Bloggers start off their blogs with much zest and zeal. But with the passage of time, some blogs go through a lull period. It might seem like your blog is dying out, but that does not mean that you have to kill it. Hubspot reports that the companies that post blogs have 97% more inbound links.

So why think about killing the blog? With our help, you shall be able to revive it and perhaps also make it flourish.

To engage the target audience, it is significant that topics need to be selected that can interest a wide range of audience. Most often, contents of blogs start to seem old that does not interest many. We have put together some strategies to use for selecting fresh and interesting topics.

Provide an Interesting Headline

Statistics say 80% of people stop reading after the headline. For this reason, it is important to create a heading will leave the reader wanting to know what the actual content is.

For example, if you are writing about an adventurous vacation, the headline can be

“I was excited about our trip but as it started, on the very first day…….”

This will rope in your audience’s attention, leaving them with the question “What happened next?”

Such a headline will play with the emotions of the audience as they contemplate about what may happen next.

Having said all of the above, the content should back up an amazing headline. If the content is not good enough then the reader might not come back.

Length of Content

Buzzsumo, a viral content publisher says that the most shared posts are usually 3000 to 10000 words in length. So you need to get the length of the blog right.

A higher number of words provide greater opportunities for search engine optimization (SEO) that points towards a higher conversion rate. Remember that people have short span of attention so keeping your content somewhere near but above 3000 words is a good idea.

This will make the blog stand out because:

  • You can get a lot of evergreen content as these long posts help you earn backlinks and organic leads.
  • Longer posts usually point towards a lot of research so the reader will expect to find all that they need to know and they do not need to roam around reading different articles.
  • Longer posts also have staying power which ensures that the post can be repurposed
  • Longer posts that offer a research oriented approach will help your blog to be identified as an authority in your niche.

Understand the preferences of your audience

Quora is an amazing source to understand the preferences of the audience. Start by typing primary keywords of your blog article and see the questions and concerns that the audiences have about that topic. This gives an insight about what the audience wants to read.

As you write content that your audience will love to read you will find that they might be ready to invest their time in your blog. Start by providing your audience with what they exactly expect to read.

Use tools to generate content ideas

For a post to be successful you need to have great content ideas. For this you need to do some research of your own to find out the most viral topics doing the rounds. Various tools are available that will help you find great topics.

For example, Buzzsumo is a great tool that can provide you with the hot topics around which you can create your blog posts. Just search using your primary search engine keyword and you will find the top posts that have been shared the most.

Another example is Ubersuggest. It is an amazing and unique keyword suggestion tool that can generate ideas for your blog posts. Just type in your keyword and hit the “suggest” button and it will help you with a list of content ideas.

Generate topic ideas from useful comments

Make sure that you read the comments left by your readers. It will help you to gain a perspective about what topics they want to read about next, helping you to find the topic for your next post.

The comments that you take into consideration must be from people who know what they are talking about, so be careful. For this you can visit authority blogs. For example, Moz Blog is a well-known blog that has content marketers and seasoned entrepreneurs as commenters.

Upworthy is another example of a blog that creates viral posts. It has nearly 88 million visitors.

An additional benefit of getting involved in comment section is that it lets you directly connect with your audience. These connections can be easily used to create a community of loyal followers for your blog. Most readers are highly appreciative of the instances when a blogger replies to their comment or resolves a query.

Generate ideas from reviews

Content ideas can be taken from the reviews left by your readers. Do not have many readers? Blog is new? Do not worry then pick a few topics and read reviews of books or other articles that were written on those topics to get an idea about which ones have a good readership.

Case Study

Joanna Wiebe had used this approach while she worked on copy for a rehab centre.

Sensitivity of the topic made finding willing clients difficult.

This is when she took the help of Amazon and read up on the reviews of books based on similar topics. She noted down keywords and phrases and placed those under three categories:

  • Memorable phrases
  • What People Want
  • What People are Mad About/ In Pain Over

With this she created a landing page for the rehab centre with the headline: “If You Think You Need Rehab, You Do.” and tested it against the control headline “Your Addiction Ends Here.”

Click through increased by 400% and 20% more generation forms started to get filled.

Apart from the dos mentioned above, some don’ts also need to be followed. The mistakes that need to be avoided are:

  • Do not over-complicate the structure for your blog.
  • Never stuff the blog content with excessive wacky ideas, sometimes “less is more”
  • The blog is not personalized enough thus alienating the readers

Conclusion:

Most blogs fail to conjure up a substantial readership for the content that they feature. The simple reason is that they do not pay attention to what is needed to create an engaging blog. The above discussed points will surely help you out to create a blog that is not only fresh and easy to digest, but also an interesting read for a wide range of audience.

Share