. Said succinctly, your introduction should clearly define a problem,state there is a solution and indicate you know how to implement it.
When writing your blog posts, it’s important to remember to keep your writings informative, interesting and relevant, If you can do this, you’ll be well on your way to developing an attractive blog—one capable of consistently pulling in new readers, who will one day become your customers.
