Creating Effective Blog Content

Within the blog creation process, one of the most obvious and important steps is writing the content itself. Paying particular attention to your writing style can differentiate your blog and keep readers coming back.  

When it comes to this content, you should consider your writing style, the type of content you choose to create, as well as writing for SEO (which is further explored in our post OPTIMISING FOR SEO).

Figuring Out Your Writing Style

Developing your writing voice can be a difficult process – a great way to go about this is to create a style guide. This is an outline of writing and publishing practices that you can use to keep consistency within your writing, and although this is by no means necessary, it can be very helpful in learning your writing style and holding you accountable. Not to mention, a style guide can be particularly useful if you have more than one person writing content. 

This guide may provide an indication of the tone you would like to convey, how casual your writing style should be, how you should link your ideas, and how you would like to go about including pictures and other media.  

If you aren’t sure where to start, an effective blog writing style could use fairly plain english, as well as a friendly, conversational tone. This will differ depending on your chosen industry and audience personas – a blog targeted towards experts and professionals would likely use more complex, serious language, whilst a casual blog would focus on more digestible, humorous content. 

It is also important to demonstrate personality within your content, as well as go in depth on your chosen topics, as opposed to providing only surface-level information.

The Format of Your Content

The type and format of your content can also provide an effective point of differentiation for your blog – you don’t need to stick to one format of blogging. Mixing up your blog post formats and content you choose to create can keep the blog interesting and fresh, not only for your audience, but for yourself. 

A few examples of different blog formats include:

• How-to guides
• Product reviews
• Opinion articles
• List posts
• News updates

A Few Extra Points on Effective Blog Content

Finally, here are a few extra pointers to keep in mind:

• Write a compelling lede – This is the opening section of an article or post, and should summarise what your post is about. To hook your readers at the beginning, you may want to include interesting and relevant statistics and claims, which can add authenticity and strengthen your ideas. Don’t limit these to only the introduction –  they should be littered throughout your writing to break up the content and keep things interesting for your readers.
• Double check your title – When deciding on the title of your post, it can help to brainstorm – come up with a number of them, and narrow your list down. An effective title is usually succinct, simple, accurate and may utilise literary devices such as alliteration. Once you have finished writing, you should go back and double check your headline. Ensure that it still reflects the content of the post, and see whether you want to change it or improve its relevance and clarity. Your title should also consider SEO factors.
• Include other media – As mentioned in our post on PLANNING THE STRUCTURE OF YOUR BLOG POSTS, a great way to capture the reader’s attention and keep your content engaging is through the inclusion of photographs, illustrations, infographics and videos. These should be relevant and of high quality. Furthermore, creating any media yourself allows you to improve relevancy and keep within the visual and topical theme of your blog. An easy way to create your own images may be through a free online tool such as Canva or Adobe Spark.

Conclusion

Generally, these are the most important factors to keep in mind when it comes to creating high quality, effective blog content. Keeping your content relevant and well thought out is crucial, however this is not an effective blogging strategy on its own. Blog success will come as a result of a comprehensive plan, detailing various blogging aspects – content included.

To learn more about where your focus should be when planning, creating and maintaining a blog, check out our page outlining EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT BLOGGING.