Creating Content – It’s all about the 3 E’s

The art of coming up with great content

Last time, I talked about setting up your WordPress blog. If you missed it, you can find it here.  I have  also talked a little about the importance of positioning yourself as an expert in your blog posts, here. 

In this article, I am going to talk about the next step in creating your blog, your content.

Do you remember back in elementary school, you were taught the 3 R’s.  Reading, Writing and Arithmetic?  Well, believe or not, there are 3 E’s you need to be aware of for your blog content.  They are:

• Engage
• Educate and…
• Entertain.

You need to have at least one of these elements in your blog posts.  If you are so talented that one of your posts has all 3, it’s even better because that post could go viral.  You could then see your visitor traffic stats climb higher than the price of gas after a Middle East peace crisis.

So how do you do it?  How does one get that great blog post that elicits comments and keeps your readers coming back for more?  Well, the first thing that you need is an idea. The best ideas come from what you are exposed to combined with your purpose.

The purpose of my blog is to attract and then educate people who want to learn how to market their network marketing businesses.  So naturally, my posts are going to be centered around that topic.  Yours may be different because your purpose may be different.

Therefore, as a consequence of my constantly reading and learning new things about different attraction marketing techniques, I come up with tons of ideas.  So one highly important key is to continuously educate yourself.

However, sometimes my best ideas come to me at weird times.  So, often times it’s best to write down your ideas if you can’t get to them right away.  (Actually, I have found the recorder on my phone works very well for those ideas).

Often times, to get my ideas out, I will start with paper.  Yup, you heard it, the next viral piece does not always begin with me just sitting at the keyboard, typing away.  Sometimes, just writing your key thoughts on a piece of paper helps alot.  It’s much like an outline, but less formal.

After your piece is written, let it sit for a few hours or a few days. There is no rush to publish it right away.  When you go back to it and read it again, more ideas will come.  You will see sentences that can be polished and new inspiration may even begin.

Finally, before you publish you must add the Pièce de résistance – an intriguing photo.  A photo is like the icing on the cake, it entices the reader with some visual interest.  There are lot of great photos sources on the internet.  Some are free and some are paid.  I have used Flickr , MorgueFile, and IstockPhoto (paid) in the past, but there are plenty of sites if you just Google free photos.

If you find that you really are not a writer and can’t come up with ideas, there is always outsourcing.  I wrote an article on outsourcing, but if you need further help with outsourcing, feel free to e-mail me for further resources.

In the meantime, pick up your pen and pad, get those keys moving, write something!

Next time I will talk about getting people to read what you wrote.  How to get traffic.

Tagged with: Blogging • home based business blogging • Marketing • wordpress

Filed under: Blogging

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!