There’s no shortcut to success. Building a profitable blog demands that you put out plenty of unique and useful content for your audience.
Are you ready to see more traffic headed to your website?
Keeping readers engaged with your content ensures they’ll keep coming back for more. While there are infinite ways to accomplish this, several article types have been proven to draw in more visitors.
It’s easier to bring new eyes to your website if you’re offering something that other sites haven’t covered yet.
For example, many companies will create infographics or videos to appeal to a broader audience. Others might opt for an expert roundup post—pairing together several familiar voices to spark discussions and establish themselves as an authority on the topic at hand.
The possibilities are endless, and every business has the potential to stand out by focusing on one or more of these post formats.
Here are the top three most effective article types that will boost your website traffic.
How-to-Guides
How-to posts are a great way of establishing authority in your industry. With instructional posts, you show your readers the keys they need to solve their pain points, or suggest one of your products.
A good example of a how-to post is How to Always Be Punctual for Your Online Work Tasks. This post offers online writers practical steps to ensure they finish their tasks before set deadlines.
Expert Tip: With how-to guides, the secret is to ensure they closely relate to what your prospective customer finds useful.
Most how-to guides follow a simple model:
- They introduce the problem
- They introduce the solution
- They discuss steps involved in the solution
- They summarise the discussion
- They provide a conclusion
Other examples of how-to posts are:
- How to Get Well-Paying Transcription Jobs
- How to Get Reliable Online Jobs and Escape Unemployment
- How to Get Amazon Work-From-Home Customer Service Jobs
- How to Nail Your Copywriting Job Video Interview
A thorough explanation is essential in enhancing your how-to guide. Make use of videos, diagrams, and pictures to make your post better than the competition’s.
To write outstanding how-to guides, you need to keep the following tips in mind:
- Write concise phrases
- Structure your steps in a logical order that will be understood by the user
- Use plain English, which your clients can easily understand
- Break your content into subheadings
- From your writing, the user should clearly see where they are required to take action.
Use Value-Packed List Posts
List posts start with a number. For some time now, list posts have been proven to be the golden goose for content marketers.
Numbered ideas have always been popular, from the ancient Ten Commandments to modern lists. It’s one type of content you can’t go wrong with.
So, why are list posts so popular?
There are four primary reasons:
- They are most shareable and value-packed
- They are very clear in communicating to people what to expect (for example, 3 Tips to Successfully Get a Transcription Job on TranscribeMe)
- They inform readers how long they’ll need to commit
- They have the simplest structure and are easy to scan and read
An example of a successful list post is 5 Best Non-Phone Work-From-Home Jobs in 2020 by CopySmiths.
Some famous magazines have also adopted the use of list posts, as shown below.
Writing a list follows a simple format that includes introducing the topic, listing your points and providing a solution.
You need, however, to keep the following in mind:
- A more detailed list is better
- Long lists are also good
- The perfect list has no magic numbers. Both odd, round and even numbers work equally well.
You’ll most likely want to sharpen your skills in writing list posts. This article on how to write list-based blog posts will be of great help.
Include Interviews With Important Figures
Almost every field has its leaders. Interviewing these leaders helps you to garner huge amounts of traffic and respect from others in the field.
Most leaders, regardless of the field, enjoy a huge following. As such, their audience is likely to click through to follow the interview.
In most cases, you’ll be reaching a crowd of new people, including the guest’s fan base on social media platforms such as:
- Google Plus
Interviews offer your followers an opportunity to acquire new information, especially when it’s coming from the horse’s mouth. Be sure to pick an important and knowledgeable figure in the industry to feature in a full-length interview.
Your interview can either be in the form of:
- A video interview
- A list of questions for the interviewee to answer
- A live podcast
How do you create awesome interviews for your blog? Here are 10 quick tips.
Tip 1: Schedule and Conduct Live Interviews
Live interviews offer you an opportunity to ask tailored follow-up questions for the interviewee to delve deeper into the subject.
Tip 2: Design Smart Questions
Your interview will only be as good as the questions you ask. Smart questions drive the interviewee to give their best advice. On the flipside, boring questions attract boring answers.
Tip 3: Begin With a Small Talk
Make your interviewee feel comfortable by talking about where they come from, the weather or their family.
Tip 4: Ensure the Interviewee Knows Your Audience
An interview should provide your audience with the best and most relevant information. Tell your interviewee about your audience, their age, personality types and interests.
Tip 5: Set Expectations
Give the interviewee a roadmap for the interview in advance. Give them the questions you intend to ask and inform them how long the interview will take.
Tip 6: Introduce Your Interviewee
Never start an interview by telling your interviewees to introduce themselves. Instead, spend about an hour before the interview to learn more about them.
Look through their latest blogs and their social media accounts to see what they’ve been up to lately. You can then write 2–3 introductory sentences on who the interviewee is, why they’re important, and why your audience should listen to them.
Tip 7: Parroting
Allow your interviewee to speak and don’t take over. You can accomplish this by using something they’ve said to prompt another question.
Tip 8: Transition Through the Questions
Always wrap up by summarising every answer they give, then transition to the next question by relating it to their response.
Tip 9: Anything Else You Would Like to Add?
At the end of every interview, always ask this magic question. It allows your interviewee to talk about anything important you might have forgotten to ask.
It also signals that the interview is about to end and encourages them to wrap up everything they’ve said.
Tip 10: Thank Them and Direct People to Their Sites
Thank your interviewee, mention their name and relevance once more, and direct your audience to visit their sites.
What Next?
Having a blog that doesn’t attract traffic can be frustrating. At CopySmiths, we understand this and would like to help you out.
Enroll in our course on blog content formats to learn how different blog content affects your audience and how to structure your articles.
