Effective blog posts can be one of your website’s most useful content elements. A well-written post that provides value to your customers while selling your company’s goods and services is a powerful tool. It can provide many internal and external link opportunities and spawn several social media posts. Plus, you can share links to the post with prospects and interested parties via email and text messages. Best of all, the content stays on your site, patiently waiting to educate new visitors and sell your wares. But to be effective, the post has to be well-written and provide a great user experience. That way, it will engage with your readers, manage their expectations, and hold their interest. If you are interested in learning how to write an engaging blog post, keep reading.
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
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Real World Example
Last year, a client told me he would write a blog for his website. I created the site and had been writing monthly blogs for him. My client assured me he was a great writer and passionate about a subject that fits the website’s purpose and content. “Great,” I thought. A steady stream of fresh content is an important part of a good SEO strategy. The post he delivered was well written, but it was not an acceptable blog post. When I told him it was not an effectively written post, he was disappointed and asked, “How can we make it an effective blog post?”
Engaging Blog Posts are Written with Important Content
The most important thing to remember when writing a blog post is to keep your customer in mind. Always provide useful and relevant information your customers are interested in. Also, always include a paragraph, preferably toward the end of the post, that sells your products and services that deal directly with the topic. For example, if you sell running shoes, write a post about the treatments for plantar fasciitis. Then wrap it up with a paragraph about the shoes you sell that prevent plantar fasciitis.
The intersection of what the customer wants to learn and selling the website’s products and services is the definition of important content. To learn more about important content, read my recent blog, Two Ways to Make your Blog More Relevant and Effective.
It’s a waste of time and energy for both the reader and writer to publish blog posts that are not important to both the reader and the website owner’s business.
Provide a Great User Experience
A great user experience keeps readers engaged with the post. There are several ways to accomplish this goal:
1. Craft and Engaging Headline
Writing engaging blog posts start with a great headline that piques interest and sets expectations. “A carefully crafted headline will include elements to help your post rank higher on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). This could help drive more organic traffic to your site,” says Theme Isle, a WordPress Theme and Plugin creator.
One of the most effective headline styles is a list preview. This headline style previews the post as a numbered list. A headline like “The 5 best beaches in Florida” is an example. People like headlines written in this style because the style sets expectations. Before reading a word of text, readers know the post about five beaches in Florida. Instantly, the reader decides whether to read the article.
2. Give the Expected Reading Time
Calculating the estimated reading time and including it early in the post is another way to set the readers’ expectations. If a reader is pressed for time, it’s great to let them know the post will take only five minutes to read. On the other hand, if a post takes 15 minutes to read, they may want to bookmark it and return to it when they have the time to consume it.
3. Make Sure your Blog is Easy to Read
Readability is vitally important to the overall user experience. According to Yoast SEO, “If you write a text that’s hard to understand, people won’t find what they need. What’s more, you’ll end up with unsatisfied visitors that bounce back to Google right when they hit your site. Google analyzes user signals like that to determine how visitors experience your site.” These user signals can impact ranking.
To determine if your blog is readable, it’s important to know your audience. If you are writing a blog post to engage with a broad audience, use short sentences and simple words. The average American reads at a 4th-grade level, so using big words and complex sentences will turn off your readers. If you are writing for a niche market that is highly educated, then it’s okay to write in a sophisticated style, but I still recommend keeping things simple. Simple writing is easier to read, regardless of education level.
4. Use Subheaders to Give Readers Natural Breaks
Short sections with subheaders are easier to read, plus it allows for a table of contents with live links to each section to be presented at the top of the blog. In the table of contents, each section header should be a live link so readers can skip directly to the sections they are most interested in.
5. Use Photographs and Illustrations to help Enforce Ideas
The written word is great, but pictures can be a great way to reinforce the main topic and section topics. If you don’t have photos, stock photos can be just as effective and are better than nothing. Just make sure the images are set up properly so they can contribute to your SEO effort.
Conclusion on How to Write an Engaging Blog Post that Sells
This article answers the real-world question, how can I write an engaging blog? Writing effective blog posts with original, important content and presenting them with a great user experience will draw in readers. And if written properly will help sell your products and services. Sand Key Ventures can write effective blog posts for your website. We write monthly blogs for websites that provide original and relevant information to our client’s customers and prospects. Most importantly, we position our client’s products and services for sale. After writing the blog post, we test it for readability and headline effectiveness. Then we find inspiring images and post everything to your site. After optimizing everything for SEO, we publish it. Then the content is ready to be shared with the world. You can create several social media posts and links to promote the posts and drive readers to your website. Driving traffic to the site is the best way to sell your products and services.
Sand Key Ventures is a website company that focuses on user experience. We write blogs establishing our client’s expertise, authority, and trust. Our blogs drive revenue. We also build new websites and provide SEO services to keep websites running clean and Google happy. Call us at 727-249-2749 to discuss what Sand Key Ventures can do for you. You can also send an email to michael@sandkeyventures.com. If you prefer to copy and paste the email link, it is michael@sandkeyventures.com.
Thanks for your time, but now we’ve gotta run. We have websites to build and audit, blogs to write, eCommerce to manage, and photos to edit. Until next time, take care.