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You know them. You know what they want. You build your entire business to serve them.

But your prospect is not connecting with you because your blog post is not bonding with them, so your message, products and services mean nothing to them. How do you engage your prospect with your blog post, and make them know, like, and buy from you?

Do the following, and they’re all yours:

  1. Offer great value
  2. Create flow in your writing
  3. Use metaphors

Let us discuss each point in detail.

Offer great value

Before you start writing a blog post, it is important to always answer this question: What’s in it for my readers or prospects? In other words, how do they benefit from my post?

Then craft compelling content that informs, educates, and transforms their lives.

Remember: your prospect is surfing through the online waters in search of solutions to their pressing issues. So, if you want to create a relationship with them, entice them with treats they can’t resist.

Here’s how to do that:

  1. Determine your prospect’s pain points: You need a little bit of research here to understand the things that wake them up late at night; the things that frustrate their lives, challenge their existence. Then write posts that address the problems.
  2. Write to inform: Don’t brag about your life story or write content that’s loaded with fluff. Instead, write meaningful words that inform, educate, and inspire your prospect to take action and change their life.
  3. Give out freebies: This is an icing on the cake. Beyond useful content that educates, you need to reward your prospects with free gifts (e-Books, e-courses, videos, etc.). This builds engagement and strengthens the bond between you and your potential customer.

The idea is to connect with them through your content, informing them to not only understand how your products will solve their problems, but why they should open their wallets and buy from you.

Create flow in your writing

It is hard to define flow in writing, but literary giants have described it as – among others – a combination of logical connection of a writer’s ideas, strong topic sentence, and varied wordings that make writing interesting.

Let’s use an example. If you’re writing a blog post on building a successful startup, discussing the importance of passion, grit, and the hard work needed to get things done, will make your writing sail smoothly.

However, the moment you added President-elect Trump in the paragraph, you’ve interrupted the flow. The sudden introduction of the new idea will make the reader wonder: “What’s the connection between building a startup and Mr. Trump?”

To avoid this weird situation, use the following tips:

  1. Logical connection: Stick to one idea at a time. Ensure that all your points are logically connected and presented one after the other. Mixing two unconnected points is difficult to fathom.
  2. Topic sentence: Is the first sentence that tells the reader the focus of a paragraph. Notice how I used the topic sentence in this paragraph. I tell you, earlier on, what I will discuss ahead in the paragraph. A topic sentence serves as a signpost for what’s coming ahead in the paragraph.
  3. Concise wording: Long, verbose wordings are boring; they break writing flow. Read this as an example: “Starting a business requires knowledge, capital, and determination; it also requires hard work and continuous innovation and iteration to make your product better and gain more customers and leads and make more profit.” That’s a long sentence, and it is difficult to read. I could have easily put it this way: “Building a profitable business requires hard work and determination.” Better, right?

The shorter and sweeter you can make it, the better.

Use metaphors

Metaphors, as Brian Clark beautifully puts it, “allow you to make the complex simple and the controversial palatable … create extraordinary meaning out of the seemingly mundane.”

They make your writing:

  1. Crisp
  2. Vivid
  3. Persuasive

And they are simple to use. Just compare two different things to explain a concept, a condition, an event, or a situation.

For example:

  • Your blog post is a valuable product.

See? The figure of speech helps both the writer and the reader. The writer uses it to simplify their message. The reader (prospect) understands the writer’s message.

And everybody wins!