What if you could get more people to read your blog posts, get more people to engage with your content and ultimately get more people to buy your stuff, as a result, because they see you as someone who’s on their side and know how to teach them to get what they need, in the right way?
If that sounds like something that would be useful to you, stay tuned and watch this because today you’re going to learn how to supercharge your blog posts using NLP.
Table of Contents:
Download Handy Sheet
Write Better Blog Posts
So today you’re going to learn a few essential tips that will help you to improve your blog posts. This is a great way to captivate your audience, so they become more engaged with your message and ultimately buy more of your stuff.
And to do this we’re also going to use some NLP.
The Strategy
I know that some people freak out when they think of NLP – but it’s not black magic that you can use to force people to do whatever you want. There’s a misconception about NLP, and I know because I’ve been studying it for years.
In reality, it’s just a series of simple psychological techniques that you can use to make your message clearer and easier to understand. So today we’re going to use it to enhance the way you teach and the way you structure your blog posts. So this is going to help your readers to understand things better, and so they get better results from reading your stuff. That means we’re mainly using NLP for the benefit of your readers.
And I’m going to give you a rundown of the easiest ways to improve your blog posts and I’m gonna list them out for you. So you might want to pause this video, and create a new folder on your desktop because I’ve got a diagram that you can download and keep, and that will help you to remember this stuff for the future because you’ll probably forget it otherwise, right? We all forget important stuff, don’t we?
So create a new folder now, and call it ‘profit copilot tips’, or something else descriptive and we’ll come back to this later on.
Using NLP
Ok, so, the first tip, number 1, – and possibly the most important is the post title. I mean think about it ok. Chances are your post is listed somewhere among many others… maybe in the search engine results page, and so you need a strong title that stands out so more people click on it and read your post.
I know some of you guys struggle with this, it’s a tricky thing to learn and I’m just as guilty as anybody else for putting headlines on the back burner. But it’s ok because I’ve got some really simple ideas you can use if you’re stuck. Ok, we can use three types of psychological triggers, so we’re injecting some NLP into the title.
Psychological Triggers
The first trigger is ‘curiosity’ because it can make content feel irresistible, it’s a deep emotion that’s closely linked to desire and anticipation. Just look at a number of headlines in magazines that use this because most of them play on this trigger. The next trigger is ‘a special announcement’ because people like to be the first to hear exclusive things. And then the last trigger we’re looking at today is ‘self-interest’, because this speaks to desire, to people’s fears and their needs.
Just look at a number of headlines in magazines that use this because most of them play on this trigger. The next trigger is ‘a special announcement’ because people like to be the first to hear exclusive things. And then the last trigger we’re looking at today is ‘self-interest’, because this speaks to desire, to people’s fears and their needs.
And then the last trigger we’re looking at today is ‘self-interest’, because this speaks to desire, to people’s fears and their needs.
A good way to structure your title is to include a benefit or a promise. I’ll give you some examples that have been proven to work because they’re from Jonathan Fields, so you could have something like….
“Are your sleep habits making you fat, nasty and dumb?”… Or how about something like… “How to Lose 20 lbs. of Fat in 30 Days… Without Doing Any Exercise”.
Ok, these are very powerful headlines that you can use to inspire you. Here is a link to Jonathan’s blog post about headlines.
And also, as Ryan Biddulph from Blogging from Paradise points out, you don’t need to spend ages crafting these headlines, just an extra 5 or 10 minutes can create the world of difference. In fact, Ryan has a whole bunch of his own awesome tips for writing better titles.
Ok, so now you know how to get attention, great, but how are you going to make your posts the best they can be? How are you going to make sure people clearly understand what you’re saying, and learn whatever you’re teaching them, and get the results they want?
The 4Mat Structure
For that we can turn to a structure that’s frequently used in NLP, it’s called the 4MAT. And it was created an ‘expert of learning’, called Bernice McCarthy.
Here, we present content in four distinct sections, and that makes it easy for the reader to consume and understand the message.
Let’s go through each of sections now and discover the best way to present your content, so it appeals to the 4 different types of learners – so this makes your content easily understood.
The Why
The first section of your blog post is called ‘the why’. So you explain why the thing you’re teaching is important. So you might talk about the end results. You’d explain the overall promise you’re making and why they should learn from you. This also helps to hold people’s attention, because you immediately give them a good reason to stick around on the page.
The What
The second section is called ‘the what’. Here you explain what they’re going to learn from you. And this helps them to understand what they’re learning. So think about all the things they need to know in order to do something, and here you’d present the facts and figures that support whatever you’re teaching.
The How
And then we move onto the main section, ‘the how’. This is where you teach your readers how to do something, this is the main bulk of your content, this is where you do the teaching portion of the blog post. I’d recommend that at least 50% – 60% of your post is made up of ‘the how’. So you’d teach your readers how to do something new, maybe you’d go through it all step by step, but here is where you go into specific detail.
Now, you might be thinking, if the how is so important, why don’t we start with that? Well, you could but you’d probably end up confusing your readers – you need to ease them into things a bit, and give them a good run-up to jumping in and getting their hands dirty. So we use the why to explain the importance of something, we use the what to explain what they’re going to learn, and then we use the how to explain how they should do it.
The If
Which brings us to the final section, the if. This is where you explain what will happen if they follow your advice and take action. Or you can explain what will happen if they don’t follow your advice. This is where you paint a picture of the end results. Now, at this section you also have an opportunity to ‘lift-up’ your audience, to motivate them and encourage them to take action, to get the results they want.
So what you’re doing here, is making it easy for people to understand your message. When you make things possible for people, when you break down the walls and the hurdles that prevent people from achieving their goals when you show them that it can be a reality, then they’ll come back to you again and again.
And that’s how you create engaging content that people will love. So, if you follow this structure your ability to teach will be improved, which means your audience has a better understanding of what they need to do, which means they get more of the results they want. And they see you as a trusted advisor because you’re giving them what they need.
Bonus
I’ve also got one more bonus tip for you, but this time it’s got nothing to do with NLP – instead, it’s a great tool I found that has helped me to improve my blog posts. And you can get it from grammarly.com – it’s a spelling and grammar checker that’s free to use and it sits inside the browser as an app, and automatically scans everything you write, as you’re writing it. It’s helped me out a lot and I’m making fewer mistakes as a result. So it might help you too if you write a lot.
Ok, so before I go, as I mentioned earlier you can download the diagram I made for you that explains everything that we spoke about today – you can keep it, so you don’t forget about any of this in the future. Just download it now and save it to the folder you made earlier.
Right, I think that’s about it for today, if you’ve found this to be useful then you might like my other videos and you can get them when you go to profitcopilot.com/subscribe and jump on the mailing list.