Are you looking for a proven tool to help you build influence, credibility and thought leadership with your target market? Do you want a “magnet” to help you attract new and repeat visitors to your website? Do you want to build a relationship with your audience that leads them to feel like they know, like and trust you?
The world of digital marketing offers you several tools that can help you; one that many businesses use that helps them thrive online is blogging. With effective blogging you do all of the above and much more. It can turn website visitors into interested leads eager to do business with you.
Here’s a bonus: it gives you a pool of valuable information you can repurpose for other parts of your content marketing strategy.
But There’s A Catch…
That’s right. There’s a catch. Your blog can either help catapult your online marketing to new heights, or it can be totally ignored by those you want to read it.
And the results you get depend to a large extent on the way you write your blog posts. The steps in this article will help you write posts that attract interested readers to you and transform them into buyers who can’t wait to do business with you.
So keep reading if you are a business owner, manager or marketing professional who wants to start a blog or already has one and wants to enjoy greater results from it.
Your readers want valuable information to help them achieve a cherished goal or solve a pressing problem, but they don’t want to have to work hard to digest it. So if you want to get your blog content (or any of the rest of your marketing content) read, remembered, shared or responded to, make it easy to read.
If reading your content feels like carrying a heavy load up a steep hill, it won’t get read!
So how do you make your content easy to read? These tips will help you:
- Write on a basic level – You are writing marketing content, not a college research paper. Think “informal”, not “formal” or “academic”. Keep your blog entries, and all of your copywriting and marketing content simple, clear and very easy to understand.If your audience reads your blog and scratches their head in confusion, its effectiveness as a content marketing tool is dead.
- Don’t fill your content with gigantic blocks of text – Have some paragraphs that are one or two sentences long. Have some sentences (and paragraphs) that are as short as one word. Want to keep your reader from getting bored? It helps if you vary the length of your sentences and paragraphs. But avoid very long sentences and paragraphs. Five lines maximum for paragraphs is a good rule of thumb, I’m confident.
One of the Key Takeaways Of This Article
You must make your blog content easy to read if you want to attract readers and convert them into leads and buyers. And you want to make your content engaging and persuasive. These two points will help you immensely.
Something to think about: “You” may be the most powerful word you can use in your content. It can “amp up” your blog’s persuasive power. And it will make your content seem much more conversational and appealing to your reader.
The “Double Readership Path”
By all means use in your content what legendary marketer Bill Glazer calls the “double readership path”. Some people, no matter how interesting and compelling you make your blog content, will not finish it all just because they are busy and distracted.
The double readership path helps you appeal to these readers while making your article easier and more enjoyable for everyone else to read and understand.
So what is it? The double readership path means that you craft clear, concise, compelling headlines, sub-headlines, image captions, etc, and that you make strategic use of bold, italicized text, quotations separated from the body of the content so as to be clearly visible to skimmers, and so on.
You add these elements into your content so that someone who is merely skimming your article without reading it all can clearly understand the message you are trying to put forth.
The Slippery Slope
In previous articles on this blog, we’ve talked about how critically important headlines, titles and subject lines are to your content marketing success, so we won’t rehash that topic here. But remember that a great headline serves some useful purposes:
- It gets your article noticed
- It arouses your reader’s curiosity and interest
- It gets the first sentenced read
These three sentences summarize its job in a nutshell. But once it’s done its job, and your reader’s eyes are focused on your content, your work is far from over. To get as many readers as possible eagerly devouring your content, you need to employ what legendary copywriting expert Joe Sugarman calls “the slippery slope”.
As the name “slippery slope” suggests, you want your content to be easy and enjoyable to read. Just like your headline needs to get your first sentence read, your first sentence needs to get your second sentence read. And so on, until your reader reaches the end of your article eager to learn more about what you can do for him and anxious to read more of your content.
This is the slippery slope. It’s a proven copywriting technique that will increase your reader’s interest and engagement in a big way!
Don’t Be Afraid To Do This!
You want a call to action at the end of your blog post. It may be as simple as telling the reader to leave a comment. It may be to tell him to sign up for your email list or webinar. It may be to download your latest white paper. And it may be to help you sell your product or service.
Despite what some social media and blogging “purists” say to the contrary, don’t be afraid to do this. You’ve given the reader some excellent, problem-solving content. Up to this point you’ve asked nothing in return.
Granted, you don’t want to start selling too early, and you may want to keep your call to action subtle and understated, but don’t be afraid to end your article with a call to action that “gets the ball rolling” on the sales process.
But don’t make your blog entry a “high-intensity”, over-the-top sales pitch. And save your sales message and call to action until the end.
If your content is easy to read, has plenty of “white space” instead of complex sentences and long blocks of text, is aimed at your reader with the goal of offering value to him by focusing on helping him solve a problem he’s frustrated with, it’s much more likely to get read and have the impact you want it to have.
Your Ultimate Goal For Business Blogging
And what impact is that? You want your blog posts and all of your marketing content, after they’ve captured your reader’s attention, to start him on a journey from reader to buyer. You want your content to be an asset to your online marketing.
And to enjoy maximum success in your online marketing, you need landing pages. But landing page platforms are not all the same. To help you reach your online marketing and conversion goals, you want the best landing page platform available.