How to Engage Your Reader

With an audience overwhelmed by a sea of content that floods their social media feeds, inboxes, and Google searches, your content must be digestible and engaging if you want more than just a skim!

Creating a blog for your website can be a valuable tool for growing your business! Although it is an amazing way to drive traffic to your website, a good blog post can do more than just increase SEO. Your blog section should come to life with the voice of your brand, creating credibility and engaging your audience! 

So, how does one create engaging content? The kind that gets your audience to trust your brand! We’ve created the ultimate guide to content writing with tips to engage your reader! 

What Is Engaging Content? 

Engaging content changes your reader in some way. By change, we mean connecting to your audience, changing their feeling towards your brand from indifferent to emotionally connected. Creating an engaging piece of content will be different for every company but there are general rules to abide by to create a successful blog post! 

1. Write An Attention-Grabbing Headline

You need to pull your audience in from the get-go! You want a title worth clicking on! A powerful headline will capture the reader’s interest, but you want your headline to do a couple of other things too. It should use keywords, encourage sharing, and start a conversation! 

Don’t go with the first headline you come up with! You want to take time on your headline because it is so important in bringing in readers. Make sure your headline clearly encompasses what your will be covering in your article in a compelling wa

Once you decide on an enticing headline, match it with a hook to open up the article. The hook is the very first line or opening of the blog post. Your opening should ask an important question, generate curiosity, or throw your reader into a situation. The power of a headline and hook will make your reader interested to read the rest of your post! 

2. Be Personal

You want to connect with your reader on a personal level. Stay away from generalizing, instead start a conversation. Your audience should feel like you are talking directly to them! Here are some dos and don’ts for connecting to your reader:

• Don’t: Generalize. ex. “Many people feel refreshed after a yoga session.”

Talking about how the entire universe makes it hard for your reader to feel engaged. The reader should feel apart of the world you are talking about. 

• Do: Use the second person, ex. “Remember how refreshed you feel after a yoga class.”

 Using the second person calls out your reader directly!

• Do: Ask Questions, “What does yoga actually do to your body?” or “How do you feel after yoga?”

All the best professors create a discussion with their students to create a dialogue. You want your article to feel more like a discussion rather than a textbook. Make your reader feel like apart of the conversation, leading them to feel more a part of your community! 

• Do: Understand your target audience.

Know who you are trying to reach and speak to them. If your customers are women age 25-30, create content that speaks to their needs. Content written for 25-year-old women will look a lot different than content written for 50-year-old men! 

3. Research, Research, Research

A blog post should give value to your audience, whether it is informative or educational! You want to find up to date and relevant information. Your sources and links should be credible! This can take some digging, but taking time to fully research will allow your post to become trustworthy.

Your goal is to be an expert in the topic you are writing about, delivering the content in an understandable fashion. Help your blog come to life with interesting statistics and data to give your reader something to take away and think about! 

4. Break Up Your Blog

Making your blog more digestible to a reader can be as easy as switching up the formatting. Using headings and subheadings creates an outline for your entire blog post! The most shareable and successful blog posts are usually more the 1000 words as this allows the writer to go in-depth on a topic. Breaking up your post into small sections and subsections makes reading the whole post much less intimidating. 

You can also break up your blog by making it into a list (like this post.) Lists are very engaging but should only be used when necessary. Lists are easy to skim, providing immediate information in easy to read bullet points.

5. Use Visual Aids

No one wants to read a blog post with just text. A successful blog post will have a variety of pictures scattered throughout the post. A visual will clarify your copy, supporting your blog post by further explaining your content. 

When choosing images to place throughout your blog post, try to use photos your company has taken or carefully selected stock images. You want images to be authentic and serve a purpose.  

Take it to the next level by adding an infographic! Infographics are a powerful tool that can explain an idea much better than text alone. A recent study found that after three days, a user retained only 10-20% of written information, but almost 65% of visual information! Infographics are an excellent way to create original content that sets your blog post apart from the rest. 

6. Revise, then Revise Again

This is a must for copywriters, freelance writers, and authors. Quality content won’t be possible on your first draft. Read your work for grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors. Then read it again. Then have someone else read it! Having another person edit your work will ensure your writing is conveying ideas clearly! 

Create Better Content

Connecting to your audience is invaluable! Your blog is a space to engage your existing customers and attract new ones too. Using even a couple of these blogging tips will improve your content, allowing your audience to feel excited about your company. Whether you just started a blog or consider yourself a seasoned content writer, there is always room to expand your creativity! Exploring different modes of storytelling can be fun, authentically showing passion for your product or service! 

At electrIQ, we combine our SEO research with your brand's tone and messaging to create on-brand content that captures organic search traffic! We write content that your target audience is interested in, but we combine our SEO research to optimize for search so it can reach past your current customers! Let’s grow together - schedule a free consultation and meet our electrIQ team!