Discover the Key to Writing Engaging Blog Content

Engaging your target audience with top-notch quality blog posts gets you more subscribers, reputation, and even sales. Writing engaging blog content, however, is not so easy — unless you know the secret…

What Makes Content Engaging Anyway?

What is engaging content? The Content Marketing Institute’s VP of Content published a postwherein several experts shared their definition of engaging content. These professionals said that content is engaging if it is:

new
relevant
Tells a story
Adds value to the reader’s life
Draws people in
Stops readers in their tracks
Keeps readers reading
Compels readers into action
Is written in a conversational tone
Touches people emotionally

But engagement in content writing should be defined through the scope of the content’s purpose. To that end, here are two key questions to ask yourself before publishing each blog post:

What is the overall purpose of your blog? If the only reason you have a blog is to improve search engine visibility for your website, it might be time to rethink your strategy. SEO content is notorious for lacking engagement.

Although blogging can help your website appear more often in search, it can also help you get more value from your current website traffic volume — and that’s where engagement comes in. Make sure each piece of content is valuable to the reader, whether it provides educational value, entertainment value, or monetary value.

The most engaging content contains a cornucopia of kinds of value for the reader. Be sure to list the types of value your blog post contains before you publish it so that you’ll have done your due diligence.

What do you want readers to do after they’ve read the post? Calls to action, although important, are alone insufficient at providing engagement. The purpose of the content that accompanies the call to action is to compel readers to convert.

In the process of searching for a solution to an issue, your potential customers land on your blog. Your content should either relieve their concerns or stomp on their pain points. The posts on your blog and the copywriting on your web pages should demonstrate of your expertise, justifying your claim of being the one to choose.

But balance is a key ingredient to writing engaging content. On one side there is the show of your high-level industry insight or product knowledge. On the other is your potential customers’ position; they may not know jargon.

You could scare your visitors away with content that is too technical and complex. You have to speak their language, not yours. You have to know your buyer personas.

You see, engaging blog posts are ultimately those which are most effective at getting readers to take an action that benefits the one who publishes them. In other words, from a business perspective, the most engaging blog content is that which results in highest conversion rate or the most reach; it is the content asset that produces the best ROI.

How to Make Your Blog Posts More Engaging

So, what is this big hidden secret that has escaped the awareness of so many bloggers and professional marketers for so long? As it turns out, it’s not really a secret at all. It is a basic principle so fundamental that many take it for granted. Alas, the secret is this:

Do your research and use what you learn from it. Don’t run away just yet (however intimidating this moment may have just become for you). Keep listening because research in business is often a never-ending, time-consuming process and data can be deceiving sometimes. You want the benefits of engaging content, don’t you?

“But I do research”, some might argue, “and I’m still not seeing enough reader engagement on my blog posts”. To those I say, “Think you’ve done it right? Think again…”

Producing engaging content requires you to research a lot more than just the topic you’re writing on. The research that needs to be done is market research. Actually, it’s buyer persona research. More specifically, it’s online customer behavior and expectation research.

Now perhaps you’re one of those bloggers who aren’t selling or promoting something. Fine. You still should have personas on the type of audience members you’re writing to attract — if you want to be engaging, that is.

Whether it’s getting more email subscribers, generating ad revenue, or just building up your base of loyal fans who never miss a post, you have to know exactly who it is you want to do what you want them to do.

For example, if you are marketing a B2B document management software company and the decision makers your blog posts are targeting:

Use Twitter for industry news updates and lead generation
Drink lots of coffee and love rock music
Have Master’s degrees

Then you know they find helpful resources, like academic journal articles and industry blogs, valuable. You know you can relate to them by playing up their music and beverage tastes from within the content. And you know your linking to tweets within the content as well as including Click to Tweet boxes will resonate with them.

What would you do with that information? You could, for example, create a blog post about the impact of effective document management in your potential customers’ industry:

In it, use examples from case studies found through the news (which you hopefully found on Twitter).
Back up claims by linking to journal articles that are freely available on the web in PDF format.
And start it off with a story of how you can to a realization, or stumbled upon some shocking-but-relevant information while you were drinking coffee — perhaps at Starbucks where it was a perfect morning and your favorite rock song (Scientist by ColdPlay?) came on. Of course, it’s best to use a real story that actually happened…

Get the gist? Content like that informs and entertains. It is unique. It is engaging, isn’t it?

Why Engaging Blog Content is Important

Speaking to your audience in a way that makes them feel like you understand them empowers you to build a relationship with them. In turn, your readers show that they are willing to enter a relationship with you by taking the action you want them to take; people do favors for friends and consumers are loyal to the brands they feel best reflects their own interests, style, and beliefs.

Although blogs with tons of traffic are sure to see some conversions, you get a far better return on investment by using engaging blog content.

Originally published on ElisaPlanellas.com