Creating high-quality content that is engaging and informative is among the most effective strategies to boost the growth of your website. However, it’s also very difficult and time-consuming to continue producing a piece of content that will attract readers on an ongoing basis.
There are times when you’re full of energy. Ideas pop from your brain straight onto the paper. You just cannot stop the flow and it all seems so easy to produce compelling content.
In other instances, you could sit for long hours trying to think of the perfect post ideas, and even writing the first line of your blog content seems impossible. Writer’s block paralyzes you. It happens to us all.
But, engaging content in the form of great blog posts, is the most effective way to connect with your customers and drive leads to your business. With the right type of content and a decent content strategy, you will be able to attract your ideal audience.
Content Marketing
Your marketing team has likely been advocating a digital content marketing strategy that includes Social Media Marketing to help boost your search engine rankings for ages. The majority of companies are actively using content marketing to expand their businesses. 82 percent of companies rely on content marketing to help drive traffic to their websites.
But unless you have a dedicated content creator or an amazing content writing tool that takes care of everything for you, Content Marketing can appear a lot to take on.
But is there a secret tip or tool that allows you to put more power into every blog post to ensure that the process of generating leads doesn’t feel like climbing a mountain?
Persuasion
A compelling blog post doesn’t just get the conversation rolling, it also generates interest in your products and ideas without appearing like a second-hand car salesperson. With effective calls to action, you will soon be hitting your business goals, boosting email subscribers to your newsletter, and seeing monthly searches on your website go through the roof.
Content Marketing can be so effective that this is the reason you need to invest a lot of time, money, and effort into creating outstanding content that has all the convincing checks and balances. You need to develop a system that lets you produce powerful content in a record-breaking amount of time. You need the ability to be able to produce different types of blog posts that will appear to the audience in mind.
In this blog post, we’ll show you the exact formula we employ to create the right type of blog post that is of the highest quality, within less than an hour.
We will show you how to distinguish a bad idea from a good one, create a great blog title that will push your blog’s search volume through the roof, and share some content writing tips that will see you on top of everything.
I’ll also let you into a secret. Not everybody is cut out to be a great article or post writer. If your strength is in running your business then why take on this task? Get yourself a professional writing team that you can outsource this to. I’ll show you how to do that too.
Create A Treasure Chest of Content Ideas
The truth is it’s really hard to come up with a flow of innovative ideas unless you have a system in place to help get your creativity flowing. If you’re stuck on what topic is the best topic to discuss, here are four easy ways to help you think of subject ideas for your blog that will help it go viral.
Create an Excel spreadsheet that will serve as an idea bank. Create columns with these headings:
- Products & Services
- Popular Content
- Competitor Content
- Desires & Pain Points
Review Your Products and Services
Ideas to go into column 1 will come from a review of your existing products and services. Although blogging isn’t a direct marketing tool, you need to be careful in selecting topics that align with the products and services your company offers.
So, you’re not simply writing for the sake of blogging, if you want your blog posts to help you increase the interest in your products and services, then you need to find a way of working them into your content.
Take a look at each product or service that you offer separately. Consider each offer individually, and ask these questions.
What obstacles are keeping your potential customers from affirming their decision?
Addressing objections that people have about your company is the most effective way to boost your lead generation strategies.
Using your blog to answer any reservations that potential customers may have will preempt many objections and stop them from arising.
A gold mine to find this type of objection is in chat rooms on webinars. You can check your webinars or the webinars of your competition. Go back through the transcripts looking for questions you could answer in your blog.
- Can I do this with your ….?
- Will your… do this?
- When I used your … I couldn’t get it to do this
Other questions to consider in evaluating your services or products:
- What makes you the ideal person to resolve their issues?
- Why can’t you compete with your rival?
- How urgent is the situation?
- What is the reason your product is current?
- What is the reason your product is the best solution?
Use these questions to generate ideas and then add the answers to your worksheet. Then, you can use the formula provided for headlines later to design your killer headlines.
Audit Your Most Popular Content
The most effective way to determine what content is likely to please your readers is to find blog posts that have already had a positive impact on your readers. Review your analytics and take note of the categories for the most popular articles and updates to content. Look at your top-traffic pages in order, as well as additional information such as:
- Estimated monthly visits
- Number of backlinks linking to the content
- The number of social shares on Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter
Once you’ve figured out what topics and categories draw the most attention, you’ll have a clear understanding of the areas to concentrate your content development efforts on in the future.
Conduct Competitor Analysis
I believe that you should make your adversaries work for you, not against you. One method to achieve this is by looking at the things that are working for them. You are not looking to duplicate their strategies. Instead, consider what content is doing well and think of ways you can improve on it.
- Can you cover a different angle?
- Include additional research.
- Perhaps include downloads to make your content more valuable
The objective is to discover the most popular articles for the keyword you are searching for. This can be done by focusing on the number of backlinks linking to the URL as well as the amount of social share.
