Your Blog Doesn’t Have to be Boring

First, Have Something Interesting to Say

It should be obvious that you have something relevant to say in your blog, right? Mind, what’s interesting to you may not be interesting to your audience (recall when your child tells you what other kids are doing on YouTube. To your child, this is the most fascinating thing ever; you, on the other hand, would just as soon asphyxiate under the endless pile of laundry).

Figure out what your audience finds interesting; what are their problems? What do they need you to tell them about or help them with? What’s in it for them? Figure that out and then deliver.

Conduct an audience analysis in which you survey, research (friendly cyber stalk), and interview current members of your audience to know exactly what they need.

Generally-speaking, audiences have four underlying motives. These are:

• The need for connection

• The need for security

• The need for recognition

• The need for growth

Second, Write Your Blogs in a Conversational Voice

Once you know what your audience needs and wants to hear, say it in a way that it’s conversational.

Yes, we know your authentic brand voice for your business blog is probably going to lean toward

conservative in that you’re going to use grammatical English and little slang or jargon, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a voice.

A few tips for writing voiceful content are:

• Use contractions; they loosen up your writing.

• Vary sentence lengths; have some short, punchy sentences amidst your flowing prose.

• Write to your audience; use the implied you. Your blog is not the time to impress your former English 101 professor with your mastery of the objective voice.

Third, Tell Stories

Use your unique voice to engage your audience with stories; blogs that tell stories that resonate are anything but boring.

One of the many ways stories connects us is by causing our brains to release oxytocin, a bonding hormone. When you tell stories, your reader or listener synchs with you.

A Story about the Power of Story

A great example of how story works comes from master storyteller Kindra Hall’s book Stories that Stick. The(spoiler) summary of the story Hall tells is that she and her husband, a man who never shopped and certainly never shopped for cologne, visited a glittery department store while traveling.

A cologne rep approached Hall’s husband with an elegant box. The salesman launched into the tale of the cologne’s seductive history, a history involving limited supply, secret intercontinental transport, and preference by one of America’s most attractive and notorious former presidents.

Without once sampling the costly fragrance or even hearing a description of what it smelled like, Hall’s husband said, “I’ll take it.” The salesman’s story was so powerful and created such a strong association between the product and the qualities Hall’s husband clearly wanted to embody that he purchased it. The story forged a connection that he wanted to be a part of without him even realizing it. This is why you need and want stories that get your audience’s brain cells exploding. This, too, is why you need to know who your audience is and what motivates them. In the above’s case, Hall’s husband, like many of us, consume products that reflect our connection to our identities.

Fourth, Make Your Blog Visually Appealing

Though listed fourth, the need for your blog to be visually appealing is of paramount importance. Why? Because no one is going to read your story or hear your amazing voice if they’re greeted by a blocky text wall as soon as they click your link. Avoid text walls by breaking up your text into short paragraphs. Forget the five-paragraph essay and all of its related trauma or that your English 101 teacher would balk at your one-to-two sentence paragraphs. You’re a big, bad blogger now; you know better.

Shorter is smarter and is way more visually stimulating. You can also ixnay the boring factor by:

• Using bullet lists like this one

• Incorporating a couple of colors, but really, just a couple. You don’t want your readers to feel like they’ve stumbled on an acid trip by clicking on your blog (far out, dude)

• Adding pictures or illustrations that make the blog’s key concepts easy to understand

Fifth, Use Social Media and Calls to Action to Give Activate Your Audience

So, just in case no one has ever said it, here it goes: your blog is actually a work of persuasive writing. Even if you employ anecdotes the entire time, you want to have some kind of engagement, right?

All persuasive writing has the end goal of getting an audience to take action (make a purchase, hire a service, e-mail their Aunt Linda, whatever) or to change their mindset about an issue and oh my gosh has this been an English 101 class the entire time? Gasp! Deception! But seriously...you need to end with engagement.

There are a multitude of ways you can do this. For example:

• Social media is all about connection through sharing and recognition. Encourage your uses to connect by sharing their stories or pictures of them using your product on social media. Create a unique hashtag for users to use, so they can see their content. Validate the need for recognition by featuring the best-of shared content each week to further engagement with your target audience.

• Share user success stories on your social media page and in your blog where appropriate; this will trigger your audience’s need to both be successful audiences you hope to attract) and to be perceived as successful (audiences you have already have a relationship with).

• Use social media or your blog to show then-and-now snapshots of audience members and how they’ve grown or evolved through interaction with your company.

Those are just a few examples; the sky’s the limit on engaging with your audience through your blog, though. We assure you, any content that’s visual and voiceful and that clearly hits your audience square between their motivational goalposts is going to be anything but boring.

Take it from us...blogs are anything but boring to read or to write, but if you’re struggling with how to write a business blog that doesn’t collect dust, we get it. Writing entertaining blogs isn’t always easy, but if you’d like for it to be, contact us, The Storyteller Agency. We specialize in writing blogs that are as engaging and as interesting as you are.