Creating Content: Creating Effective, Engaging Blog Posts

By Josh Koop •  Updated: 02/04/22 •  17 min read

The world of content creation is a difficult one to navigate. It’s hard enough to create something that you’re proud of, but it also has to be engaging for the viewer. In this article, we will take you through some tips on how to create effective blog posts that are sure to engage your viewers.

Content creation is the ability to take a question and help expand on that topic and create content that fulfills the searcher’s need while also being search engine friendly to rank properly.

If you can build up this skill you can make money online with your own blog. If you aren’t interested in running your own blog you could become a writer who writes content for others’ blogs.

The world of content creation is a difficult one to navigate. It’s hard enough to create something that you’re proud of, but it also has to be engaging for the viewer.

In this article, we will take you through some tips on how to create an effective blog post that is sure to engage your viewers.

what-is-content-creation

What is Content Creation?

Content creation brings many things to mind, as a type of content it can be written, video, audio, infographics, and so on.

The world of content creation is a difficult one to navigate. It’s hard enough to create something that you’re proud of, but it also has to be engaging for the viewer.

The focus for today will be on blogging and post generation for a blog or niche blog. This is an important part of any content marketing strategy and we will take a look at how you can create engaging blogs that are sure to capture your viewer’s attention.

If you find yourself overwhelmed by the amount of information out there, don’t worry! Content creation is something that anyone can do with some practice and patience.

What is the Meaning of Content Creating?

Content creating is a process of transforming words into a more-readable form for a specific audience. The goal is to create content that talks about the product or service, educates about it, and also entertains.

When you are content creating, you are using your skills to take words or topics that are not easily readable and transform them into something that will be more understandable for your desired audience.

The goal is to present information about your product or service in an engaging way that inspires your audience to learn more.

Why Is Content Important?

Content is how you get visitors to your website and keep them there. It is the main priority to help you build up your blog and your brand, if you lose focus on creating quality content, your website will lose its value and soon be lost and forgotten about.

It is extremely important to not only create engaging blog posts but also focus on the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) behind it as well. This means using keywords that you want to get ranked for in search engines like Google and Bing, while at the same time writing a piece that your readers will love and keep coming back for.

The best way to get a feel on what kind of content you should be focusing on is by looking at other successful blogs in your industry, seeing how they write their posts, and picking up some ideas from them!

Is Content Creation a Skill?

When you are first starting to create content you will find it to frequently be quite challenging, many of us have only written for school assignments prior and have some belief all online writing is done in this manner.

In fact, online content creation is a skill as you are typically writing for all kinds of experience levels and knowledge. You have to have knowledge of the topic you are writing about, know how to talk with your readers and what information they will be looking for.

You should always strive to create blog posts that are easy-to-read but also contain all of the required material needed for them to come away feeling satisfied!

For many new bloggers, this could take more than a year to develop and cultivate, learning how you write in your voice and what you want to bring to your content will play heavily into your development.

Content Planning and Strategy

Building a successful content creation process will require careful content planning and a highly focused content strategy to implement for success.

This means understanding the site you are working to build or write for and how content works with each other and how they all help to build the branding.

Content creation is an important part of every business, if you are able to create quality content that is engaging and informative for your target audience then you will be well on your way to success.

It takes time, patience, practice, and dedication but it can also become quite rewarding when the hard work pays off!

Building a strategy to post content to your blog is the best way to ensure you are staying on track, but also gives you time in between posts to have some fun!

Understanding Who is My Audience?

What does my audience know already? What don’t they know? One of the big keys to building a content plan is to understand very well who your audience is.

If you have a content plan that is not focused on what they care about then it will be hard for them to stay engaged and want to come back for more!

Building out reader or buyer personas of who your ideal reader would be can help give some insight into the type of information you should be sharing with them, but also how best to share this information.

Personas are essentially an image of someone in real life, where they live and their lifestyles etc. This helps when writing as it adds context, like if I was talking directly to Sally from California (my persona) or John from New York City – my tone would change slightly depending on which one I was addressing at any given time.

