Semi-Pro Blogger

The first and foremost goal of any blog should be to entice visitors into reading your content.  With the introduction of RSS feeds, faster internet speeds, and an abundance of blogs on any topic you can imagine, visitors are spending less time actually reading what you write and are skimming it for points that catch their attention.  If you are able to catch their attention within a few seconds, if your lucky they will read the rest of your post.  When writing a post you should keep these things in mind, and present your ideas in a concise and to the point manner. With that being said:

How do you get your visitor’s attention?

The first tactic is writing in short 2-3 sentence paragraphs that are broken up by Bold section headings.  The bold section headings allow your visitors to easily scan through the content and pick out the sections of your post that they are most interested in.  From there they can decide whether or not they want to dive deeper into your content.

Another item that I try to include in almost any post is the use of an image right at the beginning.  Selecting an interesting image is much more likely to get your visitors attention rather than pages of content.

Hit your visitors with bullets

No, you don’t want to shoot your visitors.  What I mean by hitting your visitors with bullets is to use bulleted lists to convey your ideas.  Bulleted lists:

• Allow short and to the point ideas that are easy to read through quickly
• Draw your visitors eyes to specific content that is important
• Increase the likelihood that visitors will read more of your post’s content

Write your content, then your post’s title

Often, when I write the title to a post before actually writing the content, I find that my title doesn’t portray the full ideas presented in the post.  Writing the post first allows you to get all of your ideas down and makes it much easier to come up with a great title.

In addition to writing a title that portrays the full idea of your post, you want your title to by eye catching and making the visitor want more.  Sometimes writing a controversial title or going against the grain of what everyone else is saying about a topic can be the best way to really get someone’s attention.  However, you want to be careful that if you disagree with what everyone is saying that you are able to back up your opinions

Leave it open ended

In addition to getting your ideas across to your visitors, you always want to encourage them to leave their thoughts and/or opinions.  The best and most successful blog posts I’ve written always go back to the user generated content in the comments.  The opinions of a group always bring out the best in any topic far better than the thoughts of any individual.  An easy way to encourage user interaction is to close your post with a question such as….

What else do you do when trying to write the perfect blog post?