Creative Spotlight: 6 Tips For Writing A Killer Blog Post That Converts

CopyPress

October 28, 2016

Many bloggers falsely believe that a good idea alone makes for an effective blog post. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. If blogging was as easy as writing about interesting topics, a lot more people would be able to monetize their words.

The way to think about writing a good blog post is to always prioritize conversions. This means setting two goals for each blog post:

Converting interesting ideas into traffic for your blog
Converting traffic into leads

But how can you achieve these goals? Read on to get six great tips for writing a killer blog post that converts.

1. Sort Out Your SEO

Image via Flickr by NOGRAN s.r.o

There’s no point spending an hour or two on writing a good blog post if you don’t get people to click on it. The way to prioritize converting your ideas into actual traffic is to optimize each of your posts so that people will read them.

Improving your SEO doesn’t entail spending hours of your time learning the tools of the trade. An easy fix is to write a clear meta title and a persuasive meta description for each of your articles.

Meta titles and meta descriptions are displayed on search engine results pages when people search for keywords related to your blog. If you don’t change these yourself, search engines automatically display the first 60 characters from your title and the first 160 characters from your blog post.

The first step is to write a clear title for each post that explains exactly what it’s about in as few words as possible. Once you’ve done that, you need to write a benefit-driven meta description that tells potential readers why they should click your specific post among the thousands of other search results.

Once you’ve made these minor adjustments to your SEO strategy, you’ll start to see a lot more traffic.

2. Keep The Attention Of Readers

Human beings now have shorter attention spans than goldfish. The digital revolution has obviously delivered some profound positive impacts to society, but this has come at the price of a decreased ability to focus.

As a blogger, this decreased attention span makes your job more difficult. Remember, converting traffic into readers is only the first step. You need to entice people to read more of what you have to say and do it quickly; otherwise, the traffic you get is about as useful as a chocolate teapot.

Keeping the attention of readers doesn’t mean you need to be some sort of literary genius. You just need to pique curiosity. Write short, punchy sentences and tell people something they don’t know within the first couple of paragraphs of your blog post.

Despite the lower attention span of the modern internet user, people love new insights and new information – give them what they want and they’ll keep reading.

3. Focus On Scroll-depth

Now that you’ve persuaded people to click into your blog post and captured their attention, you need to encourage them to read to the end of each post. This can become especially difficult with the kind of long-form content that bloggers often write.

If you’ve got a lot to say on a certain topic, your post could easily run into a few thousand words. You need to guide readers to the next conversion stage at the end of your post, which is where you can generate new leads such as subscribers or potential customers.

Improving your scroll-depth means focusing on layout. Nobody likes long walls of text – break your content up into small paragraphs of just a few sentences each. Make use of formatting such as bullet points and bold font. Use visual aids like images and infographics to keep things interesting.

Focusing on your layout in this way helps guide readers down the page towards your next and arguably most important step – converting traffic into leads.

4. Get Leads

You don’t need to be a marketing guru to generate leads from your blog posts, but you do need to put effort into this step. Traffic is useless if it doesn’t help your blog grow. Without growth, you’ll never be able to monetize your blog, which is kind of important if you’re not just blogging for fun.

To get leads you need to convince people to take action. This “action” could be downloading your free PDF tips or subscribing to your email newsletter. This is simple stuff, but the point is that each blog post on your site should include some form of call-to-action so that you’re not wasting the chance for potential new leads. Be consistent here and you’ll reap the rewards.

5. Link Posts Together

This is a useful tip for encouraging readers to stick around to see what other content you’ve got to offer on your blog. By linking posts together you provide a natural path for people to continue browsing your blog.

The more time people spend on your site reading the valuable content you’re offering, the more chance they’ll be sufficiently impressed to sign up to your newsletter or buy the ebook that you market on your blog.

6. Use Free Tools.

Constantly measuring and optimizing your blog’s success is the key to improvement. You need to get a clear picture of key metrics that show you whether you’re doing a good job of converting. Here are three useful free tools:

Google Analytics. This free tool delivers detailed reports on how many people are visiting your blog, and which keywords you rank well for, among a host of other useful data.
Scroll Depth. A handy GA add-on that measures how far users are scrolling on your blog posts.
Yoast. A WordPress plugin that helps you easily edit and optimize your meta titles and descriptions.

By incorporating the above six points into your blog, you’ll start to see a lot more conversions. With hard work, you can transform your blog from a barren wasteland of unfulfilled potential to a hugely successful source of income.