When people think about running a blog, they often imagine that it’s all about writing engaging posts and waiting for success to come to them. Being able to write content people love is a fantastic skill, but it’s not enough to start a blog and grow it to its full potential.
The thing is, there’s more to running a website that just writing engaging blog copy. You also need to run email marketing campaigns, manage social media accounts, brainstorm compelling titles, and more. In other words, you need to be a writer-of-all-trades.
In this article, I’m going to break down the three types of copy you need to master to run a successful blog. We’ll talk about why they are important and run through some examples together. Let’s talk writing!
1. Writing Authoritative Blog Posts
One of the easiest ways to make your blog’s content more compelling is to sound more authoritative in your writing. Here’s a quick example to illustrate my point:
You might want to use WordPress to power your blog since it’s easy to use and you can find a lot of cheap hosting plans that offer good performance. However, there are a lot of other equally good platforms out there, so I suggest you take a look around!
It’s simple, and it gets the point across, but it doesn’t sound like you’re confident in what you’re saying. Now compare that paragraph to this:
If you’re new to blogging, WordPress is the way to go. It’s easy to use, packs a lot of features, and finding cheap (but good) hosting is simple. There are a lot of other CMS choices, but there’s a reason why WordPress powers over 30% of the web.
The second example sounds a bit more brash, to be sure. However, it also reads like more confident advice. Plus, it includes statistics to back up your assertion, and I love a useful statistic.
If you’re running a blog, chances are you are well versed in whichever topic you’re writing about. In other words, you know your stuff, so there’s no need to be meek about it. Adding just a dash of authoritativeness to your writing will make people pay more attention to what you have to say, which makes for more engaging blog copy.
That only works if you know what you’re talking about, though. If you’re writing about something you don’t have as much experience in, then, by all means, tone down the authority. After all, it’s more important than your visitors trust you than it is they think you’re an expert.
2. Creating Engaging Email Marketing Campaigns
As far as I’m concerned, email marketing is the second most important thing you can do to grow your blog, right after writing excellent articles.
Let me explain why that is. If you write engaging blog copy and you do your homework when it comes to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), people will find your site. However, a lot of those visitors probably won’t make their way back to it again.
Email marketing is the hook you use to reel visitors in over and over again. When someone subscribes to your email list, they’re indicating a willingness to listen to what you have to say. If you can write email campaigns that are consistently engaging, you’re golden.
The problem is, the type of copy you need to use for emails is a lot different than with blog posts. With the latter, you usually want to go into as much detail as possible. Emails, on the other hand, are all about brevity and personalization. Here’s an example of a campaign I like:
That email does a great job of making you feel like it’s talking to you, which can be harder to achieve with blog copy. Now imagine we switched that for something such as:
You forgot about this one-year milestone, but that’s OK! Let’s plan something fun to celebrate, like a trip to the beach, the mountains, or a spa retreat.
The core message is still there, but it sounds a lot more impersonal. In other words, it looks more like a mass message and less like something a real person would be interested in receiving.
Your goal is to aim for email copy that’s warmer and to the point. Plus, with modern email marketing platforms, there are a lot of personalization techniques you can take advantage of.
3. Creating Engaging Social Media Posts
If you thought writing compelling but compact email marketing copy was hard, social media is going to really stretch your muscles. With emails, you still get some decent room to play with words. However, social media requires you to be a lot more concise. Twitter, for example, only gives you a measly 280 characters to play with:
That’s an extreme example, of course. With Facebook and Instagram, you can pretty much write walls of text if you’re up to it. However, no one is going to read through paragraphs and then click on a link to your blog post.
With that in mind, you need to learn how to summarize the contents of your posts and sell your social media followers on reading through the full thing. I like to think about it as writing a meta description, only it needs to be a bit more personal. For example, if I had to summarize this article, I’d go for something such as:
If you want your blog to succeed, you need to be able to do more than just write amazing articles. You’ll also need to master other types of copy, so let’s talk about what those are!
It’s short, and it tells you exactly what to expect from the article you’re about to read. With social media, your primary goal will be to get visitors to click on links to your blog posts, so learning how to sell them is essential.
To sum things up, engaging blog copy enables you to get traffic from search engines. Email marketing provides you with a way to get those visitors to keep coming back and social media offers you an entirely new audience you can target. If you can hit all three notes successfully, you should have no problems growing your blog.
Conclusion
Everyone has a particular style to their writing. Some people are better suited to technical articles, while others excel at marketing copy. There’s nothing wrong with honing a unique writing style. However, when it comes to running a website, you’ll need more than just engaging blog copy alone to succeed.
To get a blog off the ground, you will need to become proficient in these three types of copy:
- Writing authoritative blog posts.
- Creating engaging email marketing campaigns.
- Crafting social media posts that grab people’s attention.
Do you have any questions about how to write more engaging blog copy? Let’s talk about them in the comments section below!
Image credit: Pixabay.