Content marketing is a great way for your business to genuinely engage with your target audience. It helps you build that all-important relationship with your brand by giving something that all consumers want… Something for nothing!

At the heart of every strong content marketing strategy, there’s a great blog. Your blog can be a terrific platform for your business by building trust and faith in your brand and you as the owner of the business. A blog can showcase your knowledge, insight and experience and not only demonstrates your mastery of your chosen field but also gives your followers access to something your competition can never have… You!

But writing a great blog post, the kind that makes readers want to not only read more posts but learn more about your brand, isn’t always easy. Here are some tips on writing great blog posts that will help you to organically expand your business’ following.

Make it about them

While your blog is a great showcase for your insights, it is not a platform for you to brag on. If post after post is centered around how amazing you are, readers will inevitably switch off. So take the focus off yourself and make it all about them.

Your content should address common pain points amongst your target audience. The content you post should help them to solve a problem they encounter regularly or should be geared towards making their lives easier and / or more enjoyable.

Use subheadings

No matter how witty, insightful, well researched or outright hilarious your blog post is, there’s no getting around the fact that readers are put off by long slabs of text. And if they bounce away from your post after a few seconds, that sends the wrong signals to search engine crawlers.

Thus, you should use subheadings effectively to break up the text and make your posts more “skimmable”. This encourages both scroll depth and time on page which are both factors which search engines value.

Think hard about your keywords

Speaking of search engines, keywords are integral in making your content visible to those who most want to see it. Using the right keywords and combinations of keywords can help those who need to hear what you have to say find your content.

But you’ll also need to carry out keyword research to see who else’s blog posts you’ll be competing with for the audience’s attention. Not only do keywords help users find your pages from outside, they also make it easier for existing readers to find the pages they want within your blog. Which brings us to internal links.

Use internal links

The longer you can get users to stay on your blog the better. This means making it easier for them to move around your website and find other blog posts that may be of interest to them. Thus, you should be sure to use internal links. Use keywords and phrases within your blog as anchor text to redirect them to posts on certain topics.

Not only will this help users find content of value to them, it will also help your SEO!

Make it enjoyable to read

Finally, even if your content is richly informative, it doesn’t hurt to make your posts fun to read. After all, nobody wants to read a passage from a text book on their coffee break. If your content has a relaxed and conversational tone, your blog will be easier to engage with. What’s more, readers will be more likely to share your posts if they’ve enjoyed them as well as learning from them.

Dana Flannery is the Digital Strategist at TAC Digital, a Digital Marketing Agency in Brisbane dedicated to helping businesses increase website traffic and conversions.