- July 16, 2024
- by Kalam Kagaz
- Blog Writing
Greetings!! Picture this. You have been writing blogs for around a year now. You have picked your niche. And you are even delivering regular content.
Most importantly, you are dedicating a considerable amount of your effort to making this work. Honestly, you want to be heard, you want to belong, and you want to share your wisdom with your fellow humans so that they, too, can learn from your mistakes and success. However, you simply cannot come around to the point where your blogs receive that heavy traffic and reader? Ever wonder why?
Two Situations: Engaging vs. Boring Content
Let me pose two situations for you. The first situation is that you are sitting in a palaeontology seminar with 50 other scientists, listening to a professor lecturing the room about similarities between the tyrannosaurus and stegosaurus. In case you have not figured it out already, palaeontology is the study and research related to life that existed before and sometimes including the start of the Holocene epoch. Yes, irrelevant to this blog. But stay with me. Now imagine this second situation where you are in a coffee shop, the same professor greets you, sits with you to share a table, even shares a light cafe latte to suit your taste, begins with a light conversation about himself, asks about your whereabouts, cracks a joke or two about how he digs up bones for a living and then slowly and gradually slides into explaining how similar tyrannosaurus and stegosaurus are. Considering you are least interested in learning about extinct Goliath creatures, which would be the ideal way to indulge you in the topic among these two?
Why Engaging Content Works
Now, if you are here, notice something. I have exhausted around two entire paragraphs, almost two hundred words and around 5 minutes of your time talking about bones, a professor, and a hypothetical evening of which you already might be dreaming. Do you know why you are still reading this? It is because I constantly kept talking to you this entire while. My words, my dialogues, my sentences, and my phrases were all aligned towards one subject that is you. The focus was never to lose your interest by asking you questions, making you imagine situations, characters, events, and settings, in a nutshell, not letting your subconscious wander off. Once you have done that effectively, your queries about engaging content would be as irrelevant as palaeontology and those bands of 50 scientists.
Why Just Content is Not Enough
I am trying to make sure that if you are simply handing out content, information or data to your readers and your followers, there is a high probability that it will not sell. Think about it. You may consider your niche to be a unique thought, but there are many who, too, have similar thoughts. You may have a different angle to the content of the information. Still, unless you have discovered a rainbow-horned white unicorn, you are not essentially providing something that is not already there.
The Power of One-on-One Conversations
Reeling back to the professor and the two instances, if you say that you would choose the seminar over the coffee house, stop reading, save yourself some time and dig up the ground, innocent bones lay undiscovered. However, if you think that the coffee house is your alternative to the otherwise dull conversation, try to decipher why? Well, it is because of one-on-one conversations, direct flow of thoughts, occasional jokes and the cosy ambience of a coffee house. That is the tone you have to strike in your blogs. Being a blogger, it is your professional duty to engage and excite that which your reader craves through the magic and mystics of your words.
Engage Through Simple, Conversational Language
Instead of your write-up, your content does not need to host flamboyant vocabulary or Shakespearean phrases to make it sound convincing and engaging. All you require is a tint of dialogue and that tone to make your readers wonder along as they read. You must relate to your audience, your readers, to understand what gets them in the groove. Seven out of ten times, it would be that conversational tone in your content. Wondering how to do that?
Writing in Active Voice: Speaking Directly to Your Readers
Try and write most of the sentences in active voice. In simpler terms, speak directly to your readers. Give them the impression that you are talking to them personally and that they have your undivided attention. The moment you have established this bond, you have done half of the job. Your next task is to build on this. Make sure you ask ample questions in your content. The questions, rather the interrogative sentences are an effort to involve your reader in the content so that they simply do not keep reading it but beyond a point and feel like they have a part to play in it too.
Keep the Content Focused and Flowing
Be cautious about elaborating your content. Do not let the flow of thoughts loose on the page. As we do that, we often tend to deviate from the topic and our prime focus, the readers. Restrict your thoughts to small paragraphs, and remember to end the paras on an interactive note. It should not seem that you have lost the flow between two paras as it is directly related to the reader losing their interest. While writing you tread on a very thin line of attention and captivation. Be cautious that you maintain this balance. Once you are done, you do not have to worry about much.
Practice Makes Perfect
Practice these in your writing and very soon, you are bound to have the desired outcome. It is not rocket science, but something even more complicated to grab the attention of random people. However, once you have done it, it is a piece of cake. Talk to people, learn the manners of conversational dialogue and observe the manner in which they speak or like to be spoken to. Imbibe that and let it flow amidst your niche content. That is how you make your blogs interesting and conversational. Still confused? Read it from the top again.
