How much care and consideration are you putting into your blog strategy and the goal of creating valuable blog content?
Valuable blog content is what separates blogs that generate traffic, trust, and enquiries from those that sit quietly on a website without impact.
“Valuable” is often misconstrued to mean viral content, which has an immediate global impact. 99% of the time, virality cannot be achieved without significant luck or resources.
What Is Valuable Blog Content?
Valuable blog content helps readers learn something useful, solve a problem, or gain a new perspective. It combines clarity, originality, usefulness, and relevance so readers leave the page with something meaningful and practical they can apply.
Blogs remain essential, and service-based businesses can leverage them to their full advantage by carefully considering the value they can create. This post breaks down five digestible, actionable traits that help determine whether your blog content truly delivers value and how you can incorporate them into your writing.
1. Originality: Say Something That Isn’t Everywhere Already
One of the core conversations around AI in content creation was the inability to create truly unique content.
It stands out so much because of how “samey” it is, especially when content generated by AI hasn’t had an editor’s QA pass. The same can be said of business and service information, especially in a competitive market.
Marketing is an excellent example of this, as a core way to differentiate your value proposition through your blog is to focus on specific niches, incorporate case studies, and effectively utilise your business’s unique experiences and perspectives.
The idea behind originality isn’t to be radically different or to reinvent the wheel, but to take the time to consider how you can sprinkle in a bit of your business into the content you create.
Marketing, as a whole, is highly saturated. There’s a significantly high chance that the content I want to create has already been written multiple times.
So, how do I differentiate myself in this field?
I write from a strong personal perspective, as though we’re conversing. This allows me to inject more personality into my content and include phrases and mannerisms you wouldn’t necessarily find on an agency’s blog.
Would this work for your business?
Maybe, but the question should rather be: “How can we take this idea and use it in our content?”
Find your unique angle and use it to strengthen your content, build deeper trust, and stand out.
2. Clarity: Structure and Simplicity Help Readers Stay
Clarity, in essence, is about building trust through your blog content.
Poor grammar, rambling content, and an illogical or poorly edited flow ruin the perceived value of your content, even if the information itself is groundbreaking.
As a reader, it’s hard to look past these elements, and no amount of bells and whistles will help them overcome this initial perception hurdle.
When creating blog content with clarity in mind, we want to ensure two things:
- The general structure of the blog content makes sense and is informative
- The post is scannable and uses key formatting techniques
Formatting and structuring techniques, such as short paragraphs, varied sentence structure, a clear heading hierarchy, and easy-to-understand language, all contribute to the post’s credibility and readability.
This clarity provides users with an immediate positive perception. It can be the difference between them reading the whole post or immediately bouncing because the content looks too intimidating or hastily put together.
I recommend auditing your blog post template before focusing on this element. Your post may be well-written and properly formatted, but site templates or styling settings can cause a myriad of issues that affect readability.
I typically have to adjust line height and font weight for businesses using a blog for the first time, since these settings weren’t accounted for in longer-form content. a blog for the first time, as these settings weren’t accounted for with longer-form content.
3. Usefulness: Solve a Problem or Answer a Question
Now, to the general thought most of us give when considering whether something is valuable or not: was it useful?
Valuable blog content always helps the reader achieve, learn, or solve a problem.
Failing that, it should entertain.
For business blogs, the goal is rarely to entertain alone. Entertaining elements can be included, such as videos or memes, but the end goal is typically to create an impact that the reader can take away.
Using usefulness as a guide when choosing blog topics to create is a smart idea.
Doing so forces you to consider the post’s outcome, not just the benefit of creating it. This framing helps boost both SEO and conversion value, as users who find your posts practical are likely to continue to your other pages or engage with CTAs.
Additionally, you’ll find that FAQs and objections make for the perfect topics, as these immediately present the “value” of the post. These types of posts also make for effective search queries for SEO.
If you ever find yourself struggling to audit a post and are unsure whether it’s truly valuable, consider how “useful” it is to a reader in your target audience.
That will 9 times out of 10 give you the answer.
4. Specificity: Avoid General Advice That Applies to Everyone
As the saying goes: “If you sell to everyone, you sell to no-one”
Specificity is a value trait that may not be relevant to everyone. If you’re a SaaS company selling to tech firms, your content would benefit from being highly specific to that market.
The same can be said for any niche where the target audience is a specific demographic.
Content written for a design agency marketing to high street businesses and a SaaS company targeting tech firms fundamentally has to be different.
This is where specificity can be a powerful boon.
Creating content that speaks specifically to your target audience does a few things:
- Builds immediate credibility
- Highlights you as a thought leader in that area
- Allows CTAs to have more impact
When creating specific content, incorporate examples and details that make the content feel personalised, such as industry-specific language, case studies, images, and more. You can also implement a “show, don’t tell” element by using examples, industry frameworks, and more niche angles that only your audience would understand.
5. Engagement: Keep the Reader Interested From Start to Finish
Good engagement improves time on page and signals relevance to search engines. It also means your content is performing well and hooking the user.
Higher engagement may result in more link clicks, conversions, and sales.
Strong clarity, as noted in point 2, is also attributed to key engagement factors, as a solid blog structure helps to reduce the obstacles commonly associated with poor post engagement.
Additionally, the content itself will play a core role in engagement.
If we assume all four other points in this post are strong with your content, what else is left?
The story, rhythm, and tone of voice of your writing.
Storytelling and the content’s pacing and rhythm are powerful ways to keep users engaged. There’s only so much someone can take of robotic-sounding, bland sentences before they give up.
Here are a few ways you can consciously improve engagement when writing blog content:
- Mix in different sentence structures and lengths throughout your post
- Ensure your tone of voice is consistent throughout all posts for uniformity
- Incorporate personal anecdotes where relevant
- Consider breaking up informational content with short stories about your clients or work (where applicable)
- Reread your content to ensure there aren’t stretches of non-engaging content
Creating Valuable Blog Content More Consistently
As an experienced writer, I still miss certain elements on the first pass of any post.
As I like to write, it quickly becomes apparent when this happens.
For many businesses, though, this re-auditing of content isn’t always a luxury. Once content is created, resources are pushed elsewhere, and nailing all five of these value traits on a first pass is challenging if you’re not accustomed to writing long-form content.
They do, however, have a considerable impact, and fortunately, going back through the content and optimising it is easy, albeit time-consuming.
If you have posts that could benefit from a value refresh, get in touch. We can work together to sculpt your content into a valuable sculpture that attracts and engages your target audience.
