Education Blog

When you have a blog, content is essential, in fact you may have heard it said that content is king. In order to make certain your content is compelling and valuable, check your posts against the four E’s of blog content. These include: Educate, Entertain, Engage, and Enrich. Not every blog post is going to do all four, yet when you strive to meet one or more of the E’s your content will have greater impact.

First is Educate. You want to focus your content on educating your reader. Posts that educate may include how-to’s, case studies, Q and A’s. When you think of blogging like writing an email, you may recall most likely you have answered a client’s question by email. That is content. Content that you can use on your blog as a blog post. You don’t need to reveal the name of the client who asked you the question, but you can bet if you get that question one or two or three times that there are a lot of people out there who want that information. Q and A’s from clients make great educational posts.

The second is Entertain. Consider adding video posts to your blog. The very nature of video generally makes it entertaining. You shoot a video, upload it to a site like YouTube and then embed the code on your blog. You’re immediately entertaining people, because video is so immediate. They can see you and your gestures. They can see your body language; they can see your facial expressions. And that’s an excellent way to engage people and entertain them. Even “talking head” videos can be entertaining because of the immediacy of the connection with you.

The third E is Engage. Ask your readers to do something. How do you engage them so they keep coming back? One way is with a poll. When you engage people, they’re participating, and that gets them more involved with you, and you build your relationship a little bit deeper. There are many free polling sites like vizu.com and polldaddy.com. You setup an account you type in the question you want to ask, you put in a couple of choices for answers, you click a button, they give you the code, you paste it into your site. Pretty easy.

When you send the link to your poll out to all your twitter followers and your Facebook friends, pretty soon you’ve got lots people coming to your blog. The other way to engage people is to encourage them to comment. The one thing about blogs is that they’re interactive! People can comment on your blog, so you can start having a discussion. But, you have to call them to action. You have to tell them what to do. You have to say: click on the comment link below, and let me know what you think about this post. You’ve got to tell readers what to do. That engages them. Once readers comment, then they’re more engaged. Then they’re likely to come back. To encourage further engagement, respond to comments. That starts a conversation and creates a deeper connection

Finally, the last E is Enrich. How can you save your readers’ time, money, energy? What can you write that will make their life better? This may be something motivational or a link to a valuable resource. Share your knowledge, experience and lessons to help your reader have a better life.

The next blog post you write, see if you can combine two or three content elements and see what kind of response you get. Put yourself in your reader’s shoes and check to see if you’re engaged, entertained educated or if your life is enriched in some way by your content.