Hello and welcome to a new edition of the MabsArts Blog. Today we will be discussing some tips on how to Write Engaging Blogposts.
Before we dive in, it’s important to understand what makes a post engaging in the first place and what you can do to make your posts more engaging.
What makes a post engaging?
There are several factors that can come into consideration when judging wether a blogpost is engaging or not, and views or shares is not an accurate metric for that. This is because riding the trendwave will only get you so far in the blog-o-sphere. Instead you need to focus on what kind of engagement will be most fruitful for your blog if repeated.
1- Who is this blogpost for?
Normally this question will be answered even before the blog post has been written. For example if we go to a photography website and we ask “Who is this blog post for” our answer will come back as;
- photographers
- aspiring photographers
- industry profesionals
- photography enthusiasts
- etc
This is because as soon as we start a blog we are already cultivating an audience. A group of people that enjoy certain things and want to know about them. Answering this question right out of the bat will help you create content that is relevant and thus engaging to your core audience. These are the people that will end up subscribing to your blog and wanting to read more of it in the future.
2- Does your blogpost have value?
Ask yourself this question. Does it have value? Try not to put your ego in the way, ask it honestly. What sort of intrinsic value does your post provide?
Some posts are meant to give the value of knowledge by giving a team or teaching a solution to a problem. Others have the value of entertainment, like a joke post or a webcomic.
Whatever your post is offering it should be in line with the people that are reading the blog or the people that you intent to read the blog.
Say for example, you want to be writing a blogpost on airplanes, then your post has to offer some value to the people that are most likely to read these sort of posts, or at least to the general audience. You could achieve it by adding a neat little comic panel about airplanes at the bottom of your post on your trip to Hawaii, or you can offer a neat anecdote full of pictures from your recent trip to Cancun, showing off some of the least likely tourist places.
Try to put yourself in the position of the reader. After you read this post, what will you apply into your life? The answer to that question is the value of the post.
3- Make it Appealing.
There are a thousand ways to run and write blogs, you can incorporate music. Make sketches to journal your day, or even supply a backing track for people that are reading a specific blogpost. Whatever you do, make it appealing for the people reading it. Be zany, try new fun and interesting ways of delivering your quality content to people.
With this in mind, here are a couple of tips you can try out to help your posts be more appealing.
TIP NUMBER 1: Section your posts
Today’s digital age readers have a very low attention span so a huge wall of text will most likely put them off. Instead you can break up the information in your post into several bullet points, and sections.
This will help convey the information in a more enjoyable fashion that will help your readers pick out what interests them most as well as help them read the whole of the text more efficiently.
TIP NUMBER 2: Make use of Headers
A great way to break up the posts and add some much needed variety is by using titles and headers inside your post. WordPress.com allows you to do that right on their text editor, but if not you can use custom html like:
To increase or decrease the size of the font relative to the default size, use font size=”+num” or font size=”-num” , where “num” is a number. For example, to make the text two sizes bigger, use remember to put them inside brackets like these <,>:
This is bigger text.
TIP NUMBER 3: Take Pictures and Use Pictures
Ever heard of the saying “A picture is worth a thousand words”?
Well it’s true. Make use of pictures often and regularly. Pictures help drive your point home, in ways that words alone might not be able to achieve.
If you’re writing a story, and say for example the main character is a baseball player who just scored a homerun, what better way to accentuate the impact of that homerun than with an image of a flaming ball going out of the park?
Think of it like an extra layer of depth your blog can now have. Some bloggers even go the extra mile, creating fully illustrated blogposts that are in line with their ideas and their post.Blogs likes http://mightcouldstudios.co http://mightcouldstudios.com/ and https://www.profuselyillustrated.com/blog do a great job of this.
A neat way to get started with your own character to incorporate into your blog is by purchasing a custom character from our Fiverr page.
You can also use search engines like Google and Bing to get your images, however be warned. Most images from these sources are copyrighted and if you are making a direct profit from these images, you might be run into legal trouble with the owner of these copyrights. That is why instead I suggest a better practice is to search for and use images that are copyright free. A great place to search for such images is http://pexels.com
They have a great bank of images that you can use for literally no cost at all. Take for example this awesome selection of pictures I got just by typing blogging into their search engine:
That’s alll for this post, hope you’ve enjoyed it. Let me know what you’d like to read more of by posting a comment down below. Thank you and have a wonderful week.
MabsArts 