A Guide to Writing Persuasive Blog Posts
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Many content marketing strategies include regular blog posts on topics relating to the company’s industry. These blogs most often provide valuable information while seeking to persuade the reader to make a decision. Persuasion is both art and science. In my freelance copywriting business, I write and edit dozens of business blogs each month for about a dozen marketing firms. Most of them can follow a basic template that makes for easier writing.
Let’s first examine some basics of persuasive writing and then I’ll provide a basic template for blog writing that I use and encourage other writers to use.
Five Characteristics of Persuasive Blog Posts
Ah, persuasion. How do we convince readers to do what our clients want them to do after reading a blog post? Here are some basic characteristics of persuasion that I routinely use in blog post I write for clients.
1. Ditch Emotion and Appeal to Logic
Stop making impassioned pleas with colorful and emotional language. Leave that for TV ads about saving animals or giving to children’s hospitals. Those heart-wrenching images work in that venue — but language doesn’t convey powerful emotion as well. Instead, trust a logical presentation of the facts. Reading people are thinking people, so go right to their heads with logic.
2. Give the Facts
Opinions are like armpits — everyone has more than one and most of them stink; at least they do to others. Readers will not be persuaded by your opinion; at least not in business related informational blogs. They’ll go to political blogs for opinion garbage that breeds arguments. Instead, give your readers hard facts. Link to current, reputable data that proves your points. Use a paragraph to explain a point and a single link to hard proof.
3. Prove Your Points
In that great movie A Few Good Men, Tom Cruise’s character tells Demi Moore’s…
