About 94% of readers online share blog posts that they think are ‘helpful’ to their friends and connections, research suggests.

This remarkable statistic highlights the importance of creating posts that are not just interesting, but useful. If it is useful, the likelihood of sharing will be maximised.

When a member of your target audience reads one of your posts, there must surely be a number of ideal outcomes. The reader will understand and engage with the content, and ultimately behave in a manner consistent with your objectives.

Ideally, one of those behaviours will be to share your blog with their friends and connections.

So how do you ensure that your posts are useful?

There are a number of things you can do. Here are three of them:

Don’t write about things your audience is not interested in. Identify the problems they want solved and the issues that occupy their consciousness. Far too many blog posts address issues that are of interest to the author, not the audience.

Don’t simply highlight the problem or issue and discuss how bad it all is. Offer solutions. Tell your reader what they (not someone else) can do to solve the problem or address the issue. The solution needs to be as specific and practically actionable as possible.

And don’t just tell your reader what to do. Where possible, demonstrate how they can do it, and how other people or organisations have done it. Telling stories about how others have applied solutions can be very powerful.

Further considerations will be addressed in subsequent articles.

Don’t just write a blog post with the objective of getting it read. Focus on getting your content shared.

Source of core statistics – RAMONA SUKHRAJ – IMPACT – JANUARY 2017