Schools who blog get 67% more leads than those who haven’t taken advantage of the content marketing revolution.

Knowing how to write a blog post that attracts and engages customers can lead to serious money in your pocket.

When a potential customer is browsing social media and your blog post pops up, they have a mere few seconds to make a decision.

They can either keep scrolling or open up your post. If you don’t make it past this first test, your blogging efforts were for not.

If your potential customer visits your blog post, your next challenge is to keep them reading all the way through. If your content is good enough, you can use your blog to convert leads into paying students.

You’ll even find that your customers will share your content on their social media pages and market your brand for you. All of this could be yours- if you know how to write a killer blog post.

Knowing how to write a blog post that actually converts leads into customers will ensure that your blogging efforts aren’t going to waste. So how do you write a blog post that potential customers can’t ignore?

Keep reading as we walk you through the process of creating a post worth not just reading, but sharing.

Understand Your Target Audience

Before you even sit down to write your first blog post, you need a do a little research.

In order to create content that has an impact on your audience, you need to understand what your audience wants. One of the coolest parts of blogging and the aspect that your potential customers will appreciate is how blog posts can be tailored to their audience.

Everything from the content itself to the tone and the writing style can be catered to the audience you are trying to reach. For example, a school might blog with a more serious tone than a t-shirt design company.

So how do you figure out what kind of content your target audience is interested in? Research!

Remember that blog posts are meant to be informational and provide authoritative insight. You want to nail down what your audience would like to learn about your industry.

The best way to do this is to do some research to find out what kinds of questions your target audience is asking on the internet and what they are searching for.

Twitter

With Twitter Advanced Search, you can easily find out what people in your industry are talking about and asking about and it’s free to use. All you have to do is type in the keyword you want to search for and choose the “questions” filter.

Keyword Searching

There are both paid and free tools that you can use to instantly see what people are searching for in your industry. You’ll find out what the most popular searches are and what keywords are used.

KeywordTool.io is a great free resource. If you’re interested in paying for a product, we recommend SEMRush.

Quora

Quora describes itself as “a great place to share knowledge and better understand the world.”

For your purposes, it’s a great place to find out what your potential customers are talking about. Quora is free to use.

Say SEO Three Times Fast

How many of us really go to the second or third page of Google’s search results? Google searches are how many of your readers will find your content.

By maximizing your SEO ranking, you can make your content more visible to potential readers. Here are some SEO tips to follow:

Make Your Cover Count

When it comes to blog posts, your headline and your accompanying graphic are the equivalents of your book cover.

Your potential readers will judge your book by its cover, so you better make it count.

We mentioned earlier how getting your potential readers to stop on your post rather than keep scrolling is the first and most important challenge of blogging. Frankly, if you don’t make it past this test, your target audience won’t even become readers, let alone paying customers.

This is why creating compelling headlines is so important. The difference between a blog post that gets read and shared over and over and one that is passed over is its title.

Creating compelling titles is an art and takes practices. Here are some pro tips:

Remember Your Audience

Let’s go back to our very first tip for a moment. When you’re creating your blog post’s title, the most important thing to keep in mind is- you guessed it, your target audience.

While having a working knowledge of best practices is a great thing to have, at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is if your blog posts are appealing to your target audience. This is something that will come with time and experience.

The longer you blog and the more data you collect about the performance of your blog, the better you will know how to create titles that your potential customers will want to read.

Appeal to Readers’ Emotions

This is a concept that is common across all marketing platforms and content marketing is no exception. Creating a blog post title that appeals to your readers’ emotions will incentivize them to read more.

You can do this by taking a moment to think about what emotions you want your reader to experience while reading your post. Use words in your headline that will give the reader a clear idea of what to expect from the rest of the post.

Be careful not to overpromise or oversell if you can’t deliver. Over-hyping a post might lead to readers thinking of your content as dreaded clickbait.

Being honest about what readers can expect to gain from reading your content will lead to them developing a sense of trust in your brand.

Use SEO Keywords

There is no better place than to use your keyword research than in the title of your blog post.

You should have done the keyword research already to give you an idea of what your audience is searching for and what terminology they are using when doing so. Using the language your audience uses while searing for information will not only help them find your blog post but will also increase the chances that they will read it.

The key here is to include the keyword as naturally as possible. Don’t force it.

Format for Readability

When people are looking for information, they want it to be presented in the clearest way possible.

Blog posts have taken on a remarkably simple formatting style that is designed for the modern reader. People want their information fast and they won’t stick around if they can’t find what they’re looking for.

Remember that a significant number of readers will be viewing your content on a mobile device. Here are some ways to make your posts more visually appealing and easier to read:

Use Subheadings

If your blog post appears as a solid chunk of text or one big paragraph, your readers are going to run the other way.

Few things are more boring or intimidating than reading a wall of text. Readers have come to expect user-friendly formatting while surfing the web, and you don’t want to let them down.

Readers want to be sure that reading your post will be worth their time. They’ll often skim a post before committing to reading the whole thing. For this reason, breaking your article up into smaller sections with subheadings is a great idea.

It will make things easier on the reader and will allow them to quickly locate important content. Your goal should be to make things as easy on the reader’s eyes as you can. This will make it more likely that they will finish the piece and become a paying customer.

Don’t Forget About Bullet Points

Using bullet points is another way to break information up for readers as well as highlight important information.

Readers’ eyes will naturally be drawn to bullet points if you use them correctly. You can quickly present important information to your audience without making them do much work.

The thing to remember with bullet points is that you’re working with limited real estate. You only have a few words, so make them count.

Bullet points shouldn’t be used for full sentences and you shouldn’t write entire paragraphs in bullet point format. Use bullet points sparingly to express short, meaningful ideas that will impact the reader.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Did you know that the human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text and 90 percent of information transmitted to our brains is visual?

If you want to boost engagement, your blog post needs images. You can create your own graphic content or use free images from stock photo sites.

Most blog posts feature an image with the headline. You want this image to be relevant to the content in the post and to capture the readers’ interest.

Don’t stop at just one image. You should be using compelling images throughout your blog post. A good number of images is one per heading or subheading.

When you’re choosing an image to represent your blog post, choose one that is highly sharable. When your post is shared on social media, the title and the image will be visible to users of the platform.

Also, consider using graphic images to explain concepts to readers. Their brains will process the information more easily that way and they will feel more engaged than they will by simply reading the text.

Call the Reader to Action

But how do you convert them to a paying customer? By encouraging your reader to perform some sort of action.

Blogging is a great way to provide something (information) to your potential customers at no charge to them, but chances are you’re hoping to get something in return. Creating compelling content that establishes you as an authority in your industry will bring in customers, but there is a way to keep them engaged.

By calling your readers to action, you’re giving them an opportunity to do something for you. You could ask them to contact you, purchase your course, follow you on social media, and even share your content.

We suggest turning on the comments on your blog posts and suggesting readers leave a comment or question on the page. The important thing to remember is that you should be clear about what you want your reader to do.

Providing opportunities for engagement will not only convert readers into new customers but will help with customer retention.

Know You Know How to Write a Blog Post

While many people think they know how to write a blog post, their numbers say otherwise.

It’s not just about knowing how to press publish but about how to write blog posts that get results and turn leads into paying students.

If this sounds like too much for you are you still aren’t confident in your blog writing ability, that’s okay! Sometimes it’s best to leave it to the pros.

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How to Write a Blog Post That Actually Converts Leads into Students