When the internet first became available at large, blogs became the way for people to share thoughts and insights with each other. They were creative spaces to have fun and explore thoughts and ideas. As the internet evolved, blogs became powerful avenues for businesses to attract target audiences. To leverage the power of blogs, you need to know how to create a blog.
You might say that this is obvious and unnecessary. Everybody these days knows how to create a blog. All you need to know is how to use WordPress, the content management system that powers a huge chunk of the internet. Starting a blog takes only a few clicks on WordPress. But that’s not what we mean by learning how to create a blog.
The key thing you need to know about blogs as a marketer in 2021 is the art of engagement. How do you create an engaging blog that brings you leads? Now, we’re asking the right question. Creating a blog that keeps readers glued requires a few important tips. This article will walk you through the major steps to starting and running an engaging blog.
How To Create A Blog: The Basics
There are a few basic things to know about starting a blog before we go any further. This has nothing to do with the actual work involved in creating a blog. It’s about everything you need to have in place before you implement your blogging strategy. Here are the most important things to keep in mind.
1. Define Your Objective
Why are you creating a blog? You need to be able to answer this question with specificity. What’s your end goal? If you’re thinking about how to create a blog, first answer why you want one. Is it just to increase traction on your website? Do you want readers to turn into customers? It’s important to answer these questions before you get started. Knowing your aims will only help you decide your blogging strategy later on.
2. Specify A Target Audience
After defining your blog’s objective, the next step is to decide who your target audience will be. If you’re a business, your target customer will mainly answer this question. You want to create content on your blogs that appeals to your target customer. Thus, your target audience will be the cornerstone of your blogging strategy. Having a clearly defined target audience is one of the first steps to creating an engaging blog.
3. Focus On Web Design
This should be obvious by now, but if you’re thinking about making a blog, start by investing in good web design. How your blog looks is as important as the content it has. Readers these days expect a website that loads quickly and looks professional. It shouldn’t be too cluttered with ads either. It’s useful to know how to use WordPress to create a blog and tweak it from time to time. If you’re trying to make an engaging blog, having a bad web design will undermine your efforts before you even begin.
How To Create A Blog: 8 Tips For Creating An Engaging Blog
Now that we’ve covered the basics, it’s time to delve into the art of running an engaging blog. Like any craft, this is something you learn over time. You need to experiment and find out what works best with your audience. However, there are a few general tips for making your blog engaging for readers.
1. Stories Are Your Friends
Let’s do a short experiment: Think about the last piece of immersive or engaging content you consumed. We bet that you’re thinking about storytelling, in some form or the other. Whether that’s TV shows or news articles or blogs, stories are what engage us. They have mystery and they move forward, taking readers along with them. The key to engaging readers is to tell them a story.
This is true for movies and novels, of course, but it is an equally important lesson in how to create a blog. Whenever possible, your blogs should be relying on stories and anecdotes. Weave them along with important insights to create an enjoyable read. If you employ stories effectively, you will be well on your way to creating an engaging blog.
Do you know why childrens’ stories are so popular across cultures? Telling stories is how we communicate important lessons that can’t be put in simple prose. Making us feel for characters and stories effectively communicates points much better than simple statements. Incorporate stories in your blogs for more engaged readers.
2. Make Your Headlines Irresistible
When it comes to writing for the internet, the headline is everything. It’s what decides whether your article will be read, or if readers will scroll through it. It won’t matter what the content on your blog if the readers never make it there. Make sure to spend some time coming up with catchy, attractive headlines for your blogs.
For the internet, it is not uncommon for SEO experts to recommend that you spend as much time coming up with a good line as you do writing the article itself. If you think about it, that figures. Your blog post will be found either on search engines or social media, both of which only provide the headline as the entry to your article.
For blogs that are targeting a certain keyword, you want to make sure your headline contains the word. It’s true that Search Engine Optimization has now become a lot more complicated, but these thumb rules stay the same. To tell search engines to pick your article up for a keyword, you need to have it in your headline.
3. Get The Word Out There
When blogs were little corners of the internet waiting to be found, it was alright to just focus on publishing. These days, if you don’t make some noise, nobody is going to hear you. When you’re learning how to create a blog, make sure to also focus on social media and search engine optimization. In order for your blog to get attention, you will need to put your best foot forward.
For social media, you ideally want to have a strategy to make your posts perform well. Again, great headlines and accompanying captions are a must. Platforms like Facebook will also tell you when your posts tend to do the best. Make sure to optimize your social media posts to get the highest reach possible. Only engaging posts can help you promote an engaging blog.
Another aspect of learning how to create a blog is having Google index it. For Google, optimization is a whole different ball-game. You need to optimize your website’s design so the search engine picks it up. You also need to incorporate keywords, but not so many that it reads like spam. There are plenty of tricks for optimizing your blog for Google that you can learn. If this is your main source of traffic, you want to make sure you invest in SEO expertise.
