All’s Well That Ends Well
Spend five minutes in the online marketing world and you’ll learn how important it is to have a blog. More specifically, you’ll realise that your blog content, like content on all online platforms, must be original, if you don’t want to end up buried beneath hundreds of other Google search results.
The point of your blog, then, is to increase your brand’s online visibility to search engines. But there’s more to it. You also need to focus on direct engagement with your readers. If your blog post is of interest to them, they’re more likely to share it with their network of friends and colleagues on social media. In this way, your audience facilitates a wider reach for your blog, and your brand.
The number of comments on your posts is a good reflection of the size of your blog’s audience. To attract more readers and sustain your current readership, you need to create positive interaction between you and your readers, within a vibrant commenter community.
How do you stimulate this kind of engagement? As well as having fresh, relevant blog content, your blog posts need to have a good ending. Any piece of prose, whether it’s fiction, news or online content, must follow the time-tested structure of introduction, main body and conclusion. This helps to cement the salient points of the piece in the reader’s mind for easier recall, and simply makes for more satisfying reading.
With a blog, though, the ending should also function as a kind of “call to action,” which encourages readers to do something more than close the window or tab when they’re finished reading. One way to do this is to ask for contributions. If your post is organised in the form of a list, ask readers to add to the list with their own suggestions, in the comments section. You could also end your blog post with a question. This encourages readers’ to comment and share their opinions. Make sure, though, that the question is general rather than specific, and is not a simple ‘yes/no’ question. Remember that you want to stimulate engagement in the form of a lively discussion or debate.
There you have it – the reasons it’s so important to end your blog post properly, and the best ways to do it. A blog is more than just information and/or news; it is typically a platform for opinion. Therefore, it is the perfect place for discussion and debate between readers, and an ideal tool for spreading your brand’s influence further via social media.
