Writing content that converts is more than just doing keyword research. Don’t get me wrong keyword research is necessary! But understanding your audience is even more crucial. It’s not your job to sell; that’s the job of the sales page. It is your job to presell that is to warm up your audience, so they are receptive to your recommendations. When you are doing this successfully writing content that converts is relatively easy.

The reason most people start with keyword research is that they have no audience when they first start a blog. Blogging in the first six months is a very lonely experience. You feel as though you are the only person reading your blog in the universe, and in truth you probably are. Over time when you develop your content, your tribe will come.

Until it does, it’s quite difficult to understand your audience. You can’t ask them directly, so you have to be a little bit smart about your research. Going to forums and hang out where your target audience hangs out. First of all be very aware that you have to define your target audience.

For instance, if you are in the money making niche you are targeting more specifically than people who need more money. Think about it there are about 6 billion adults on the planet and how many of them that you know has enough money? That leaves 6 billion people with the problem. However, if you target all of them, you will end up by appealing to none of them.

The Sieve Versus the Funnell

Imagine two kitchen utensils, the colander, and the funnel. A colander is round like a bowl with a lot of holes in it. It’s usually used in the kitchen to drain water from solids. So if you cook say rice or peas, you pour them into the colander which retains the food, but the hot water rushes out. A funnel, on the other hand, is triangular in shape with a thin narrow but long base. It is very broad at the top, and if you were to fill it with sand, there would be thousands of grains of sand at the top.

However, the weight of the sand would crush down because it narrows as it goes down the sand becomes more compact. This is what should be happening to readers of your blog. There are a lot of readers that the top; they narrow down in numbers. However, those numbers become more concentrated or more interested in your content until that the base of the funnel where it’s very narrow there are only a few grains of sand compared to the top. In blogging terms, these are people who are buyers. They are much more crucial than your readers at the top because reading your content has converted them into buyers.

Interact with your target audience

Read their blogs
Read what your competitors have to say! Do they have a lot of comments on their blogs? If they do then they are interacting well with their audience. Their content is engaging enough to encourage their readers to reply and make suggestions and comments.

Join similar groups on Facebook
type in your keyword on Facebook and join groups or your target audience hanging out. Introduce yourself in these groups. Listen and observe the problems that you will have to address. A Facebook group is a good place to develop your personality. Yes I know you have probably developed your character already but I’m talking about your blogging persona. You may not necessarily be yourself or you may be yourself but targeting certain aspects of your personality.

Once you have your blog set up, there are several things that confuse the reader at worst or at best muddy the waters. Keep your blog with plenty of white space. Break up your content using headers. I try to insert a header at least every 400 words. It makes your content look less dense and easy to read.
Keep your navigation super simple. Your readers are not going to spend precious time trying to find where you put content they will simply leave and find elsewhere. You can have too many bells and whistles on a blog. Keep the theme very simple and don’t have animated icons or images that jump out at people unawares.

If you need a more complex navigation then create a secondary menu. I generally call my legalities and I put in the privacy policy, the affiliates disclaimer, the site map and anything else I don’t want to confuse my reader with. I generally put this in the footer of the blog where it’s out of the way.

Make sure you install Google Analytics because you can find how long your visitors stay on each page. This sorts out what content is engaging in which content isn’t. You will find when you start that the majority of your readers will stay less than 30 seconds! That’s not even long enough to leave the home page.

Try not to lecture your reader

Don’t use a higher all the time. Use the word “you”. This makes the reader feel involved it makes them feel that you understand them. Try and be a little bit casual. Imagine you’re leaning on the door post of your kitchen, looking in at your friends sitting right around a wooden table. Suppose you have a mug of steaming coffee in your hand and you’re just chatting to them as though you haven’t got a care in the world.

Having said that trying gets the point quickly don’t waffle! Your readers have a very short attention span. Everybody understands stories and they are very effective way of conveying meaning to your audience. By definition your stories about you but turn them round to your reader by using words such as
“I don’t know about you, but”
“if you’ve ever done this, you will know what I mean”
“have you ever had this happen to you?”

Don’t glide your readers with science or industry jargon keep it simple. Above all keep your copntent real.