4. Embed Images, Tweets and Videos
We cannot emphasize this enough: multimedia is non-negotiable. In 2021, nobody is interested in reading walls of text anymore. There are so many different ways to communicate your point, and you should be utilizing them. Relevant images and graphics give a big boost to readability. Having great images on your posts is also helpful for marketing the blog on social media.
Things don’t stop there. See if you can find social media posts that can complement your blog. Ideally, these would be posts that add weight to the point you’re making. Embedded tweets and posts are great for making the blog come alive. They help readers feel like they’re reading something current and dynamic.
Embedding videos from Youtube and other platforms is also a great idea. After all, it’s likely that your blog has related videos that go deeper into your post. Including them in your blog adds another layer of richness. If people watch the video through your blog, they also spend more time on your website. You can insert videos just like this one below. Feel free to take a look at what SurveySparrow is.
Before we continue with these tips, we recommend you also consider starting a vlog page.In that case, you can bring value to your readers on a whole different level. You should research some of the leading video creation companies to see what is currently trending in this niche.
5. Short Sentences, Short Paragraphs
Long sentences take up unnecessary mental energy. When reading on the web, people can be very impatient. They don’t want to work hard to get the information they need. If you make your readers work hard, it will be very tough for you to create an engaging blog. Great blogs make the reading experience as easy as possible.
Thankfully, writing for a smooth reading experience is not a mystery. There are a few tips you can follow. The first one: always break up your sentences. When you find yourself writing a long sentence, ask yourself if it would work better as two sentences. In most cases, you will find yourself breaking up your sentences. This makes for snappier writing.
If long sentences can sometimes be a drag, long paragraphs just suck all the energy out of the reader. When learning how to create a blog, you need to envision posts that are made up of short, sharp paragraphs. Blog posts made up of short paragraphs that have short sentences is the formula to creating an engaging blog.
6. Add Subheadings For Better Readability
One of the best ways to think about how to create a blog is to look back at your own experience. When you’re reading a blog post, what makes your experience better? You can then work backwards to include these insights into your own blog. For us, posts without subheadings are a dealbreaker.
Most people who get directed to blogs from Google don’t have much time. They want quick answers, and subheadings is the way to give them that. Don’t bore them by hiding what they’re looking for in dense paragraphs. Tell them where they’re most likely to find their answers. Subheadings respect the reader’s time and attention, and thus make for an engaging blog.
While we’re at it, it doesn’t hurt to have your subheadings be engaging. For most readers, the subheadings will be all they read. In this case, you want to make sure that they effectively convey your point. You should also try and include your target keywords in your subheadings. It goes a long way in getting Google to pay attention to your post.
7. Write Posts That Are Timely and Relevant
If you are thinking about how to make a blog, you need to have a content strategy in place. Like we said earlier, your content strategy will be derived from your target audience and objective. But aspects like relevance and timeliness can apply to all kinds of content.
Let’s take an example: We just started a new year. Likely, all your old blog posts are still referring to 2020. A new year, though, brings with it a new context from which we must write. Would content from 2019 hold any relevance now? A lot has happened, and we are rethinking pretty much everything. Why not take some time out to update your old posts for 2021?
Along with timeliness, making posts relevant is also key to making an engaging blog. A lot of blogs offer tall claims in their headlines, and start talking about irrelevant subjects in the body of the post. That’s not just annoying. It’s disrespecting your readers. When learning how to create a blog, make sure your content strategy is timely and relevant.
8. Don’t Forget The Call To Action
For a second, let’s assume you’ve got everything in place for an engaging blog. You have implemented SEO. You’ve written sharp, timely blog posts that are easy to read and full of pictures and embeds. Congratulations on a great blog. But then what?
Remember, you had an objective for which you needed a blog. At the last stage, it’s crucial to keep that objective in mind. When readers come to your website, what do you want them to do? If you’re looking to generate leads, we suggest embedding a pre-sales survey from SurveySparrow. You’ll generate more leads and collect data about their purchasing preferences.
A call to action is where you cash in all the effort you’ve put in your blog. Call to actions can range from anything to signing up for a newsletter or filling out a quick survey. If you’re looking to embed a survey, feel free to check out SurveySparrow. You can use it to create beautiful surveys that can fetch you 40% more responses. Here’s a survey created using SurveySparrow to accept blog posts from guests…
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Create An Engaging Blog For Better Leads
Those were 8 tips that you should definitely follow if you’re wondering how to create a blog. To create a good blog, you will need to use a content management system like WordPress. If you know how to use WordPress, you have a significant advantage. If you don’t, there’s no reason to worry. It’s not hard to learn, and there are more than enough Youtube videos to help.
The trick to creating an engaging blog is consistency. Post regularly and you will find yourself generating great leads from your blogs. If your objective is to improve your sales, having a blog to improve site traction is a must. But how do you convert readers into customers?
This is where SurveySparrow enters the picture. The online survey tool helps you get data on your readers by having them fill out a short survey. You can design a custom survey based on your needs, or go with a pre-built template. Embed the survey in your post, and make sure you don’t lose the opportunity to make the most of your blog.
