Blog posts are hard, frustrating and can keep you up at night with worry. Worst of all is when they just don’t do what you want them to.
Why aren’t people clicking on my post? Why are they bouncing? Why aren’t they reading all of it? Why are they not engaging with my call to action?
Here are 5 tips to help you out.
No Rambling.
Don’t ramble in your posts. Take some advice from journalists and put the most important stuff at the top. Get straight to the point. If your post is 500 words, cut it to 350. Always be editing.
- Keep sentences and paragraphs short,
- bin unnecessary words,
- if you can say it in 20 words, don’t waste your reader’s time with 40, and
- make use of bullet points.
Numbers in Titles.
The most effective blog post titles have numbers in them, are very specific and a little controversial.
Ex. ‘The 10 Best Ways to Destroy Your Competition by 2016’ is better than ‘Are You Struggling to Get Ahead in Business?’
Focus on Issues.
Your blog should always, always, always focus completely 100% on the issues that are keeping your customers up at night. Nothing else.
Internal Links.
Bounce rate can be successfully nuked by adding relevant internal links to your other posts. It could take reading 10 posts before a potential customer trusts you.
Call to Action.
Have an effective call to action. Think about where they are in the buying cycle. After reading one or two blog posts they don’t necessarily want to call you for a quote. Add an option to sign up to a newsletter instead. Let them ferment for 6 months while they buy into your philosophy and your importance to them through monthly newsletters.
Blog posts are all about relevance, efficiency and reliability. Making your readers’ lives easier should be your focus. It’s about them, not you.
Each post should be continually adding to a network of quality information, where you understand the buyer’s cycle while educating your target audience.
In time, your customer base will grow thanks to your well-developed content strategy, which abides by a clear company mission statement, of which your blog is an integral part.
