It doesn’t matter how good your marketing strategy is. If you don’t have exceptional copy, you’ll never convert traffic into revenue at a large enough scale to create a successful business. Exceptional copywriting is integral to blogging success. And until you perfect this skill, your results will lag behind the competition.
5 Copywriting Tips for Blogs
Marketing trends and hot hacks come and go, but the principles of good copywriting hold true year after year. Here are some useful tips you can apply to your current blog copy strategy to get a larger number of clicks, higher engagement, and more conversions.
1. Quality Always Supersedes Quantity
We live in a society where more is typically associated with better. People think if they can accumulate more, do more, say more, watch more, sleep more, eat more, or work more, etc., that they’ll get better results. This idea has permeated (and even dominated) the world of marketing and copywriting. People have this idea that the more content you can create, the better your results will be. But do you want to know the truth? Quality always supersedes quantity in this realm.
You’re much better off producing one piece of highly-optimized, useful, and unique content every month than a dozen shallow, thin pieces that don’t add any value to your reader. Stop focusing on how much content you produce and figure out how you can make your content more engaging and helpful to the audience. That’s where real success comes from.
When you have quality content, it’s easier to build links. It’s also easier to gain traction on social media. All of the heavy-lifting that once wore you out becomes a cakewalk.
2. Good Headlines are Everything
Whether someone sees a post on social media, a search result on Google, or they’re browsing your blog’s homepage, there’s one thing that makes people click (or not click) above all else. It’s the headline.
Most bloggers write a piece of copy and then slap on a headline at the end. But in reality, your headline should be one of the biggest points of emphasis.
The only goal of your headline is to get people to click. You can use any number of tools to do this, but curiosity, urgency, and specificity are great places to begin. Reach out and touch people’s emotions – fear, empathy, excitement, etc. – and they’ll click in droves.
3. Create a Slippery Slope
If the goal of the headline is to get people to click your article, the objective of the first sentence is to get people to read the second sentence. Likewise, the goal of the second sentence is to persuade people to read the third sentence. If you can get people to keep reading the first five to seven sentences of your copy, they’re much more likely to stick around.
In copywriting, the lead of a blog post can be likened to a slippery slope. You want it to be so slick that people can’t help but slide down to the bottom (i.e. the end of the article).
4. Make it Digestible
Long-form copy is in right now. Google loves it and readers love it. But the biggest challenge of creating monster 2,000- to 5,000-word posts is that it’s easy to lose a reader in the middle. They see a bunch of words and become intimidated. Then they bounce before ever making it through to the call-to-action.
The biggest key to writing long-form copy in today’s environment is to make it digestible and easy on the eyes. You can do this by using any number of mechanisms, including bullet points, numbered lists, graphics, charts, video, subheadings, bolded words, italics, etc.
5. Always Give a Next Step
Getting someone to actually click on a link and visit your blog post is a massive undertaking. Getting them to read the entire post – or at least skim down to the bottom – is another huge win. Unfortunately, many bloggers let this opportunity go to waste by failing to include a next step.
Every blog post – whether it’s purely informational or there’s an upsell – should have a clear next step that the reader can take to continue moving through your funnel and/or website. Whether it’s recommendations for related posts, a lead magnet with an opt-in form, or a link to a sales page, you must capitalize. You don’t need a hard sell every time, but there should be a little direction.
Putting it All Together
Copywriting isn’t rocket science. Yet if you study a bunch of blogs, you’ll find that 95 percent of the copy is just plain bad. This doesn’t mean the blogger is a terrible writer. It does, however, indicate a lack of understanding of what high-conversion copy looks like. Hopefully, this article gives you some ideas to leverage as you seek to improve your own copywriting skills.
