Everyone these days needs a blog. It’s the best way to promote a brand. Blogs offer an insight into the brand’s ethos or value set, and they are written to be accessible to a target audience.

A brand can be anything from a person to a product or even an event. Content varies from brand to brand, but it usually involves a topic with information related to the product, person, or event that the brand represents.

Here are five tips for writing effective, engaging blog posts.

Polish Your Work

There can be no errors in your post. The most common grammar mistakes detract from the message, and they distract those readers who know their language. You can also confuse your readers with inaccurate punctuation or poor syntax.

Before you publish anything for public consumption, you need to edit your work for structural issues (like what information goes into which paragraph) and then proofread your work thoroughly for technical errors (like spelling, punctuation, grammar, and syntax).

You must use paragraphs. Your reader wants to absorb and understand logical sentences that have been grouped together correctly. Each paragraph must have sentences dealing with the same idea. When you change your idea, or develop into another idea, start a new paragraph.

Fake news or clickbait articles typically use loads of exclamation marks and capitalized words. Your blog posts will lose credibility with a knowledgeable audience if you do this. Never randomly capitalize words which may seem important, but which are not titles or other forms of proper nouns.

Know Your Brand

When you are writing a blog post for a brand, you need to know your brand’s voice. Is it informal and contemporary? Or formal and traditional (professional)? Your choice of words links into this aspect of blog writing. You can damage your brand by producing posts with an inconsistent voice, so if you are taking over the content writing of a brand, you must research and familiarize yourself with previous posts. This way you will be able to continue the same stylistic elements of your brand. If you are creating your brand from scratch, you need to decide on your voice beforehand, and this, in turn, links into the next point, which is to know your audience.

You must also understand the ethos of your brand: what it stands for. Your content should always reflect this, and not your own personal opinions or agenda. You will need to identify this, and be aware of any potential conflict. When you choose your content, you can consciously ensure that it aligns with your brand message.

Know Your Audience

Feeding into an understanding of your brand is an understanding of your audience. You should never write for yourself, unless it is in a diary that you keep under your pillow. When you publish for an audience, you need to know who should be reading your work. You also need to understand their motives, needs, beliefs, and demographics. If you are writing for a corporate brand, you will be able to gain insight into your audience from the company’s audience research data. If you are writing for your own brand, you need to be very clear on the kinds of people you want to attract to your brand, and tailor your message to suit their views and lifestyles. This is linked to your brand’s voice, which is why it needs to be consistent.

Your content also needs to appeal to your target audience. It should be engaging from the start, without sounding like clickbait. There is an obvious flavor to clickbait stories, which offer the reader an unsolved puzzle, whereas a good blog post will tell the reader why the article is worth reading in the first few sentences.

Keep It Simple

Write in short, simple sentences. Long, complex sentences, one after the next, become exhausting to read and you will lose your readers. There is no need to patronize your readers with really basic language, but you should avoid being verbose. Vary your sentence lengths to change pace. Short sentences speed up the pace of the article, and long ones slow it down. You can use this to your advantage: variety keeps readers engaged and interested.

Blog posts should also be short. Around 500–800 words is a good length, and if you have precise, directed content with good graphics, your post will be effective.

Lengthy posts can sometimes become convoluted, and if you give in to the temptation to include too much information, you will lose your readers. Try to keep it short, with a clear, punchy point.

Use Good-Quality Images

This is the element which offers readers a visual connection to the written message. You need to use professional images to project a professional image for your brand. So that means no blurry, bland cellphone photos. You can find excellent stock images online, and if you are writing for a corporate brand, the creatives on your team should provide their chosen product images.

This is important because it also affects public perception of your brand. If your audience sees a poor-quality image, then it may not matter what you have written. Bad graphics diminish the credibility of an article. The effect looks amateur, in the same way that bad spelling and grammar looks amateur.

A good tip for choosing an image is to go for the color. A good, clear, and colorful image attracts the reader’s eye first, and then motivates that reader to see what the story is about.