There’s one unavoidable truth in the world of inbound marketing: content is king.
Any decent digital marketing campaign will include an emphasis on content creation. Creating fresh and exciting content can boost your SEO, make your website more appealing to visitors, and guide potential customers through the buyer’s journey.
Still, content creation isn’t all fun and games. Cranking out consistently killer content requires a huge amount of effort, and sometimes you still miss the mark. If the quality of your content is getting in the way of your goals, it’s time to purge.
It’s time for an evaluation of what aspects of your blog are working for you, what needs tweaking, and what needs to get thrown away.
Start With Titles
If your titles are uninteresting, boring, or irrelevant, no one will even be interested in the blog section of your website. Without a strong title, you have no way to draw your readers into the information you want to share with them.
Learning to create great titles is one of the most important things you will do when creating content for your blog. You can improve your title-creation abilties by coming up with several options for each new piece of content.
Try to make each title include something to grab your audience’s attention. Use action verbs and adverbs, colorful language (but not too colorful!).
Keep It Interesting
Another way to drive your readers away is with snooze-worthy topics. Keep who you’re writing for in mind when you create ideas for topics.
It’s possible to create a great title and still have a terrible article, so be sure you are providing information that is actually interesting and of value to your target audience.
If you’re having trouble thinking of topics for your blog posts, go back to why you created your blog in the first place:
- What is the purpose of your blog?
- How is your blog positioning your company?
- What sorts of topics will accomplish that goal?
Consider what questions your audience has, and answer it. This will provide the most valuable content to your audience, and will result in you creating quality blog posts.
Image Is Everything
If the title doesn’t draw the reader in, the image definitely should.
Images play a huge role in getting that initial click on the blog post. But don’t stop there. Once a reader clicks on the actual blog post, continue to grab the reader’s attention.
Time is valuable and important to your readers, so don’t waste their time with huge blocks of text. Instead condense information by using small paragraphs, bullet points, and numbering. Use bolding and italics to highlight important information in an eye grabbing way!
Give Up, Get A Fresh Start, or Recycle
Sometimes it’s best to know when to call it quits. If you’ve got a blog post that just isn’t working, consider deleting it and moving on. Your time will be better spent creating a new post that is more likely to connect with your audience.
Getting a fresh start can give you the opportunity to look at the core values of your content creation process. Take some time to brainstorm new topics and form a cluster of related ideas that can build around a pillar blog post (a long-form blog entry that will cover the central topic of your blog in depth).
When your content creation well feels like it’s drying up, consider recycling content. Turn those old, potentially outdated blog posts (especially the ones that have been successful!) into new, exciting content.
Conclusion
Providing a blog that is relevant and useful to your readers is easier said than done. You need to make sure that your titles are attention-grabbing and to include compelling ideas and images to keep readers scrolling. Sometimes, it just doesn’t work and you need to get rid of the content all together.
Still, the end results of your optimization efforts will provide your potential customers with a better experience on your blog, which will ultimately drive more traffic through your website and increase your brand recognition!