Creating a blog is one of the best ways to position yourself as an influencer. A blog will allow you to promote yourself and demonstrate your expertise, thereby creating a large and engaged audience. The challenge? Standing out among the crowd and getting noticed. In other words, creating content that is not just good, but GREAT. Here are four tips to help you do that.
Have a Narrative Structure
There is a saying in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) circles that said “storytelling is SEO for the human brain.” What that means is that the human brain is actually optimized to hear stories, and this is true in a far more literal sense than you might expect. That’s because we evolved telling stories around campfires, and in a time before the internet or movies, this was how we understood things and passed on knowledge. Stories create emotional stakes, they help us to feel as though we “know” the writer, and they build suspense to keep us hooked.
Have Your Audience in Mind
If you were developing a product as a business, then you would first make a point of carrying out market research to make sure that there were people out there willing to pay for a product like yours. Think of your articles then as products, and make sure you’ve thought about who will actually be reading your article. Of course the larger your audience, and the more connected that demographic, the better chance of spreading your article will have.
Write Articles That Are Easy to Skim
People have short attention spans and in the world of social media this is exacerbated – when we check Facebook it’s normally a distraction so we don’t have time to sit down and read pages and pages of text. Make sure then that your articles are easy to skim through and that you use headers and bullet points so that people can quickly glance over your pieces and get drawn in.
Know Your Topic Inside Out
The worst thing you can do is to hire a writer to write your content that doesn’t know about the topic. Even if they’re the best writer in the world, if they aren’t passionate about the niche/subject matter, then they won’t have anything new to say or to bring to the discussion. The result will be content that is bland, vanilla, and safe.
Know your topic inside out and only that way can you create and share NEW ideas.
THAT is how you become a thought LEADER.
