Sometimes it’s hard to gauge exactly what kind of content your readers are after. Traffic, click-throughs, and social media engagement can offer indications, but it’s easy to forget that your initial results are typically a small sample size.
If you take significant strategic actions and base your planning on statistically insignificant data, you’re possibly headed for an entirely wrong set of actions. In other words, the best results out of the worst content, or the worst classifications of content, is going to lead your blog down a path toward mediocrity and disengagement.
So what are a few tried-and-true methods of blogging, and popular types of content that your readers are almost guaranteed to appreciate?
1. Images
Images were unpopular in the early days of the Internet, due to universally slow bandwidth that limited speed and quantity. Now, however, much of the nation has high-speed Internet access from offices to our smartphones, and images have become incredibly popular.
It’s recently been reported that images account for a staggering 80 to 90% of social media sharing and engagement on Facebook. A statistic like that needs no secondary analysis, because even if it was 10 to 20%, you’d still want to incorporate images into your blogging.
2. Short, or staggered
There’s no rule when it comes to the length of a blog commentary, but one thing’s for sure: You need to keep the reader engaged throughout the post.
That means you’ll want either to write shorter pieces, or to break up a long post into several smaller pieces with subheads and visually interesting inserts such as bullets or graphics.
3. Instructional writing with instructional images
In the earliest days of the Internet, several sites generated a lot of traffic by acting on their understanding of two simple ideas: that people want to be told what to do, or they want to be shown what to do.
Even if you’re unsure of exactly what to tell someone to do (because you don’t entirely know their particular situation), at least tell them what they can expect others to do (and explain the situation they would do it in).
For example, if your blog focuses on trading stocks or derivatives, you’ll succeed by following this example of explaining how investors might trade through tapering volatility. Along with the graphic, the text gives the reader excellent visual and verbal instructions they can act upon. That creates value for the reader, and that’s what readers want from you: value.
