It’s Infographic Saturday! Each week, I dig through the most informative infographics from across the web and break them down for you.
The typical infographic does a good job of breaking down demographics and organizing information that you may already know. They look nice, but in the end they don’t add much value. But the one I found this week was overflowing with helpful data to help marketers reach a larger audience.
Check out this gem from Mashable. Content marketing agency BlueGlass created one of the greatest infographics I’ve seen around the topic of building an engaged audience.
There is some great stuff here about managing social media and increasing your subscriber count. But I felt the most valuable information was related to blogging. Here are a few of the highlights…
Your Headline is More Important Than You Think!
Look, I get that headlines are important. I spend some time thinking through the best possible headline that will, in particularly, show up well in search results.
Important, sure. But of the people who read our blog posts, 80% will only read the headline while 20% read the entire post? That tells me that 80% weren’t interested enough after reading that headline to continue on.
Wow!
BlueGlass suggests that 50% of your emphasis should be put on the quality of the headline. I admittedly put no more than 5-10% of emphasis on headlines now. According to this study, you should spend just as much time and effort on your headline as the actual content.
I also appreciated the “formulas” and examples of headlines that they provided. I personally always try to answer a question that someone is likely asking when they type a search query into Google. You’ll notice that I use a lot of “How to…” titles.
I may put too much emphasis on “How to” and could mix it up a bit. They suggested:
- What Everyone Ought to Know About…
- Little Known Ways to…
- Get Rid of… [problem] Once and For All
For fun, I made the title of this blog post Little Known Ways to Build an Engaged Audience. We’ll see how it works!
Write More Effective Blog Posts
Alright, so now only 50% of your emphasis should be put on writing your blog post. How do you do that? Be succinct!
I admittedly tend to get a bit wordy and could stand to cut down my content a bit. But I do follow their guidelines of breaking up your blog posts in the following ways:
- Use Subheaders
- Use Line Breaks
- Use Bulleted Lists
That’s right, I used a bulleted list to say you should use bulleted lists. BOOM!
[Line Break]
Alright, so here it is. Are you following these rules to build a more engaged audience?
[Read the original Mashable article here.]
