Today, I’m going to talk about how to structure compelling blog content for your audience.
So let’s say you have a great piece of blog content, you’re ready to get it out there, and you want to make sure you get solid readership on your content. These are the few tips and tricks that you can use to get that engagement and get people looking at your content and get them staying on your page.
In this example, we’re using a list, this is a Franchise List: A Definitive Guide on 22 Great Franchise Opportunities in 2019.
So first thing you want to do is create a dope headline including active words and try to tastefully use a few keywords. One of our keywords is franchise list or great franchise opportunities. We also use a modifier with the year, by adding 2019, that makes it hyper-relevant, so people want to check it out and view it.
And remember to use a compelling headline, you can make it a little longer, around 10 to 12 words, but try and keep it cohesive and tight in regards to how you roll that out.
Next, you want to start with a nice lead in. So we always start with a nice bold, "Franchises are a great way to earn a steady income and still retain some of your independence." I feel like that’s a pretty solid intro, because these are people that are most likely entrepreneurs, or they’re looking for additional revenue streams.
So we’d like to catch them quickly as soon as they see that content.
Next thing you want to do is break up your content. I can’t tell you how many times I read a blog where it’s literally 15 sentences in one big paragraph. People don’t want to take that time to read that, they want to be able to digest this content quickly. So my biggest recommendation is make your paragraphs at max three sentences.
As you can see, you can easily read this content, with the bold and the italics, and also this content here, and the max is three sentences, right? We don’t go too long with that content.
Next up, use bullet points, bold, italics, and links. This helps you break up the structure and make it easy for people that are perusing your content. No one sits and reads an entire article unless they have the time. Now you want to make long form articles because it’s great for SEO, and you can rank that content really well.
But make sure you’re breaking up your content, add in bold link to other web pages, make sure you’re making it easy for people to digest.
So if someone comes here, and they want to invest in Chick-fil-A, they can quickly in a bird’s eye view be able to see that the cost to open a franchise is 5000 to $10000. Side note, it’s harder to get Chick-fil-A franchise than it is to get into Harvard, but that’s a story for another time.
So use bullet points, bold and italicize your content.
Also, make sure you use images. I can’t tell you how often I’ll see a long blog with one image and that’s it, the rest is text. Images are easy way to break up content and make it flow better, as you can see here, we have a ton of images that we’re using, we also provide credit and attribution to anyone that we’re using their images, and it also adds an offsite link as well.
You want to be able to leverage image content, because that way, the content is easy to break up and it’s easy to view. I can go straight down this list and I can go to number 16, there’s an image, and then there’s text. So it adds consistency to your blog content.
You can use websites like Unsplash, or thestocks.im. If you have access to my resources, they’re all in there also. You can find tons of images that you can use on these websites for free. So there’s no excuse not to have a ton of image content in your blog.
Lastly, make sure you edit, proof and test the SEO optimization side of the content. There’s a plugin–and I know most of you probably know about this, it’s called Yoast SEO. This is a free plugin that you can add to your WordPress website that will tell you information about that specific blog post.
I won’t go into details with that, most of you know about Yoast, but always run it through the test to make sure that it functions well.
Now once your content is live—I've done tons of blogs on sharing your content—four free resources that you can use to get your content out there fairly quickly are Quora, Facebook groups, social media and forums. I have a free download on my site Johndsaunders.co, and I’ll include the link below to get that free guide.
But otherwise, guys, just make sure that you’re making your content really easy to read for the user. Think of someone like yourself, who has a busy lifestyle, who’s doing a lot, that doesn’t have the time to sit down and read an article verbatim, and try to cultivate your content around that.
I hope that helps, and I wish you the best of luck, we’ll talk soon.
