Keys to Effective Blog Content – Relevant, Entertaining, and Informative
What you’ve heard is true. Content is king. If you have a blog, your number one priority should be content that is effective. But what does that really mean? Effective content has one or more of the following properties: relevancy, entertainment potential, or ability to inform. All content must have some sort of value to it in order for people to want to read it! Let’s look at why this is and what you can do to ensure that your blog content is effective.
We are increasingly a society that is on the “go”. We have so much to do and a limited time to do it! This spills over to our time spent online. When we’re surfing the web, we want to find what we need and then move on. Thus, the need for effective content! If your content is not effective, web visitors will quickly move on to whatever site has the content that they need – quicker than you can say “back button”. Make sure that your blog content is:
1. Relevant To Your Blog
Above all, your content should be relevant to whatever your blog is about. Merriam Webster defines relevant as “having some sensible or logical connection with something else such as a matter being discussed or investigated” or as “having some bearing on or importance for real-world issues, present-day events, or the current state of society”.
So if your blog is centered on “divorce and child custody”, don’t add content that is unrelated to these two subjects. If your blog has a discussion or comments area, be sure to mediate any comments that your visitors leave – again, being sure that they are relevant to the subject at hand. (This can also help you to weed out any spammers that visit your blog to ply their wares).
2. Entertaining to a Fault
While there are some serious subjects out there and some blogs that aren’t there for entertainment (like my free people search blog, for example ), presenting your content in a way that is entertaining is a good way to keep your visitors coming back for more. Not a comedian? No problem. Hire a copywriter to blog for you! If your blog can benefit from a sense of humor, people love to read things that make them smile.
3. Informative!
And last of all – keep your content informative (think about Wikipedia). If people are looking to your website for answers, then give them what they need. And for those who can’t entertain- you can always inform! Informative content is a good way to bring people back to your website again and again, especially if you position yourself as an expert at what you do.
Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are "affiliate links." This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission
January 17th, 2011 at 3:52 pm
darren no doubt content is king but king needs its army to conquer what i mean is even if you’ve good content one cann’t get visitors to blog, in order to get visitors you need to have good backlinks for your blog, content and baklinks goes together to make a blog hit!
January 18th, 2011 at 9:48 pm
You’re very right Aaron. But the content is still king, I mean if you have crappy content no one will link to you so maybe you can get some links and visitors, but they will never share or link to your content. If you have great content any visitor have greater value, there is a greater chance that he will share your article with his friends, link to your content, or subscribe to your rss feed so he will be turned into a regular visitor.
January 18th, 2011 at 1:07 pm
Great post about blogging.
I think you have hit every important point, if the content is right and you promote it within Twitter or other social media websites then the links start to flow.