People love to read awesome content and would definitely stick around for more. That’s why understanding how to produce high quality content is a HUGE factor in your blogging success. It’s like the old saying goes, “Content is King.” In this article, I will teach you the most important factors that you need to focus on to keep your readers hooked in your content.
Prepare The Best Topics
Everything starts with a well-planned topic, one you think that will have tremendous value to your audience and to you as well. Don’t just go out on the battlefield and write aimlessly with no real objective for it’s a recipe for failure. Generate hundreds of ideas first to allow for some ample space in your mind to go around.
After creating lots of potential ideas, you must pass them through a quality test and try to pick the best ones for blogging. Remember, you can always create a fresh batch of raw topic ideas if you truly believe in abundance. So don’t worry about discarding some ideas and fear that you might run out of it.
If I were to do the sorting, then for every 5 topic ideas, I will pick one with awesome potential. It will really depend on your ability to do the research on the topic and the amount of information you can actually acquire on the subject. But if you already have a topic (which I guess is the reason why you’re here), then let’s move on.
Factors That Will Make Your Content a “King”
I’m now going to show you how to give your content an extra boost in quality. Take them into account the next time you open your WordPress Editor or Google Docs program and check if you are following these guidelines.
- A Great Headline & Introduction
The very first thing a reader will see is your title and your introduction, so make sure to do your best to get them hooked. Use powerful words in your title and get them to pay attention to you through your introductory paragraphs.
Do you know that it only takes a couple of seconds before people leave your website? That’s because we’re in the Information Age and there are lots of distractions around us. Knowing this principle will make you think twice about your first impression to your readers.
- Formatting
This means editing your blog post to make it look organized and readable. Add headings and subheadings, bold, italic and underline texts to emphasize on the things that matter. Keep paragraphs short and add more white space to your content. And also, create internal/external links to get people to learn more through other references.
One reason you would want to do this is because search engines crawl in your content and one thing that it pays attention to is formatting. Another reason is simply to make your blog more readable in the eyes of your audience.
- Adding Media
Learning tools such as images, audios and videos will surely make your site cooler than those that display bland text all throughout. At minimum, I recommend putting at least one image and placing it above-the-fold (through the Intro).
The only drawback I think in trying this approach is that it takes a lot of effort and time to put up great images, nice audios and informative videos. I’ve tried it myself in this article and I could tell you that it can be exhausting at times. But if you want to have a slight edge over other blogs, then why not give a try?
- Relevance
Make sure you address your content to your readers because they’re the most important thing to take into account. Is your content relevant to the audience you’re trying to draw in? To find out, check your blog post’s title. Do you think it fits well with your niche? Because if not, then you might be bringing the wrong people to your blog.
Also, make sure that you’re creating evergreen content, which means having content that will stick for a long time. If you still don’t understand this factor, then just remember to keep your focus on your people.
- Providing Answers
People read articles mainly because they’re trying to solve their problems. Knowing this, you must therefore provide them a great answer. If you’ve done your research well, then helping people won’t be hard at all.
Do whatever it takes to find the best answers and make sure to elaborate on the solution. People will definitely love your website and will perceive you as someone of great value to them when you manage to solve their problems.
- Examples & Proofs
If it‘s possible to reach for a lot of resources such as personal stories, scientific research, social proof or testimonials, then that would be a huge plus to your content’s quality. Just find any resource that seems to be relevant for your blog post and try to link to them whenever possible.
These things are strong indicators of credibility and it can help persuade your people to believe in what you’re trying to deliver. Content that really make good use of this factor are product reviews because people want to make sure they get their money’s worth, and they do it by looking at these indicators.
- User Experience
Of course besides articles, your overall website will play a very important role in providing great content. Even if you invest weeks in creating one awesome blog post, it won’t matter if your website looks awful.
Consider the following – pop-ups, sidebar content, proper formatting, page speed, navigation menu and other website stuff. See if they create some distractions in your website especially to your readers.
