Drive Readers to Your Blog With Content That Addresses the Four E’s

Photo cour­tesy René Ehrhardt

By Denise Wake­man

When you have a blog, con­tent is essen­tial, in fact you may have heard it said that con­tent is king. In order to make cer­tain your con­tent is com­pelling and valu­able, check your posts against the four E’s of blog con­tent. These include: Edu­cate, Enter­tain, Engage, and Enrich. Not every blog post is going to do all four, yet when you strive to meet one or more of the E’s your con­tent will have greater impact.

First is Edu­cate. You want to focus your con­tent on edu­cat­ing your reader. Posts that edu­cate may include how-to’s, case stud­ies, Q and A’s. When you think of blog­ging like writ­ing an email, you may recall most likely you have answered a client’s ques­tion by email. That is con­tent. Con­tent that you can use on your blog as a blog post. You don’t need to reveal the name of the client who asked you the ques­tion, but you can bet if you get that ques­tion one or two or three times that there are a lot of peo­ple out there who want that infor­ma­tion. Q and A’s from clients make great edu­ca­tional posts.

The sec­ond is Enter­tain. Con­sider adding video posts to your blog. The very nature of video gen­er­ally makes it enter­tain­ing. You shoot a video, upload it to a site like YouTube and then embed the code on your blog. You’re imme­di­ately enter­tain­ing peo­ple, because video is so imme­di­ate. They can see you and your ges­tures. They can see your body lan­guage; they can see your facial expres­sions. And that’s an excel­lent way to engage peo­ple and enter­tain them. Even “talk­ing head” videos can be enter­tain­ing because of the imme­di­acy of the con­nec­tion with you.

The third E is Engage. Ask your read­ers to do some­thing. How do you engage them so they keep com­ing back? One way is with a poll. When you engage peo­ple, they’re par­tic­i­pat­ing, and that gets them more involved with you, and you build your rela­tion­ship a lit­tle bit deeper. There are many free polling sites like vizu.com and polldaddy.com. You setup an account you type in the ques­tion you want to ask, you put in a cou­ple of choices for answers, you click a but­ton, they give you the code, you paste it into your site. Pretty easy.

When you send the link to your poll out to all your twit­ter fol­low­ers and your Face­book friends, pretty soon you’ve got lots peo­ple com­ing to your blog. The other way to engage peo­ple is to encour­age them to com­ment. The one thing about blogs is that they’re inter­ac­tive! Peo­ple can com­ment on your blog, so you can start hav­ing a dis­cus­sion. But, you have to call them to action. You have to tell them what to do. You have to say: click on the com­ment link below, and let me know what you think about this post. You’ve got to tell read­ers what to do. That engages them. Once read­ers com­ment, then they’re more engaged. Then they’re likely to come back. To encour­age fur­ther engage­ment, respond to com­ments. That starts a con­ver­sa­tion and cre­ates a deeper connection

Finally, the last E is Enrich. How can you save your read­ers’ time, money, energy? What can you write that will make their life bet­ter? This may be some­thing moti­va­tional or a link to a valu­able resource. Share your knowl­edge, expe­ri­ence and lessons to help your reader have a bet­ter life.

The next blog post you write, see if you can com­bine two or three con­tent ele­ments and see what kind of response you get. Put your­self in your reader’s shoes and check to see if you’re engaged, enter­tained edu­cated or if your life is enriched in some way by your content.

And now I would like to invite you to claim your free instant access to my 5-part video course to learn more about how to get the best out of your blog. Visit http://masterbusinessblogging.com

From Denise Wake­man, Founder of The Blog Squad and Online Mar­ket­ing Advisor.