Better Blogging
Today, pretty much all the influencers have a blog. Having a website and a blog today is pretty standard in our industry and in most businesses now. So, all my self-publishing indie authors, if you don’t have a blog yet, go get one and attach it to your website. And if you do have a blog, let’s figure out a way to make it better. Come on, all my authorpreneurs, let’s figure this out so we can do better blogging.
One of the ways to do better blogging is to come up with better titles for our blogs. We want to have catchy headlines or titles for our blogs. This is what catches people’s attention and causes them to pause for a moment. Headlines that do that have done their job. With that said, we now need to figure out how to create headlines that cause people to stop and look for our own blogs.
So, where do we find these catchy headlines? Well, we can kind of see them all over the place. After all, we are in the information age. So written content surrounds us now. And where there is written content or any kind of content, there are great headlines and titles too.
As we go through our day, any time a headline catches our attention, we need to notice it. Now I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but humor me for a second here. While yes, it’s true those catchy titles or headlines make us notice them, we often don’t fully see them. For the most part, they catch our attention, then we just move on. We don’t stop and wonder what it was about that particular title that caught our attention.
We need to honestly notice great headlines and titles. We need to be conscious of them and reflect upon what makes them so great. Then we also need to save them. Copy them down in a notepad. Or, if we’re on our computer, then we can just simply copy and paste them into some file. This could be the beginning of our swipe file. Or, if we really wanted to be cutting edge, we could copy and paste these great titles into our WordPress software program. There we could save all these great headlines as drafts for future blogs of our own making.
We want to also try to personalize our blogs. People want to know that we’re real people with real emotions and challenges just like them. Sprinkle some of your emotional human stories throughout your blogs. And also create an emotionally riveting About Me Page and a Mission Statement or Vision.
People love this sort of thing. And again, they want to know that you’re human, personable, and relatable. They also want to personally experience your journey and story because that’s how people connect. And something you’re personally going through may help them too.
Speaking of helping… images help a lot, too. We are visual creatures, especially us men. So, use a lot of pictures.
Now, I know we’ve all heard the old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words, right? Well, guess what? There is also tons of research out there that shows that social media posts and blogs get clicked on way more when they have images. So be sure to use a bunch of pictures with your blog, okay?
Okay, listen, we are all passive by nature. We sit back and read something and feel good about it. And our attention moves on to something else. Hey, we enjoyed the blog, but we didn’t realize that maybe we were supposed to do something else, too, besides just enjoying it. It’s not personal when people don’t take any action beyond reading your blog. It’s just how it is. That’s human nature.
So, what do we do about this human nature of just sitting back? Well, we have a call of action, of course! At the end of our blog article, we need to ask them to do something. Maybe we ask them to click on a link to be on our email list. Perhaps we ask them to share our blog. Perhaps we even ask them to click on a link and buy our book or service that is related to the blog. It’s endless what our ‘asks’ could be…
The important thing here is that we have to ask people to do something because they won’t know to do it on their own without any direction.
Also, get the social media share buttons up on your blog. If you tell them to share it, and the buttons are right there, some of them will share it. And hopefully, this could create a chain reaction. Maybe, the blog, with some help from others, might even go viral.
The beautiful thing about this authorpreneurship business world is that we get a lot of do-overs. As we learn and become more and more competent, we can go back and fix things. As we grow and learn new things, we can go back to old blogs and change them or make them better. We can edit the titles to make them catchier. We can add more emotion to our writing and make it more interactive. We can add better pictures or more pictures. And then once we improved upon that old blog, we can throw it back out into the world in a fresh new way. Pretty cool, huh?
Hey, we are all going to be great bloggers before we know it, right?
*Check out the free video lesson on this chapter!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFLepukWbhg&list=PL_-39bUXJitwL8cHUpiZ5mO0-JJuaPOVl&index=61