I was recently talking to a business owner about his blogs and suggested one of them, with the title ‘The Secrets Of Selling’  could maybe have a more interesting title.

“I can’t change that,” he told me, “it needs to be that for SEO purposes.”

And for me, that’s a problem. Being held hostage by search engine optimisation means that articles get blander and more uniform. And you know what that means…people don’t want to read them.

Isn’t it better to have a hundred people see your blog and actually read it, than a thousand see it, but don’t read it?

So this blog is just about writing something informative and engaging that people want to read. Most things online, whether they’re videos, pictures or articles that go viral do so through people liking and sharing them. I’m not saying I’m going to be able to make you an overnight internet sensation, but I am a strong believer in WOM over SEO. WOM or ‘word of mouth’ and that’s all liking and sharing is really. So…write it and they will come.

“Enough about SEO already, what about ‘twiddling’?” I hear you shout. Well, I will get to that I promise, but first I want to tell you about why I put it in the headline. Now the tech-savvy among you probably know what it is, but hopefully, the majority of you, don’t know what it means. I didn’t before I read about it.

So here comes the first lesson/tip. You’ve got to write a headline that grabs people. And unfortunately, most blogs don’t. In fact, only 20% of the people who read the headline will then go on to read the article. And then 55% of people who actually read the blog only read it for 15 seconds.

So if a hundred people saw this blog, you’d be only one of 11 that got this far. Pretty scary really. By the end of this article, I’ll just be talking to one person – Dave in Witchita.

But don’t despair, it doesn’t have to be this way.

People only have a limited amount of time and that’s why so many people don’t read a whole article, or at the very least skim over it.

So you need to offer them something new, which is hard when you’re writing something like ‘How to write a blog’. There are thousands of articles out there on this subject, so you need to stand out. By talking about twiddling I’m drawing you in with the invitation to learning something new.

People’s rational brain will be engaged because they’re going to learn how to write blogs that people will read, but their emotional brain will also be engaged with ‘twiddling’, something new and intriguing.

The other technique you can use with blogs and articles is the headline and subhead.

Books use this a lot. You get a title that is interesting and intriguing and then the subhead is more informative, letting you know what the book is about and what you’re going to get from it.

For instance, a few years ago, I wrote a book called ‘Brainhack’. It obviously is something about hacking your brain, but it could be medical, it could be drug-induced or more self-help. But with the subhead ‘Tips and tricks to unleash your brain’s full potential’, you know what you’re getting.

But  personally, I think with the way people’s attention span is going, it’s better if you can get both information and intrigue into the headline.

If you just have information in the headline, there’s no way to differentiate your article from all the others out there on the same subject and if it’s all intrigue people will lose interest very quickly if they feel there not going to get anything concrete out of reading the  article.

So on to the article itself. The general consensus is about 750 words is a good length. But at the end of the day, whether it’s 200 words or 1,000, if it’s interesting, people will read it. This for instance is over 1,000 words.

Now for the content. I always think it’s good to start with a story, an anecdote or a personal experience that brings to life the subject or how you came to write it.

The readers rational brain will be happy because it knows later in the article it will get what it came for. So it’s time for you to emotionally engage the reader.

Once you’ve got your reader emotionally engaged it’s always good to drop in an interesting statistic. If you can add in a link to the source, so much the better. An example would be the one I used about how few people who read the headline of a blog, go on to read the article itself. It gives the reader something that they will share with a friend.

Although they personally may use the tips in your blog, they’re less likely to talk about them. However they might say “I read today that…”. Don’t expect them to reference your blog, but if you’ve given them one juicy factoid to impress their friends, chances are they’ll come back for more.

Now you can give the reader the information they’ve come for. Make this as clear as possible. A numbered list is always good. This means if people are really short of time, they can go straight from the headline to the meat of the article.

And then of course you’ve got to fully explain what you were talking about in the headline, in this case, “twiddling”. To be truthful, you don’t have to wait until the end of the article to do this, just find a place where it fits and is relevant.

And so now you’re at the end of your article as I am with this. If you can, it’s nice to tie it back to the start of the article or the headline. Often blogs just seem to just peter out, so do spend a little time trying to round everything off nicely.

People remember great endings. Just as a good film can be ruined by a bad ending, so can a blog. You also want to cement in people’s minds the one thought you’re trying to communicate.

And mine is: to write something that people will want to read and stop obsessing with SEO. And this is where twiddling comes in.

Google has its own blacklisting system called “Twiddler” that manipulates website rankings and search results. I like to think of it as some little room deep in the heart of the Googleplex that has people called Twiddlers deciding which website is good or not, but it’s probably just some algorithm. Its aim is to censor offensive material, so unless you are writing an article about why Hitler was so great, I think you’re fairly safe. But my point is, Google is in charge of the game. It’s their ball and they decide the rules.

However much you pay some tech guru, they are never going to be able to keep up with Google. Just concentrate on writing something well structured and interesting and people will really want to read it.