Creating an impactful blog is not a technology thing. Setting up a blog involves getting a domain, installing WordPress, plugins and choosing the design, that are a technical thingy, and are not talking about these.
Coming next are the word count, keyword usage, internal linking, inserting images, small paragraphs and Yada, Yada. We are not talking about these either.
Let us talk about how to create an impactful blog using content and techniques that will give your readers a different perspective. We will do this in two simple steps.
- Analysing your readers and what to appeal to
- Writing tips to create an impactful blog
Analysing your readers
An impactful blog should make a difference in your readers’ lives. Before you write, it is important to have a purpose for the blog post. For this post, the purpose is to ‘help’ readers improve their writing while creating an impactful blog.
If your aim is in line with ours, analyse some simple yet powerful factors that can help you create an impactful blog.
You readers
- Get into the minds of people who read your blog or those who want to read it. Create a reader persona in as much detail as possible, because, it will be easier to understand the blog or content you need to create (style, topics, etc.).
- This exercise will also help you understand how to attract more readers to your blog besides engaging techniques and/or monetising your impactful blog.
- Your understanding of the reader will also define how you can make an impact by using subscription options, when or how often should you write a blog or which social media platforms to target. The primary target of understanding your readers or creating a reader persona is to add real value to your readers.
- Do not grope around in the dark thinking that just writing well or presenting well, will make yours an impactful blog.
What do they need?
Let us take an example of this blog post – Search Intent Optimization
- My readers are digital marketers, or people who want to use their services.
- They are trying their best hand at search engine optimization.
- Their websites rank well on #Google but their conversion rates are low.
What does your blog post offer?
- I want to give my customers more leverage on their SEO practices to understand how to make a visitor buy.
- I am talking about search intent optimization that can be a subset of their SEO practices to integrate better keywords.
- This will help increase conversion rates.
How the reader will change by reading your impactful blog?
- Understanding the concept of search intent is essential to upgrade the reader’s knowledge on SEO.
- The readers will look at the search intent of the buyers and analyse the buyer’s journey.
- They will understand how, where and which pages to optimise for better conversions.
- Readers will change in a manner that they will look at SEO with a finer eye and achieve what they set out to achieve.
Advantages of having an impactful blog
- When a reader changes by reading your blog, chances are that they will subscribe and return to it.
- Blogs that add real value to readers and changes them build confidence and trust.
- Changed readers will always share the blog on their networks.
- This is not rocket science, just that we get engrossed in the Yada-Yada and forget a lot about this art.
- So, what is the change you want to bring in your readers? Obviously a positive one, because focussing on this aspect will make yours an impactful blog and helps your content marketing efforts.
9 Writing tips to create an impactful blog
1. Be original and yourself
Do not express the same ideas as your peers or competition does. Always, be original and interesting. Your blog is unique because of ‘you’ and ‘you’ are the one trying to build an impactful blog. You can add more personality by being yourself and telling your own story, like this blog does, creates the ‘impact.’
2. Be honest and transparent
Express your ideas honestly. Do not pacify your readers with all ‘positive’ stuff. Call a ‘spade’ and ‘spade’. Transparency differs from honesty. Spelling out the truth is essential to invite ideas, however good or bad they might be. Being transparent creates engagement, and that is essential for an impactful blog.
3. Spend quality time
Ideate and let it sit to pick in your mind before you write. Good blogs take time to create. It is quality over quantity and not vice versa, as most of us would like to believe.
4. Creativity is critical to an impactful blog
There is no limit to creativity. Express yourself on audio/ video or text, it doesn’t matter. However, if you are text blogging like me, here, you need to create a story that will run for a few weeks. It will help you express better, help readers to understand better and give you best results. In SEO terms, it is also called a ‘cornerstone’; content to which you link your explanations. What we ignored at the very beginning of this post come into importance here in terms of internal linking.
5. Find your voice and make it ‘we’
Finding your blogging voice will come with time, because, that is the ‘I’ you will find to express yourself in your own way. Do not write like someone else, it will fail. Use words like ‘we’ and ‘ours’ instead of ‘you’ and ‘yours’, because it will make a better impact.
6. Ignore negativity
The internet is a huge place and not all readers are positive. Don’t make it sound like an obituary! Irrespective of the best content you put up, you will get some negative comments or even stupid ones. We call them seagulls that fly in, crap and fly away. Bet is to ignore them because hitting below the belt is not your style.
7. KISS
No, that would be gross, ‘Keep It Simple Stupid‘. Do not put too many widgets and ads across the post. This takes away the reader’s focus from the content of your blog. Minimalist writing and minimalist branding are the mantra going into the future.
8. Live it up
Creating an impactful blog is not about your profession. It can be about one of your passions, hobbies or whatever you want to tell the world about. To keep it simple, create an impact and live it up.
9. AI Content
AI generated content doesn’t work, at least not for us. Because mortals like you and me can see the difference and so do search engines. If you creating AI content and putting in 2/3 blog posts a day… it is not a good idea, you know how it will turn out.
Here are a few more tips from my peer @kimgarst – 24 Ways To Add Some Visual Punch to Your Blog Content.
Conclusion…
Coming to think of it, when you create an impactful blog, it also affects you positively and enhances growth. With engagement, comments and advice coming your way, your impactful blog will take you only one way… North… And to understand which way content marketing is headed and why impactful blogs are important, read our article on Content marketing in 2022.
I will be glad to understand your thoughts on how this reading this blog changed you.
With the recent update from Google, you will need to create really valuable content. For more, read our blog on understanding helpful content update.
0 Comments