This is also equally important to know what they wouldn’t know, what do beginners ask questions on versus experienced people? Knowing this will help you identify what information to include and how much detail it requires.

SEO Research

This part of the process is to identify worthwhile content topics that will be beneficial to your readers and then try to find the best keywords that you can target.

In order for people in search engines like Google or Bing, to know when a blog post is relevant to their query they must include certain words – these are called “keywords”.

If a poor keyword is chosen or maybe skipped entirely the content may never show up in the search results no matter how great of an article it is!

Keyword research tools, like SEMrush, make this process much easier by providing suggestions on what people have been searching across the internet with regards to your topic.

This gives insight into if there is enough volume around each word before spending too much time writing about them, but also helps keep everything focused as well.

Ideation – How to Generate Content Ideas

Finding keywords is all good and needed, but you also need to then look and evaluate these keywords for which can be excellent content topic ideas as well!

Here are some questions to ask when evaluating keywords:

Keeping all of these things in mind when creating a strategy for coming up with new topics should keep everyone engaged and wanting more – don’t forget to kick in the creative juices to have fun too though!

The best and fastest-growing blogs all identify worthwhile content topics before ever writing a single word on a post or page. This is the most effective way to not only create content that is relevant but also build a loyal audience.

As long as you remain consistent with publishing and identifying new topics along the way your blog will grow in no time!

The next part in ideation is to generate creative article titles that could help describe the content you are about to write.

The best content in the world will be unclicked on from the search engine results pages if there isn’t a clear reason why the visitor should click on your content, these are vital to long-term success and gaining more volume.

Last in this process will be to take all the content keyword ideas and prioritize them by how much traffic they would bring in and how difficult/easy it will be to create.

This way the most important topics are being worked on first while also allowing for flexibility if anything changes down the line or maybe there is a topic that can easily be turned into an infographic, video, etc. – whatever helps your business more!

The process of creating content isn’t always easy but with these tips, you should have everything needed to start doing so now!

Writing

Now is when the rubber hits the road, for many the best way to build content is to start with an outline, or content brief, where you can understand the headings and work out a flow between each.

If you don’t have the outline or brief to start from then the content can get muddled as you have no clear path, you end up zigging and zagging around and the post becomes lost.

You want to make sure that you keep pretty tight on the keyword that was chosen for the post, not adding it over and over again but staying true to the same direction and information flow.

For many posts, I like to start right off by providing some semblance of the main question being answered for a chance to win the snippet from Google and a chance to rank above all other content.

After that I tend to have somewhere between 3-10 H2 headings depending on the content I am going to cover and what matches this direction and helps inform the reader on the topic with a little more depth.

Editing

The next phase in content creation is to take the written post from earlier and begin to re-read and look at what modifications you want to make for SEO purposes.

The best way to do this is not just looking at the content in its raw form but also by adding it into a tool like Frase or SurferSEO that offers online readability and search engine scoring versus others in the top 10.

This check will help to make sure that you know the average word count of the competitors along with the images, headers, and other elements that will help the post to rank and show up in search.

After this is done you can then go back into your content, change words around as needed. This is when you can rework and rename H tags with keywords, changing some wording around by adding synonyms and adding other semantic information.

Uploading

At this point you have a fully prepared piece of content, now you can add it to your CMS, or content management system. The most common are WordPress, bbPress, Drupal, or Joomla.

I’ll focus on WordPress as it has the largest target audience due to the ease to set it up on an inexpensive host like Bluehost and be up and running in less than 5 minutes.

For WordPress, you would sign into your admin console, go to post, add a new post, and then copy and paste the content directly into the post area and add the heading above.

This is when you want to provide the URL name that you want the post to have, for some they keep these short and directly tied to the keyword and for others, they can be the full title or other details.

Before you complete the post itself and publish you want to add on the media that helps push the story written, within WordPress this typically is at least a featured image, which I use Canva to create this image along with a similar Pinterest image.

Many will add more images throughout the content to help convey more information for the visitors to enjoy the extra effort put into the content.

After this you would want to look at adding the links out from this post to reference materials which can be inside your site or external, these are signs to Google and others of a “cited” source bringing you credibility or not based on the site.

