Once upon a time, there was a boy who thought he had a decent writing skill. He was actually doing good in writing his diary and letters. In fact he wrote the very first poem when he was in class 3. Then someday in later age he had started writing stories as well, but couldn’t complete yet.
Are you curious to read the rest of his story? But I am not going to write more on it now. I will write the remaining part at the bottom of this post. But right now I am going to share how you can make your content better and engaging.
1# Share Story
People love to hear stories. It inspires them, motivates them and entertains them. You and I are not exception either. In this post, when I started the story, it makes you curious to read further.
We need to apply this hack in blog posting, email campaign, and public speaking. It will improve the readability and engagements. Not only that, story helps in building relationship.
So we should share an informative / inspiring / timely story to help our readers learn with fun.
- But, how can you find story?
- What kind of story to share?
In web, it is not tough job to find productive stories. You can always find useful short stories to add to your blog post by simply doing Google search.
Here is what I did to find some short Inspirational stories.
And I found some cool short stories to share. Here are few of them.
What kind of story to share?
It depends on the nature of your blog post. Share the most relevant story with your topic so that people get the message easily. Remember, when we are writing for our audience, we are actually helping them either by solving any specific problem or entertaining them. So we need to help them in the best way we can.
2# Ask Questions
Check the screenshot, this is what I wrote in my last para.
What I did? I asked a question.Asking questions is another smart way to start a blog post. It always creates curiosity. When you ask a question, your readers ask the same question to themselves and they want to know your opinion or answer on that question. It influence them to read further.
Check the following screenshots from Social Media Examiner.
I took a quick look on their last four articles where three articles starts with questions. They follow the exact trick for more than 90% of their blog posts.
3# Use Screenshot
If a picture says 1000 words, a screenshot says million words. When we share any screenshot, our readers get more confident in our statements. They trust it and take more actions. That’s why you find screenshots in most sales page. Here are few free tools you can use to take screenshot easiest way.
Read Also: 15 Small Business Tools Saved My Big Buck
4# Create Custom Image
Find copyright free images in web, and use them in your post. It saves your time and makes your content good. Do you know that more than 2 million blog posts are written every day. So what makes your content different from them?
A custom image can make it unique. You can check my featured image for this post. It’s unique with my own picture. I am not good in photoshop, even I have no experience in Photoshop. But I found my own solution to create professional custom image. And it just costs me $13/Month (As I am using their pro version to create gif, collaborate with my team and use custom font)
Here are few tools you may use to build awesome images:
- Canva (Image Editing – My recommendation)
- Pic Moneky (Image Editing).
- Pixabay (Free Stock Image Download)
- Flickr (Free Stock Image Download)
- Pexels (Free Stock Image Download)
5# Include Others In Your Content
Even though I am writing on my own blog, but I talk about others as well. I talk about the resource others made, or their articles, video etc. This helps in building a strong relationship with them. I believe this is very smart approach and it helps my post to be more authentic and valuable.
If you check blog posts from Neil Patel you can see that he always shares informative posts others have made. We should do the same where possible.
6# Use Heading, Subheading and Bullet
Using heading, subheading and bullet helps our reader to scan our content. In our website, especially for evergreen content, we will have visitors with different skills and interest. They all will act differently on same thing. This is how human brain works. They all think and do little different than each other. So using heading, subheading and bullets will help them to better understand our content.
It Gives SEO Advantage as Well
If you think from SEO point of view, I would like to mention that heading tag is one of the most important SEO factors. So by using heading and subheading we can ensure better rank. But we need to know how to place keywords to create better content for both search engine and human being. Here is an article you will definitely love to read about keyword placement strategy for SEO advantage.
7# Share Stats
Check the following three sentences.
1) By working on these tips, you can get more traffic.
2) By working on these tips, you can double your traffic.
3) By working on these tips, I was able to increase 300% of my traffic and you can do the same.
All of these three sentences have almost same intent, but number three will have better feedback because it is specific. It is data driven. And it can make our content even better if we add some stats.
And you can easily find suitable stats by simply taking a Google search. Here is how you can search “keyword statistics 2017” or “keyword statistics”. By adding the year it can help us find recent stats. Check the following screenshots for better understanding.
There are lots of more small and big hacks by which we can make our content even better.
Okay let me finish the story that I have started at the beginning. The name of that boy is Nahid Hasan. Right now he is running few startups for both local and global market; writing blog posts to help other marketers and business owners so they can grow together.
