Complete Copywriting - Blog - The Power of PR for Businesses

When you sit down to write a new blog, do you ever find that you can get stuck in a bit of a blogging rut? I used to.

You can stop that rut from taking hold. And it's not hard to do. It's just a matter of shaking it up a little. Avoid using the same old blogging format every time and you will see results. And fast.

Here’s a quick breakdown of some of the most popular blogging styles.

The Listicle

This is a list of all things useful.

Kind of like this one I guess.

It’s quite regularly used in news round ups such as this one Donald Trump's presidency and 27 other real things that happened on The Simpsons first. Its popularity largely comes from the fact that it’s a really quick and easily digestable format to provide useful information. Its SEO credibility is pretty good too as it allows for lots of keyword-rich headers in significant places.

There’s a lot more you can do with keyword placement, but we’ll save that for another time. Just make sure you’ve signed up and I’ll send you an email with a link as soon as it’s available.

Newsjacking

This sounds a lot more sinister than it really is.

And you see it all the time.

We all do.

You quite simply take a current or topical event and then put their own company’s spin on it. It’s a great way to benefit from lots of current comment on a particular event or activity.

One day, I received a call from a company that was promoting programmes educating people about the importance of an active lifestyle.

The only trouble is, they had exhausted all of their obvious stories.

After working with the company some weeks the House of Commons published a report on the state of childhood obesity. We re-energised their campaign securing more column inches for them by adding comment to the existing story. A perfect example of newsjacking.

Personal Spotlight

These blogs are really popular because everyone loves to read real life stories. Whether they are about people, or companies. So what better than to tell your readership about your success stories. Or someone else’s success stories.

It’s also a great way to really effectively communicate the benefits of your service or skill set.

As humans, we’ve indulged in stories since the beginning of time.

And even in today’s modern world, the personal story structure, known as the hero structure, is used by the most popular most popular Ted Talks.

Stories are a really effective way of conveying important information.

When you were growing up you probably heard the story about the boy who cried wolf? Indeed, there was probably never a boy who actually cried wolf, or did any other of those naughty things, but there was a key message underlying the story that still holds true today.

The reason morals and fables are put into stories is because stories engage the brain more fully, making them easier to remember and relate to than just facts alone.

When we hear a story, our brain releases Oxytocin which helps us to bond with people and to feel good about things. If you can make your site visitors feel good when they’re reading your content, you’re part way there!

To get the Oxytocin really flowing freely though, you need to capture and hold the reader’s attention. You also need to enable the reader to put themselves in the position of the storyteller.

Instructional

You see it everywhere – how to train a rabbit, how to bake a Christmas cake. How to survive in the jungle for a year with just one tin of soup - you get it.

These are everywhere, yet we all love them.

We love them because they can enable us to do, well, almost anything. Hell, last year I even fixed a tumble drier myself using an instructional.

The versatility of this type of blog is what makes it so very popular among bloggers the world over. It’s quick and easy to write and generally speaking tends to result in good search term performance because the nature of it means that keyword density tends to be quite high.

It is also super easy to translate these blogs into video, vlogs, podcasts, and infographics.

Another huge benefit is that these types of articles don’t usually require a whole lot of research, so they are relatively quick and simple to create, and less expensive to create. Definitely a timeless winner.

Cheat sheet

The cheat sheet is similar to the listicle in as much as it is often a round up but it tends to be more stylised than a list. It will give the reader fairly detailed information fast and without too much fluff. Kind of like this article I put together recently on ‘14 ways to get more traffic to your blog’.

Media Posts

These are posts created specifically for social media.

They can be text or images. Or they can even be a series of images such as a slide share or one extended image such as an infographic or retweetable snippets for linked in.

Studies show that people find image posts more appealing and are more willing to share them, and what’s more, share them with greater regularity than text media posts.

This could be because images are processed by the brain around 60,000 times faster than text.

So next time you start to write a blog, take a little time to think about the best way to make a point. Can you cash in on a headline story SEO opportunity, or maybe a little social media credit?

If your get up and blog really has gone awol, maybe it’s time to get some professional support? We are always happy to discuss your blogging strategy or your blogging requirements so give us a call. Or you can keep your eyes open for my next article on how you can get more inspiration on how to find blogging topics.