How to Create Magnetic Blog Posts for Your Subscribers

Marketing teams constantly brainstorm new and exciting ways to connect with their audience of shoppers and loyal customers. Blogs are becoming an increasingly popular way of accomplishing this.

All anyone has to do is plug in a search on how to produce great blog posts, and they’ll become bombarded with a host of authority posts that teaches the writer all sorts of things, such as:

• The technical location of where they should place headlines and subheads
• How to optimize headlines and subheads for organic search
• How many words are optimal for a post
• What type of content media is useful (such as text, video, photos, and audio files)

All of these are useful and correct, but here’s what’s often missing:

Too few teachers are talking about to create ecommerce content that consumers want to read.

After all, the goal of producing these type of posts is to create a rabid fan base while also addressing their questions (through educational posts), and hopefully, helping them to resolve their problems.

Fortunately for marketing teams, the process isn’t hard, but it will require a bit of heart, and creativity. But first, here’s a question that many marketing managers who haven’t discovered the power of the captivating blog post might be secretly wondering:

Why are Blog Posts So Important, Anyway?

Neil Patel is one of the foremost voices in digital marketing. In addition to building brands and offering consultation to international corporations, he also produces authority articles, such as the article he wrote for the Quicksprout blog.

In it, he posts a lesson about content marketing in the online marketing segment of his Beginner’s Guide To Online Marketing course.

Read how he sums up content marketing, and why it’s important for your goals:

Content marketing is just what it sounds like. It’s the process of engaging and growing your customer base through high quality content.

Content marketing is NOT social media, an intern’s job, or limited to a company blog. Like any other marketing practice, it requires commitment to systems and standards. It should be held accountable to measurable results.

Content marketing is more than just the creation and distribution of content. It’s a tool that, when executed properly, positions your brand as an influencer. It starts with storytelling around the concepts that your customers value most.

And the content marketing authority, The Content Marketing Institute (by way of Joe Pulizzi) gets quoted in the same article, summing up why content such as blog posts are crucial, and why they should be consumer-facing:

Now that consumers are totally in control of the buying process, you are seeing enterprise brands working to adapt to that.

The whole movement to get found in search, or drive online leads or create business opportunities with social media starts and ends with a content marketing strategy.

In order for any of that to work, enterprise brands have to have something meaningful to say that, in some way, links to their marketing and business objectives.

(Emphasis mine.)

Creating Magic for Your Subscribers

When it’s time to create the type of blog posts that become must-read material for the site’s subscribers, there’s definitely tangible and intangible elements to consider.

First, a great, captivating blog post literally starts with a great headline. Marketers should note that it’s key not to add the the garbage pile of click-bait that’s constantly littering the search engine results.

It’s crucial to create headlines that are both intriguing and yet, honest. It’s tempting for retail marketers to slip into hard-boiled advertising tactics, but blog posts designed for subscriber engagement and content marketing aren’t the platform for hard-sell advertising tactics, such as hyperbole and over-statement.

With this in mind, marketing writers should ask themselves questions, such as:

• Am I guarding myself and the headline for hyperbolic click-bait?
• Is the headline topical to the content?

After the right type of headline is crafted, then it’s crucial to produce the meat of the content that (hopefully) keeps the consumer’s (or the blog subscriber’s) eyes on the page.

After all, that last thing that any marketer wants is for a potential customer to click away to a competitor’s page!

In order to prevent this from taking place, it’s important to build a captivating blog post around a brand story.

Writers should think about the structure of their marketing stories. They should have a clear path that leads the reader on a storytelling journey. The reader should never feel confused or put-off by what they are reading.

It’s useful for the writers to borrow inspiration from basic storytelling templates – the hero story, the overcomer story arc, the lesson, etc. And also, it’s extremely useful for certain retailers to use this platform to share backstories-these are stories behind the story.

These are great opportunities to share how the company was founded, where it stands now, and where it hopes to arrive in the future.

In fact, these are the type of stories that are perfect for socially responsible and highly-niched product brands to use within their blog posts and throughout their marketing media.

There’s a purpose for producing and promoting branded blog posts. With this in mind, it’s crucial for marketers to create the type of posts that branded blog subscribers want to read.