Crafting a blog post is almost same as creating a sculpture. This process involves mixing of ingredients in the right way to convey your message in the most effective manner to your readers. Here are 8 best tips for creating sticky blog posts that can keep the readers glued to your post until they finish reading it.
Eye Catching Title
The very first thing that grabs the attention of the reader is post title. It's an entry point to your post page. The post title should be luring enough to entice the visitor to click and reach the original post page. Follow the KISS ("Keep it simple, stupid") principle while crafting post titles. "Simple and straight to the point" titles works best in pulling the readers.
Appealing Post Beginning and Post End
The opening paragraph is the second most important part of the blog post. Sometimes we create a killer post title but fail to compensate it with equally great opening, resulting in bounce back. Your reader's anticipation and imagination must be fulfilled after he lands on your post following the attractive post title. There are various approaches to open a post and you can use choose the best approach depending on the need and situation. Following are some of the ways you can use to open blog posts.
1. Ask a question
2. Use metaphor or an analogy
3. Start with eye-popping statistics
4. Say something controversial
Similarly; closing paragraph is the third most vital part of any blog entry. There can be two approaches to it. Either you can provide complete solution and information on the subject, or you can leave some questions for the readers to trigger the comment trail. The latter option is often used by large number of bloggers to get more comments.
Use Power of Lists
Collection of resources in the form of bulleted lists is one of the best methods to make post more attractive and sticky for readers. Visitors love bullet lists that give quick and easy access to tons of information. If there is scope, do not hesitate to create a list to increase the stickiness of blog post.
Use Power of Illustrations
Picture speaks a thousand words. Spice up the blog post with relevant images to make the reading experience more interesting and fulfilling for the visitor. Use of images can make even a dull post look attractive to the reader.
Weed Out Useless Jargon
Sometimes, newbies use filler content to pack empty places in the post. Nowadays there is tons of similar content on web and visitors tend to skip posts containing useless stuff. Trim and weed out all junk information and condense the post into meaty useful information pack. That's what the reader is looking for. Clear and crisp, to the point and easily understandable information.
Stress More On Quality NOT Quantity
Creating a very long post should be avoided in most cases. With the emergence of social media sites, a large chunk of blog traffic comes through these sites. Studies have shown that the traffic from these sites have comparatively higher bounce rate then that coming through organic sources, and retaining the visitors coming from these sites is a challenging task. Readers are looking for quick answers to their questions. They have no time to read a mini-novel for a small problem. Try to keep the posts short (300-500 words) and simple. Avoid narrating a story and elaborate the problem in minimum words.
Spelling and Punctuation
Now this point is quite obvious. A blog post free of any grammatical and punctuation error is the key to better reader experience. As soon as you finish the post, don't be in a hurry to press the publish button. Devote some time in proofreading, editing and correcting all the mistakes. Once you are satisfied, publish it on a test blog. Now open the post as a visitor and read it carefully. This way you can pick up many more shortcomings and errors that you may have missed earlier. Repeat this process until you are not completely satisfied.
Minimum Ads
Aggressively stuffing ads in and around post body is a sure shot way to repel the visitors. Place the ads carefully and if possible keep the content part completely free of any ads. Avoid embedding graphical ads in the main content. Blended text ads at the end of post body are a good choice.
Have Your Say!
What other methods you use to make blog posts sticky? According to you what is the best way to make the post more luring to the reader?
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