If it has more than 100 links and it’s also published across Facebook as well as Pinterest and Twitter over 13,000 times, then this shows that it’s a hit in the eyes of your target audience.
Make it your own. Find ways to improve it and readers will discover your work. This will lead to more traffic filtering through to other content on your website as they explore.
Look At Your Customer’s Pain Points
It is unbelievable how many people do not take this important step. If you’d like to convey a compelling narrative then make content that is highly relevant and will be seen by others as an authority.
Not paying attention to the people you’re trying to get in touch with isn’t the most effective approach to reaching them. It’s about getting inside the hearts and minds of your viewers. Here’s where you can find the insights you need:
- Blog comments
- Quora
- Niche Forums
- Amazon reviews of books (pay particular attention to negative reviews)
- Facebook groups
- Search on Twitter
- Your website search engine
- What questions do your customers ask?
- What are their objections?
- What issues do they require assistance with?
You can write these ideas out in full but the aim at this point isn’t to create a hook, but rather to generate concepts that you can go back to later on and expand on.
Ask Your Customer Service Team
If you are lucky enough to have a customer support team now is the moment to connect with them.
- What kinds of questions are they asked most often?
- What issues do they encounter?
- Are there areas in your services or products that create problems?
Get those ideas together and determine whether you can create a blog post from them. At a minimum, you could create some interesting FAQs for your article.
If you don’t have a customer service team you can check your chatbots, live support transcripts, or your support email inbox. There are probably several diamonds in the rough that you could make use of to create engaging content.
You will be surprised just how many great content ideas you will have unearthed using these methods, that you can transform into killer blog posts for your website.
How To Gather Sources & Get Started on Research
What if I said the process of writing your blog is like painting a picture?
You are the creator, the artist. Your research paper is your canvas. All you need to do is add layers of interesting ideas, questions, and answers to make your article.
The main question is how can you make your research not so time-consuming? The procedure is fairly easy.
The same methods utilized to come up with blog topics can also be used to conduct your research. Instead of getting caught up in the topic, you concentrate on the content.
While you read through your content ideas from your spreadsheet, note down the thoughts that come to your mind. The reading should be the input and writing the output. The aim is to make an informative, data-driven blog post.
Once you’ve finished your research, leave it to settle and ruminate for a few days. If you let your thoughts sit for a few days, you will find that they get more refined. You will have more clarity and the purpose and flow of your blog post will become clearer.
This is another tip that will make your life easier; bookmark the top research results as well as add to a Google Doc. If you ever need to extend your research you’ll be able to quickly find it and not have to sort through search results over and over again!
So, how do you determine the right things to work on to shape the content of your website? It’s all in the framework.
How To Structure A Persuasive Blog Post
(6-point Template You Can Borrow)
There are few things in the world that people hate more than being marketed to when they just want information.
Anybody searching on Google for some information is unlikely to be expecting a sales pitch when they click through from the SERPs. If your readers detect even a hint of sleaze in your blog posts, they will make a dive for the exit button.
The only way to escape that unfortunate fate is to stop selling and start persuading.
There are six pressure points that you need to tap into:
1. Likeability: If your readers don’t like you, everything else is irrelevant. Naturally, people are skeptical of perfection. So be vulnerable, tell your story, and document the imperfections. Eighty-six percent of consumers say authenticity is important when choosing a brand to do business with.
2. Credibility: Your readers not only need to believe in you, but they need to believe in their ability to produce results. That’s where providing easily consumable and actionable content comes into play. A great way to create more bite-sized content is to add images every 100 words or so. Images can boost content credibility by 75 percent.
3. Urgency: You need to help your readers get over their tendency to procrastinate. The way to do that is to emphasize the urgency.
Why does the information in your blog post matter today? A genius way to insert a call-to-action in your post is to create content upgrades. Backlinko improved its conversion rates by 785 percent (in one day!) using this method.
4. Authority: Your authority is increased by creating comprehensive, data-driven content with unique insights. The more authority you command, the more people will bet on you to deliver the transformation that they seek. This also encourages them to keep returning to your blog to see what you are covering now.
5. Reciprocity: Attention is the currency in the online space. So when someone gives you their attention, you reciprocate by providing value with no strings attached. Giving away your best content for free can help you reap big rewards.
6. Authenticity: Who is ever their absolute authentic self in every scenario? Seth Godin describes authenticity as consistency. It means showing up day after day with a congruent message.
If you’re shaky with your ideas or complacent about the way that you express them, you won’t hold up to scrutiny. A study of 27,000 consumers revealed that consistency is critical for trust and loyalty.
I know this sounds like a lot of criteria for one blog post to meet, but by using a system that we give you you will find it all fits together. Look out for Part 2 in the coming weeks on our blog, where we will lay out the rest of the system.