Publishing

This is the fun part, when you get to press that big button and successfully complete this post.

This is also the end and the new beginning as you will now want to start looking at this process from the start again on a new topic or keyword from the list you created above!

Publishing can be pressed further though many successful content creators will also have some content promotion methods already built it can be fairly fast and efficient, otherwise, you can start building these today to grow in addition to organic traffic!

Content Promotion

Taking your content out to the masses and not just waiting for Google and search engines to find and rank your content can help you springboard your blog posts to success.

Let’s discuss some of the most effective ways to promote your content:

Reviews

Ask other bloggers, business owners, and influencers in your niche for reviews of your blog posts or products that you may be promoting. If they agree, ask them to share the review on their social media accounts with a link back to your post.

Social Media

Post content to social media groups that would be interested in your content. There are many groups and communities that you can join and promote your blog posts to from Facebook Groups, Reddit, and the assortment of up and coming platforms.

Email List Marketing

For years an email list was an anchor to a successful website, this can work for you regardless of ranking in a search engine. Share your blog posts with your email list prior to publishing and ask them for feedback on the topic, if it is relevant to their needs they will most likely share it with others in their network.

Find companies that agree to share your content with their email list or social media followers. Having an engaged audience on these platforms can help drive people back to your site, increasing the chance of them linking to you and ranking for relevant keywords in search engines.

Syndication

Submit press releases to popular websites that agree to syndicate your content. Many times these sites will share your content with their email list or social media followers, getting you in front of a larger audience and increasing the chance for engagement with users sharing it within their own networks.

Repurposing Content

Since you just put all this time into creating high-quality content it would be sad for it to be posted and forgotten to time alone.

Repurposing can be as simple as taking parts and turning them into Instagram stories, a YouTube video, or short, concise Tweets.

You can also take the content and beef it up even further to turn it into a PDF, Ebook, or similar downloadable which you could then sell and keep 100% of profits once again increasing your exposure with minimal effort.

Creating Multimedia Content

If you put time into knowing your potential customers prior to creating anything you will be able to use the content for more than one media as you will know how you could repurpose parts to make more interactions occur.

No one wants their content efforts to go to waste so you will want to get the most out of every piece.

Using these strategies can help your content do more than just exist online, it can be shared across networks and lead to increased traffic which in turn might mean an increase in visits, sales, or leads for your blog or business!

Social Media Content

Most types of content like posts can be broken into multiple pieces of content for social media platforms as most will have limited content visibility.

Adding images to the body of your post means you can get at least one more repost out of it on social media if not several.

You could take that image and turn it into a short video or GIF for use in places like Twitter, Reddit, or Tumblr where these types of posts are allowed.

This will increase views and engagements on all platforms and help you see results faster than if it were just a simple post update.

Video Content

Video content types tend to cause bloggers stress but overall video is an amazing medium to process words into something that can be further appreciated when built with the audience in mind.

What’s even nicer is a short video needs only 1-200 words in many cases meaning you could convert a single post into multiple videos that all cover individual sections of your first written content.

How Do You Know if Your Content is Working?

This is the real question most people will be asking when they begin building content blogging. The truth can be very tricky, if you choose the wrong keywords this could be an exceedingly long time until you get that part right.

For those who get the keywords right on a new blog, you can expect to have no visitors for months (many times this could be 6 months or longer) so you have to be patient and write to no one to be successful long term.

As time goes by you should begin to see organic traffic numbers rise month over month and this will mean you are starting to be listed on page one for some terms and this will be typically when a site can explode in growth if you continued posting.

Should You Outsource Your Content Creation?

I would advise not outsourcing in the first 3-6 months when you have little traffic and little idea what will perform well for you as you could be throwing money away and getting little to no return.

After these first 6 months and around 50-100 posts, you will want to possibly start expanding out to do more video, social media, or maybe a second blog.

In this case, is where you would want to begin to look at content creation outsourcing options, I keep the list of my choices here, these agencies and people have always performed very well for my needs, I know they can for yours too.

Josh Koop

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