Sitting on a white chair with a steaming hot cup of tea by my side, my fingers carefully placed on the keyboard, I stare at the blank sheet. The cursor blinks as if patiently waiting for words to type themselves. My fingers tingle to signal my brain to be creative!
Do you experience a similar fight on how to start writing? Oh wait, are you also attempting to write a blog for the first time and contemplating if you can add value to these million voices online? If your answer is yes, read on. If your answer is no, I will still recommend you read on. This is going to be worth it!
"Blog writing is a conversation", a pro-tip I caught from an internal conversation and it changed how I think.
There is a history of everything, from music and art, to medicine and technology. History helps us understand present-day scenarios and being a graduate in the subject myself, tickles my cerebrum to understand the narrative of situations, by asking deeper questions of why things are the way they are. So now the question is: Why is blogging a conversation?
As remix is to music, blogging is to writing, and writing is a conversation. A successful conversation stems from 2 main pillars. First, expressing ourselves, and second, listening to others. We want to connect with our readers to start a conversation with blog writing.
The ubiquity of the internet has made it important to shift towards a customer-centric model. You are not afraid to share your experiences online, are you? Marketers need to prick up their ears to be attentive to what kind of content the audience is looking for. Engaging the target audience is also a constant conversation, and further building a one-to-one relationship that must be Timely, Aligned, and Personalized is a whole new level. Inbound Marketing is personified as a constant advisor to the target audience. So, how do they enable long-term growth? You are right, blog writing!
The cycle of Attract, Engage, Convert, and Delight becomes stepping-stones to help reach out to the right audience and achieve goals. Blogging is a critical part of the attract stage. It helps attract new visitors and convert them into leads as it is considered a reliable and trustworthy source of content. This, in turn, reflects in the increased traffic numbers on the site. Adding a blog to the website can increase your traffic by as much as 434%.
The rule with blogging is simple, "Attract the readers, keep them engaged through your content, and once the lead is created, delight by empowering them to see beyond their roadblocks." A blog post should be captivating. The average time readers spend reading a blog post is 37 seconds. Shocking, right? Additionally, 43% of readers skim through content rather than attentively reading it. One should make the value of the post clear.
Quick tips, anyone?
1. Break the Content
Imagine you’re in a hurry and you’ve swallowed a big bite of watermelon, all at once. Your throat will feel funny, won’t it? Best way is to break the content into digestible chunks with a combination of written content, images, embedded video, and audio to keep your readers engaged.
2. Pick the Genre
Does it happen to you, when you’re engrossed in a deep thought and a joke pops in your head? Can you remember the last time you had a hearty laugh?
They say, “Laugh when you can, it is cheaper than medicine.” Having said so, one should thoroughly know the audience they are writing for. Let’s pick a genre, like humor. Humor in blogging is about engaging the reader, enhancing the brand, and subtly managing its art. Humor also leads us to a vital element - 'empathy’.
3. Be Empathetic
The blog needs to be empathetic to personalize the reader's experience. It helps connect at a human level and build long-lasting relationships. Blogs are widely used as a sales tool to provide ‘the right information, at the right time, with the right channels.’ According to HubSpot, businesses that use blogs as part of their content marketing strategies get approximately 67% more leads than agencies.
4. Build Trust
Be honest, do you not count the cash right after you make a withdrawal from the ATM? I do it every time! Trust works at different levels and knowing the ‘Buyer Persona’ and solving their pain points in the blogs helps build trust between the reader and the company. The proportionality between the trust factor and the probability of s/he becoming a customer for the company is direct. Adding internal and external links increases credibility.
5. Contextualize and Segment
The blog post should be appropriately contextualized and segmented. Keyword research is essential, however ‘listening’ to what your audience searches for is of prime importance. Inbound is customer-centric, hence, it becomes highly critical that "Attract, Engage, Convert, and Delight" work in a cycle.
Creating remarkably tailored content with appropriate context should be the primary focus of your Inbound Marketing strategy along with empowering customer potentials. Blogs, thus help to achieve the impossible. It is undeniably a great tool to create the website traffic, generate leads, help grow your link audience and provide the company with newer prospects. When aligned with business goals and analytics, you may reach the right people with the right search intent by writing Blogs.
In the end, the only way you can bring words to paper is when you start writing!
