Having a blog with great content ideas is one thing, but having a successful blog with great content ideas is entirely another.  Once you have that great idea creating a popular blog post is dependent on a number of factors and one of the most important initial factors is how you execute that content.  Follow these 8 tips to writing blog posts that will grab readers attention, engage with them and satisfy their needs:

1. Titles That Work

Headlines and titles set your content up by making a promise to the reader, your content then goes on to deliver on that promise. Headlines are also you’re first point of communication with potential readers, this is when they make the decision if they are going to read the rest of your content or not. On average only 2 out of 10 people go on to read the rest of the copy after reading the title, so you need to make it count.

There are dozens of researched formulas for headlines proven to work extremely well, some of my favourites are:

How to Posts - How to create….
Numbered List Posts – 21 reasons you should…, 10 ways to…., 8 tips for writing…
Who, What, Why, Posts – What we can learn from…, Why Guest Posts perform better than…,

Check out the following screenshot of recent popular post headlines from seomoz.org  one of my favourite SEO blogs.  4 out of 6 of their tiles follow one of the headline formulas above.

2. Content that helps people

I just mentioned that using a ‘How to…’ formula was great for post headlines, that’s because it immediately lets readers know that if they continue reading they are going to learn how to do something that they potentially didn’t know previously, that they will gain insights that will help them to achieve something and we all love getting free tips and advice.   So when you are coming up with blog post ideas think about what the consumer is going to get out of your post, write about subjects that help people, provide them with useful information and tasks they can action themselves.

3. Separate with Sub Headings

If you’re post is over 200 words use sub headings, they help to break content up so it doesn’t look so daunting to a new reader and it will allow skim readers and people short on time to skip to the content they find most appealing.

4. Include Imagery and Visuals

Including imagery is a very important part of a blog post, images break up heavy blocks of content and are visually stimulating to the eye, like sub-headings this will make a piece of content appear less daunting to readers and will encourage them to read on. Graphs, charts and infographics are also a very effective way of getting heavy data and information across in a easily consumable manner. Try and create your own visuals where you can and don’t be limited to just pictures:

• Pictures
• Photos
• Graphs
• Tables
• infographics
• Videos
• Slide shows

5. Create Conversations

Blogging is a big part of social media and social media is all about engagement and conversation.   Are you writing great blog posts but getting very little user interaction?  Are you getting alot of new visitors but very few of them returning?  Well by creating conversations with your readers you can really help to engage with them on a much deeper level and let them know that you understand them.  You can do all this by asking your readers questions.  You may have noticed that as you read through this post I have been asking questions about the points I have been making and then going on to answer those questions.

By using this method you’re already sparking up a conversation, which will start to build that relationship that you want with your readers. Hopefully you are asking the sort of questions that have brought users to your content in the first place, which also means that you should be answering those questions and giving your readers solutions, advice and tips that are going to leave them satisfied.  If you are doing this successfully then you’re opening yourself up to a whole host of benefits:

Building relationships will increase the chances of readers coming back and/or signing up to future methods of communication.

Instilling confidence in your readers which will increase your profile and brand awareness.

Sparking conversations that will encourage users to leave comments on your posts.

Increasing the chances of readers sharing your content.

6. Back up your points

Are you quoting facts and figures or making bold claims?  If so then you need to back up your information. If you are using figures you found on the web or in a book then link to that information or cite that text, if it is your own research then include screenshots of your findings.  Trust has to be earned and citing sources will help to add authority to your writing and authority to you as writer and in turn will dramatically increase the chances of your work being cited.

7 . Don’t be Scared to Link Out 

I was talking to a blogger the other day after reading one of her posts and I asked why she hadn’t linked out to a company that she mentioned and recommended in her post, her response was that she ‘didn’t want to risk diluting and even losing her Google page rank’.  That’s madness and also incorrect!  If everyone had the same attitude then nobody would like to anyone, page rank would cease to exist (more so than it does now) and search engines would struggle to find any new content to crawl and index because there would be no way for them to get there.

The internet is connected by links and by creating great content we hope that other websites will link to us as reference points & recommendations.  The same goes for your blog posts, linking to other websites will help to improve the quality of your post by offering users further reading, it will help you to reference and back up your points and claims (see tip 6) and it is also a very good way of getting yourself noticed and building relationships with influential people in your industry.  So don’t be afraid to share the link love.

8. Bold important points

Very simple this one, bold important information or parts of your content that stand out. If you have a particular fact or figure that you feel is very important then put it in bold. This will draw the attention of a reader and allow anyone skim reading the content to skip to important information.

Evolving your content from great blog posts to great popular blog posts will make the world of difference to your site.  Popular content will naturally be shared more often, it will acquire more social mentions, it will receive more user interactions and it will generate a whole lot more natural links, all of which are the difference between average blogs and super successful blogs.  Follow these tips and turn your great content ideas into successful and popular posts.