5 Tips for Writing Engaging Blog Posts.
Writing an engaging blog post isn’t very easy.
Online readers have really short attention spans. Grabbing their attention, and holding on to it throughout the post is very difficult.
In this post, we are going to be looking at 5 tips that you can keep in mind when writing a blog post to make sure that it is interesting and engaging.
5 Tips for Writing Engaging Blog Posts
1. Do Proper Research
You can’t attract readers if you don’t know what you are talking about.
Take an example.
If someone was to say:
“The world probably has a lot of countries. There may be more than 180 but I’m not sure.”
It would sound horrible. No one would trust it. No one would rely on it and no one would quote it.
On the other hand, if someone was to say:
“The world has 197 countries. From these, 193 are members of the UN.”
It would sound way better. Even if it’s not true, it sounds like it because it’s said with determination and confidence.
And if you want to sound confident and determined, you have to have a proper command on the subject matter. You need to be so learned in your topic that you should be able to state facts and figures related to it without any hesitation.
When you want to write on something, take some time out beforehand and dedicate a session solely to research. Look at reliable articles, research papers and books on your topic.
Always remember to mention statistics and figures, and to link them back to their original source.
2. Focus on Making the Beginning Engaging
In writing, the old adage ‘First impression is the last impression’ holds a very accurate application.
If you manage to create an engaging and interesting introduction, you will be able to hook your readers and get them to read till the end of the post.
This will mean that if you’ve placed any links or sponsored elements in your blog, they will be more likely to appear in front of your readers.
Similarly, you will also increase the chances of your readers to click on any internal links that you may have left in between your content.
Here are some points that you can keep in mind to come up with an engaging introduction:
- Discuss the main concept or topic of your content
- Don’t dillydally. Get to the point without putting in a lot of fluff
- Start with a relatable question
- Keep it short and sweet
3. Break Your Content Down in Headings and Sub-Headings
By breaking your content down in headings and sub-headings, you will be able to make it easier to navigate and skip through.
If there is a reader who wants to just read a particular part of your post and not the whole of it, they can easily skip to their desired part and then leave. But, if you don’t add headings and sub-headings, your reader will get annoyed scanning through the content.
Other than that, headings and sub-headings can make your content appear less like a wall of text. And here is something you should know about walls of text.
If someone has written some highly interesting and information content, but without dividing and splitting it properly, it will appear boring to the readers.
But on the other hand, if the content itself is not very informative, but it is properly split up in headings, sub-headings, sections and bullet points, it will look interesting to the readers.
4. Make Sure Your Content is Unique
Plagiarized and copied content is, to be a little dramatic, the bane of reader-engagement. This problem can occur with writers who just take all their information from a single popular source on the internet without diversifying their research.
Plagiarized content, especially if it is taken from a popular source, can stick out to the readers, and it can easily be spotted.
However, there can be a lot of writers who don’t intentionally copy stuff from other sources. But even these types of writers can have trouble with plagiarism by committing it accidentally.
To make sure that there is no plagiarism, of any kind whatsoever, in your content, you should use a plagiarism checker.
Plagiarism checkers usually work by scanning the given text against online sources to see if there are any matches between them. This can help you easily see if there is any accidental duplication in your content from other sources on the internet.
5. Add Visuals and Graphics
There are few things that make written content more engaging than some visuals and graphics.
The logic behind adding visuals and graphics is the same as we discussed in the heading dealing with headings and sub-headings: they stop your content from looking like a giant wall of text.
But, here’s the thing.
While it is commendable and good for your content’s engagement to have images in it, some writers can go a little over-board. They can either start adding images at every other point in the blog post, which can make it impossible to peruse.
Or they can start adding images that have nothing to do with the content at hand.
This sort of excess or irrelevancy in the added visuals can, far from making the content engaging, take away whatever little engagement it may have previously had.
Conclusion
If you are writing for an online audience, you should understand well that your readers will not bother entertaining a dull and boring blog post.
In this post, we looked at some tips and steps that you can follow to make your content look interesting and gripping to your readers.
To sum it up, you should take care to do proper research before sitting down to write your blog post. Having thorough command and knowledge over your subject can make you sound authoritative.
Then, you should work on creating the beginning of the post interesting in order to hook the attention of your readers. You should also break your content up in headings and sub-headings so that it is easier for users to navigate through it.
Uniqueness is also necessary for making your content engaging, so you should be sure to check your final draft for duplication using a plagiarism checker.
And last but not least, you should take care to add visuals and graphics in your content.