Since Google’s last update creating interesting, creative and high quality content has become more and more important. Forget about boring, irrelevant blog posts that simply serve to host a keyword and move away from blogs and blog networks that only exist for SEO purposes. SEO is no longer just about getting hundreds and thousands of links. It is about getting high quality links, so it is time to get creative and write content that people actually are interested in and create content that might even go viral.
But how does that work?
Here are 4 tips that can give your content the ‘X factor’:
1. Write about current events and topics
In order to do so, you will have to be up to date with everything that is going on in your business sector, city, region, country or even important events from all over the world.
For example, England has just recently been celebrating the Queen’s Jubilee (60 years on the throne), which gave bloggers the perfect opportunity to write about everything related to Britain, the Royals etc.
If we have a look at the sports sector, we could currently use the Football Euro Cup (Euro 2012/European Football Championship) or other major sports events coming up during the summer.
But even those topics might get boring after a while… Why not make use of days and events not everyone has been talking about? To find those, you can make use of online event calendars such as this one. Did you know for example that the 29th of April was the “International dance day”? Or that the “Badger day” is coming up on the 17th of June?
At first, those days might not always seem to be very interesting, but surely if you are creative and pick out some good ones, you can write a very interesting or funny blog post.
2. Conduct an interview
Blog posts are often quite similar. Everyone tries to inform you about the newest trends, makes lists or create how-to guides. Why not try something different and go for an interview blog post? It might be difficult to get hold of someone interesting, but it is worth a try because at the end of the day you might get rewarded for your hard work and persistence. So do your homework and find out who the big influencers are in your sector. Tools and platforms like Followerwonk, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook might help you with identifying who the ‘social leaders’ of your industry are.
3. Interactive blog posts
Why not try to get the reader actively involved? Wouldn’t it be great if lots of people would talk about your post and even repost it on their blogs? A competition or a survey might just be the right strategy. Let’s say you have some products or vouchers to offer, you could think about an interesting survey and select one participant to be the winner or you host a competition and other bloggers need to get creative. So come up with an interesting idea and then get as many bloggers as possible involved. However, before you put all you work into compiling such a survey or a competition, it is worth checking the general interest in such topic beforehand. Make sure your idea will work and attract attention!
4. Use Images and videos
Don’t bore the readers with plain text posts. Try to make it interesting and beef it up with some images. When you write about fashion, why not use some photo collages or pictures of interesting outfits, instead of just writing about the newest trends? It will definitely add some value to the post and make it more vivid. If you have an interesting infographic that might fit perfectly to one of your blog posts, then use it! Infographics can be very informative in a fun way, especially if you have the chance to create and use interactive infographics. But also memes are very popular at the moment, like the one with the badger further up in the text. If you want to create your own meme you can do so here.
Another great way of making your blog post more interesting is to do a video-blog post or insert a suitable video in your post. This strategy might be particularly interesting, when you are talking about a quite dry topic. It is therefore a good way to make the dry topic fun and more interesting by using video material. If you have the time, resources and knowledge to create a video yourself – that’s fine, but you can also make use of existing videos, just make sure you quote them correctly or try to get in touch with the owner of the material.
Hopefully you will find a few of those tips useful and will be able to make use of some of the strategies in order to make your written content more interesting and creative. Have fun trying out some of the ideas!
Cover Picture: Mike Turner
Image:https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/53/31/8c/53318c25c1132718c7e44632675cb5f5.jpg
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