Admit it.
Writing is hard.
No.
To write a blog post that people want to read is hard!
I know because every post I write goes through a dozen edits before I either hit the publish button, submit to clients or send it in as a guest post.
Even with the amount of time spent on polishing your post, it is becoming increasingly difficult to get people’s attention. If you want your audience to pay attention, you need to position your cards right.
Here are four tips that I have cherry-picked to increase your chances of writing a post that people want to actually read. You should adhere to them if you really want to write a blog post people will read.
1. Craft Clickable Headlines
You only have eight seconds to capture your audience interest. If your headline cannot arouse enough curiosity for people to click-through, there is no way that they are going to read your content. You should know that on the average, people read less than 50% of a post. The secret to getting them to stick with your content starts with crafting eye-catching headlines that beg to be clicked.
To master the art of crafting clickable headlines, practice writing down at least five different headline ideas for every post you want to write. The more you practice writing headlines, the more you’ll get good at it.
Your headline should also appeal to your audience emotionally, intellectually or spiritually. To determine if your headline falls into any of the three categories, plug your headline in the emotional headline analyzer from the intelligent folks at Advanced Marketing Institute.
Take this post for example. The EMV (Emotional Marketing Value) of the headline of this post is 45.5% when I used the emotional headline analyzer, so I know it’s not that bad.
2. Write a Killer Blog Post Opening
Your headline is only the beginning with writing a post that people want to read. If readers click-through your headline only to find a boring opening, they will not stick long enough to read your content. This action, called high bounce rate, tells Google that readers are not finding high-value content on your site or that your headline is misleading and that might get your site flagged.
To prevent this from happening and increase engagement on your post, write killer blog openings that are interesting, intriguing and provocative.
Here are my best three post openings:
• Open with a statement of fact: I used this opening type with this post because opening with a statement of fact appeals to your audience emotions. When you engage with your audience emotion, they will be interested in what you have to say next.
“Admit it
Writing is hard.
No
Writing a post that people want to read is hard.”
• Open with a quote: the best way to do this is to open with a quote that rings through all the major points you hope to cover in the post.
If I wanted to write a post about “high converting headlines” I could open with a quote from Advertising legend, David Ogilvy:
“On average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”
• Open with a question: the secret here is to let your creative juice flow instead of following a process. Don’t be discouraged if you come up short with questions to open your post. The more you practice openings with provocative questions, the more you get better at it.
Here are some of the questions I will come up with if I was opening this post with a question:
“Have you ever wondered why nobody reads your content?
Do you get jealous (yes, jealous) when you read a friends blog and discover that she has been pulling targeted traffic with her content?”
3. Use the Right Formatting
Readers will most likely skim your content, not read all of it—especially if you have long-form content on your blog. Ensure that all main headings are labeled with the h1, subheads with the h2 tag and sub-subheads with the h3 tag.
Use bullet points where appropriate and always remember that your words should flow. Don’t jump from one idea to the next without a proper flow.
When deciding the title for your subheads and sub-subheads, practice the same rule as coming up with your headline. If your subheads are boring, nobody wants to read them.
Cross off all common advice and change them into something that will sprout curiosity amongst your readers
4. Know Thy Audience
Ultimately, you are writing for your audience and when you know what your audience wants, it is way easier to get your post read.
While writing a lengthy post is good for keyword ranking on Google, what is the point if your audience will not read it? One way to see if readers prefer short or lengthy blog post is to see how much of your content gets read.
Now, it is over to you to put into action the tips presented in this post and you won’t have a problem writing a blog post that people want to read.
Do you have other tips to write a blog post that people want to read? Please share in the comments section.
Hi Adesoji,
A well written post!
You covered almost everything one needs to know about blogging. I am sure this will be a good guide to the newbies.
Keep it up. Keep sharing 🙂
~Philip
Hi Philip,
Yes, it is a good guide for the newbies who care to learn and do what’s important.
Thanks 😉
Hi Adesoji,
Thanks for sharing the post of Hannah here.
It’s a very insightful post to say the least.
I very much fully agree with all the points except one, and that’s the Number 4 point “Know Thy Audience”
She said why write long form posts if your audience won’t read it since most people will only skim through your posts.
Here’s my reaction to that;
We are bloggers because we want to teach our audience what we know, establish thought leadership and have some of our audience hire us.
We are not blogging for fun; it’s business.
So the cross-section of your audience who never takes the time to read your post, may never hire you or pay you any money; so why let them form how your content will be written?
Those that take the time to read your every content, are your real potential customers; they are the ones who are genuinely interested in your topic, they are the ones who will pay you money for your services because they have come to trust your expertise and thoroughness in your posts (because they have taken the time to read them).
So the objective should be to write detailed posts that can answer the most pain points of a particular question, so that it can rank well in the Search Engines and stand the chance of impressing your potential clients into hiring you.
It’s true that the people who will take the time to read through your blog posts are probably less than 5%, but they are your potential clients, they are the reason why you won’t shut down your blog because you can no longer keep it online for lack of money.
So we should rather endeavour to attract more potential clients than attract a freebie audience (those that will always skim and never buy anything).
In conclusion; the Search Engines love long form contents and you need that to rank on the first page so you can attract potential clients for your business.
It’s better to have just 200 potential clients read your post than to have 10000 freebie seekers read your post.
That’s my 2 cents to this post.
Thanks again for sharing bro
Hi Dan,
Thanks for your “long form” 2 cent 😉 It’s really appreciated.
However, there are perspectives to this issue.
Some potential clients don’t care if you write short posts or long posts before they hire you. They trust you based on the services you offer not just on the type of posts you write. So, it’s safe to know your audience. And if your audience contains those who like long posts and those who like short posts, it’s safe to alternate the kinds of posts you publish on your blog.
Freebie seekers won’t even read your post whether it is short or long 😉
Great article! Very helpful info, thanks for sharing!
You said nothing about the length and number of paragraphs.
I’m too wordy while writing a post. What is the best perceived number of words? How many visuals there should be? What do you think about usage infographics in posts (like visuals, not the solely source of info).
Sorry, that I’ve asked you too many questions.
Hey Helen,
I’m glad you found the post useful!
As for post length, your post should be as long or as short as it should be.
What this means is, if you can explain your post in 500 words, that should be the appropriate length. If however, your post topic can only be expressed as a 2000 word article, then that should be the length. The most important factor is that you give your audience quality and not quantity.
The human brain interprets images (visuals) faster than text so you should include visuals in your post.
If you are writing a 500 word post, one or two visuals will do. If it’s a 2000 word post, three to ten visuals will do. It depends on what you are writing about really.
I hope this helps…
I was about creating a new post and I just used the tool in this post to calculate the EMV score to judge between the two headlines I crafted.
Thanks for the great share
You’re welcome Tunde 😉
I have been trying to gain attention but it’s not working. What do you think I should do?.
Hi Samson,
What have you been doing to gain attention? The approach you take determines if it will work for you or not.
When writing a blog post, do you think one image is quite enough?
One image is enough except the the post is a tutorial, guide or a post that really requires more than one image.
This is a very useful piece. I have been running a blog for almost two years now, although I receive positive reviews about my posts/content, I still find it very hard to drive substantial traffic. I’d try and implement these tips.
I really like MMO. Keep up the good work Adesoji.
Glad that you find this useful. Make sure you implement this and monitor the improvement on your site traffic. Also, there are other articles on MMO.ng you can read and apply to get more traffic.