- Proper Length of Content
Content length is actually up to you. If you think a topic can be explained in under 1,000 words, then much better to be concise and explain direct to the point. But if you’re the type of person who is very knowledgeable and loves having depth, then aim to write 1,500+ words.
I think the point here is to give everything you’ve got, no matter what your blog is all about. Don’t consciously target a magic number for article length. If you think you’ve covered enough for your blog post, then stop writing. Plain simple.
- Call-to-Action
After people read your content, then never ever forget to include actionable steps to do afterwards. Examples of CTA’s you can add include leaving comments, following you on social media, sharing your content, subscribing to your email list, and your favorite, asking people to buy from you!
Obviously, not everyone will follow your call-to-action. So to further understand what’s really happening, you should find out ways to track your CTA conversions. In this way, you’ll better understand what to improve in your content and make it better as a result.
- Uniqueness
My number one tip for you no matter what you do in life is: Just Be Yourself. Stop wasting time trying to pretend like others and simply use your unique style of delivering content. Sure, there’s a way you can become awesome in blogging. You just have to keep finding it and never stop until you have your style.
Just imagine that you’re having a casual conversation with your bestfriend and don’t feel the pressure while doing so. The wonderful thing about blogging is that it isn’t formal writing, where you are forced to follow writing rules and nothing else. With that, I want you to just write naturally and keep it plain simple, my friend.
Practice is “Key”
In order to make these factors work for you, there is only one thing that I recommend to help you improve: Practice. Keep writing content, learning about your niche and finding more tips on how to improve your content. The reason is plain simple: Actions speak louder than words (and thoughts).
To give you a clue on what to practice in creating high quality content, I recommend that you start off with research. Acquisition of knowledge is a great way to spark great ideas for your content. It also allows you to write faster because your mind will be better able to respond when it’s stimulated.
Another thing, publish posts regularly. At first, it really won’t matter if your content sucks. Surely, every beginner starts as little, squishy critters (if you know what I mean). The way to toughen up is by showing up in your writing sessions even if you don’t feel like writing and think that your content looks awful. Eventually, you’ll improve with every blog post you’ve made.
Want More Tips and Guidance?
If so, then what you need is someone to mentor you on the basics of writing content. I’m not saying that I’m the expert. But definitely, there are millions of people who write way better than me and are seeing tremendous success online.
When I first started, I knew from within that I can’t do it alone. After all, I needed feedback from great people to see if I’m really on the right track to publishing great content. So before I started my blog, I diligently looked for a community full of these “experts” who will definitely take care of me and lead me to success.
One day, I came across Wealthy Affiliate, a place that provides online courses, a website platform, a library of awesome webinars, and most importantly, a community that really cares!
I’m really proud to be a part of this program because for the first time in my life, I had lots of online mentors guiding me. Kyle is the founder of this platform, and I actually get to talk to him at least once a month. He always gives great advice especially in creating high quality content.
But if you’re not interested in an online membership, then you might want to check out my other related blog posts:
- Generating Blog Topics using Google Search
- Finding Blog Ideas by Narrowing Down Topics
- How to Decide What to Blog About from Your List of Topics
- How to Make Money Blogging for Beginners
Well, that’s it for my article on how to create content that rocks. I hope you’ve learned some tips from it and make sure to practice, practice and practice. Did you find my content useful? Kindly let me know by sharing your thoughts in the comments below. Thanks for reading!
Riaz Shah says
January 23, 2017 at 2:13 pmHey Dominic,
I love your content-writing style and it suits the topic too. I believe the length is first and foremost the most important part for me to check for before finishing my write-ups because if its too low, than Google won’t see it.
Out of curiosity, would it be better if I write longer articles like up to 5k to 10k words? I saw blogs like Moz and Blog Beast writing super long articles and it looks super cool and I’ve always wanted to challenge myself into writing that much too.
Dominic says
January 23, 2017 at 2:41 pmSure. You can take the challenge of writing humongous blog posts that will give tremendous value to people. Just remember though, with great content comes great preparation. So you must be willing to do all the work and research in order to succeed in such endeavor. Good Luck!