Blogging is nothing more than a conversation with your reader. Visualize your ideal reader (hopefully your ideal client) sitting across from you with a cup of their favorite hot beverage and you are having a conversation. The only difference is that the conversation is all from you and it’s in writing, a blog post.
Right now, I’m picturing you in this conversation with me, nodding your head and saying “oh yeah, I get it, that makes total sense.”
If you’ve ever role played, this is probably easier for you than if you haven’t because you have to play both your role (the blog post writer) and the role of the reader (your client or customer who reads the blog post.)
Knowing this, there are 5 keys to blogging success:
#1 Write to One Person
Yes, this does mean you are going to need to know who your ideal client or target market is, specifically, before writing your blog post. For example, you may write a blog post for middle aged, divorced women, with kids gone (or no kids), in corporate careers, who are struggling with their weight. That is a very different blog post than the one that targets thirty something busy moms with extra baby weight! Know who your market is and know their pain points and priorities.
#2 Use Conversational Words and Tone
Write your blog post the way you would speak. With the many ways technology keeps us in touch, including email, text, instant messaging, and more, our communication styles have become much more relaxed and abbreviated. Eliminate the big words (and they really aren’t very big), from your blog post, like “implement” and say “use,” instead of “initiate” say “begin.” Relaxed includes starting a sentence with a preposition (and or but), because that’s what you’d do in a verbal conversation.
#3 Tell Stories
Stories from your own life, the life of clients (change the names to protect confidentiality), the life of friends and family (with permission) are all great ways to bond with your blog post reader. Studies have shown that people remember stories far longer than they do facts and figures (except for those analyticals in the crowd.) Your blog post is an opportunity to share from who you are, not just what you do.
#4 Make a Point
Every story, no matter how rich in detail you make it, must have a point. Why are you sharing this particular story in your blog post? What is the lesson you want your reader to get in the blog post.
#5 Create a Call to Action
As you close your blog post, as you would close a conversation, there is a next step. In a conversation about business it might be a request for proposal, and agenda of next steps you want them to take before you get back together, you might provide a resource. The same applies to your blog post. Invite interaction, ask your reader for their feedback, opinion, how they’d handle the situation you wrote about, or give them a chance to buy something. Reading your post without a call to action is only spinning their wheels.
Here’s my CALL TO ACTION . . .comment here and tell me if you currently use these 5 blogging success tips and how they work. If not, which are you missing and when will you put them into action?
