How to Write More Persuasive Content for Your Blog

Content marketing, the art of producing articles and other materials to inform and entertain your audience, can be a highly effective medium for converting your website traffic to paying customers. The idea is to either use your content directly to persuade a consumer to buy from you, or to push them to finalize the deal with a call-to-action (which is difficult, considering 96 percent of your visitors won’t be ready to buy).

Either way, the success of your strategy depends on how persuasive your content is, and unfortunately, most business owners don’t know the best way to persuade their audience.

How to Make Your Content Persuasive

So what can you do to make your content more persuasive?

1. Clarify your strategy. First, you need to clarify and describe your core strategy. What are you trying to accomplish? Are you trying to earn more conversions so you can provide more qualified leads to your sales team? Are you simply trying to help users understand that they need your products? Without a primary goal or intention, you won’t be able to define or measure “success” for your brand.
2. Identify and understand your target audience. To be an effective persuader, you need to know who you’re persuading; market research should therefore be your first step in making your content more persuasive. You need to know what your target audience’s beliefs and values are, so you can appeal to them. You need to know their personalities and behaviors, so you can address them with the right tone. And you need to know why they’re different from other demographics, so you can create content that’s meant specifically for them.
3. Work with a professional. There are hundreds of variables to consider when you’re creating content; in addition to being persuasive, you’ll need to be articulate and optimized for search engines, and you’ll need lots of that high-quality content if you want to succeed. For most businesses, the most cost-efficient and reliable way to achieve this is by working with a content services provider like Rightly Written. They’ll already have the expertise necessary to craft compelling content, and they’ll be able to do it more efficiently than any newcomers you bring on board.
4. Make your primary goal serving the reader. You may be tempted to hard sell your readers, if your end goal is getting them to convert, but it’s better if your main intentions are serving your readers’ needs. Don’t try to cram more calls-to-action into your blog post; instead, make your blog more informative, and more valuable to your readers. This is going to build trust, and will probably attract a bigger audience to your brand as well.
5. Show off your expertise. Moz is known as one of the foremost expert brands in SEO, and for good reason; they dedicated themselves to becoming experts in the field, and frequently show off that expertise with high levels of detail, original research, statistics, and anecdotes from personal experience. If you want to persuade an audience, you first need to convince them that you’re an expert on the subject.
6. Link to other sources. You can also build trust and become more persuasive by linking to outside sources. Chances are, there are people with more expertise and more knowledge than you have on a particular subject. Referencing them in the body of your work shows that you’ve done your research, that you know what you’re talking about, and that you’re not alone in your perspectives, opinions, or findings.
7. Explain each topic in-depth. It’s free to create a website and post content, so if you want to provide persuasive, valuable content, you have to put the effort into creating it. Go as in-depth to each topic as you can, providing rich details and exploring the topic comprehensively. Don’t leave your audience with any questions they need to have answered elsewhere. If your post grows too long, you can include a summary at the beginning or end, so skimmers can get the full value of your article as well.

The Importance of AB Testing

There’s no solidly reliable conversion strategy that every brand can follow; brands and audiences are just too different, and there are too many variables at play. It’s important to experiment with different strategies and tactics, so you can see how they work in your specific situation and optimize your approach gradually with the tactics you discover work best.

AB testing is one of the best ways to do this. At its simplest, AB testing is producing two variations of a single strategy (like two blog posts with different tones), and monitoring to see which variation performs better. It’s the easiest way to learn which tactics work and which ones don’t, and will provide you with detailed insights about your audience.