Your website looks perfect: you hired an experienced UX/UI designer who developed a perfect interface for your blog, a web designer who created a perfect color scheme, unique badges and plugin concepts, a frontend developer who solved all problems with adding advanced options for blog navigation. You also cooperated with the best marketing agencies to promote your blog with SEO and contextual advertising. And now you are waiting when the number of your readers will exceed 1,000. But nothing happens: in fact, the number of unique visits becomes lower, and the bounce rate increases. Why does that happen? Perhaps, you’ve missed the most important aspect of running a successful blog. Your content.
Content is a moving power in the online world. People are looking for fresh and unique information, some truth-revealing posts, and scandalous investigations. They no longer need beautifully designed pages with hundreds of elements that only disturb the attention. The design becomes more minimalistic, but the demands to content rise. No one will follow a blog where nothing happens. You need to update your blog regularly with the most relevant information. None advertising method will work if you have nothing to offer your readers.
Content creating – why is it so complicated?
Writing an interesting and captivating post is a real challenge. Today, anyone can become a writer and present his ideas to the world. And as a rule, the ideas tend to repeat each other. You need to be creative enough to find a new thought (or the old good one), and artful enough to present it in a unique way. Even professional bloggers sometimes are confused with writing a new post: when everything has been told before, it is rather difficult to find something that attracts the attention.
Some bloggers choose the easiest way to keep people engaged in the conversation. They choose the most urgent and the most painful issues to discuss. They build intrigues around famous politicians and offer their radical point of view on religion. For other bloggers, this method seems to be inappropriate and even humiliating.
The sources for inspiration are different for every blogger. Moreover, sources also depend on the general idea of your blog. For example, if you write about food, you can find inspiration in Jamie Oliver’s books, and if you write about movies, the reviews of your most favorite movie critic can inspire you.
The ideas and where to find them
The first thing you need to write a good post is the idea. For many writers, finding it is the most boring process that regularly ends up with a failure. Generating ideas should become your habit. Sitting and thinking about what you should write today does not work. If you have noticed that finding of the idea is rather difficult for you, follow this step-by-step guide that will help you overcome this problem.
1. Write down your thoughts
Where do you keep your ideas and thoughts? Perhaps, the only place for them is in your head. But the ideas and thoughts change all the time, you forget them, and cannot remember even the most brilliant ones. Start to write down everything that comes to your mind. It is better to use a notebook or text file to keep all ideas in one place and to have an access to them whenever you need.
2. Review your notes
It is not enough to write down the idea. You need to remember about it and find a way to implement it in your work. Review your ideas once a week or two to refresh them in your memory and to add some interesting and important details. Perhaps, you develop some of the ideas in real stories while revising them.
3. Find connections between the ideas
When you review the ideas, try to connect some of them. This method is perfect to wake up your imagination. Two or three weak ideas can create one awesome big idea that will inspire you for writing an informative and emotional post.
4. Do not publish the first draft
When the post is ready, leave it for a couple of days. Try to forget what you have written and do not think about it. Come back to checking it in a few days. That will help you find better ways to express your thoughts, encounter better words, and create a stronger basis for a communication with your readers.
5. Read other bloggers
Mostly, people get inspired by other people or their actions. If you feel that you need a push to write a post, go online and read other bloggers. It does not mean that you should find a topic of another blogger and just rewrite his ideas. Be attentive to the associations and thoughts when you are reading a post. Perhaps, you do not agree with some statements and want to tell your readers about that.
7 steps for writing a post
The idea is not enough to write an attractive post. There are several important factors that also influence the quality of your writing and the number of visitors who will read it till the end.
1. Choose an intriguing title
Do not discover all secrets of your post in a title. Find the words to make it sound mysterious though promising. A reader should understand the idea of what he will find in the article, but the details should not be revealed from the very beginning.
2. Work on the first sentence
The opening sentence determines the quality of the whole post. No one will read it if you do not create a proper impression from the first words.
3. The idea should be important to your readers
As a blogger, you need to remember that your main aim is to satisfy the desires of your readers. Mind the information you provide in your post: it should not be interesting to you, but it should have a point to your readers.
4. Include CTA
Drive your readers’ attention with adding a call to action into your article. Make them do something instead of reading.
5. Find deeper ideas
Your post should not be written just to update your content. You need to use every piece of writing to become closer to your readers.
6. Mind the quality of your writing
Deep ideas will not save your post if you have many mistakes and misprints. If you are not sure that the quality of your writing is high enough, use editing applications or proofreading services.
7. Build a dialogue
Involve your readers in a conversation. Ask them to express their opinion and share the ideas. In this way, you reach the highest form of interaction between a writer and a reader – a dialogue.
The workflow of generating ideas and writing a post can be a little bit different for any author, but the process should include almost all of the above-mentioned steps. If you are passionate and dedicated to the work you do, your posts will become better with every word. Use your time to find the most appropriate words, to choose the best strategy of communication with your readers, and improve your content to attract new visitors and keep your subscribers satisfied with what they find in your blog.
