Content is important, we all know that. Content helps to drive traffic to your website and build brand awareness. Unfortunately, many businesses are failing to reap the benefits from their blog because they don’t know what to blog about, they have run out of ideas or because they are failing to realise who the content is actually for. Your readers generally aren’t arriving on your blog to discover more about your latest award nomination or the newest member of your staff, they aren’t really interested in that stuff. What they want is content that will benefit them.

If you’re struggling with your blog here are four pro tips that will help you to release the potential that’s there for the taking for every business.

Discover Your Target Audience

There’s no point writing blog posts if you have no clue who you’re writing for. If you don’t know your target audience this is the starting point for you. The identification process doesn’t need to take too long, begin by answering these questions:

• Who – An obvious question, who is going to want your products or your services? Mums, teenagers, professionals? Are they male, female or both? How old are they?
• What – What are they looking for? What is it they need and how can you create content that will offer them solutions?
• When – When are they going to be trying to access your content?
• Where – Where do they live, hang out and work?
• Why – Why do they go online? Do they want to socialise, are they after entertainment to pass the time or do they require information and advice?

Finally you need to find out how your audience is accessing the internet so you’re able to make compatible content. Are they most likely to read your blog using a desktop or a smartphone? This is an important question to answer so don’t ignore it.

Make Your Content Useful

The best content you can come up with will recognise problems experienced by your target audience and provide solutions to these problems. The reader will feel happy and grateful that you’ve shared the answers they’ve been searching for and as a result they will be more inclined to share the content with their friends who are experiencing the same issues.

Find the type of content your audience will respond to and that helps them to make use of your product or services. If you sell dog food you could write blog posts about how to keep a dog healthy, the different ingredients and how they benefit the dog and a whole host of other articles relating to responsible dog ownership. If you sell fabrics you could create weekly patterns, care tips, and create videos showing skills and techniques.

An Interesting Read

The presentation of your content needs careful consideration. Readers often feel put off when faced with a large block of text. Their time is precious, so the content must be easy to skim over and still take in the gist of the message. Therefore you need to present the content in a way that provides solutions quickly.

Achieving audience friendly content isn’t difficult, simply:

• Make use of headings and subheadings throughout the post.
• Readers love lists, use them to make the content easy to absorb.
• Keep your paragraphs short.
• Use conversational language, keep it simple and don’t feel the need to impress with words. You want your average reader to understand you.
• Use white space.
• Add images and infographics.

Help Your Audience to Find Your Content

Using SEO plugins to help create a post the search engines will find and understand, but the work doesn’t stop there. Share the content across all of your social media channels and in any areas online where you know your audience is likely to find it.  Read ‘Are You Guilty of Neglecting Your Content Marketing‘ for further tips that will encourage your target audience to find your content online.

Making your blog work requires an understanding of your target audience, recognising the content needs to be written for them and finding regular topics that will provide your audience with information they are looking for. Be proactive, considerate and commit to quality over quantity, your blog will find its place and your audience will find you.