We may be visual creatures, but good copy is still incredibly powerful. That’s why it’s so important to always work on making your copy the best it can be. Whether you’ve just started blogging, or you’ve been at it for years, there’s always room for some improvement. Here are 5 easy tricks for writing better copy that your audience will absolutely love.

Know Your Audience 

First thing’s first: Do you have a good grasp on who your audience is? This is the No. 1 thing to know before you draft any piece of copy. You really want to hone in on who you’re writing for so you can create copy that speaks their language, and fulfills their needs.

You should be able to answer questions like:

• What’s the age range of my readers?
• What are their biggest pain points?
• How can I help them solve their problem?
• What kind of language do they frequently use?

Once you have a good grasp on the answers to these questions, you’ll be able to better create copy that specifically connects with them. You’ll be creating valuable content that helps answer their problems, and writing in a way that resonates with them.

What’s that mean exactly? Well, if your audience is fairly young, hip and sassy, you won’t want to be writing overly stuffy copy that they won’t relate to. If your audience is pretty modest, curse-filled language would hardly be appropriate.

When your audience reads copy that speaks to them, you’re able to create a quick connection. (I go over this more in depth in my free e-course, How to Find Your Writing Voice.)

Quote a Source

Creating great content means providing lots of value, and an easy way to add more value to your posts is to quote an expert source. This not only shows your readers that you’ve done your research, but that you’ve got some high-profile experts who back what you’re saying, too.

The bonus part of quoting an expert source in your blog posts is that they may even share it, meaning your post can possibly gain even more traction and exposure. If you’ve spoken with a source directly, always be sure to not only thank them for their time but to also send the link to the post when done, in hopes that they’ll share it!

If you’ve quoted a source without speaking to them directly (like you pulled something that they’ve previously written) always send a note with a link to your post letting them know you’ve included them. Sometimes you’ll get a response, and sometimes you won’t, but you might just get a good social share out of it!

Make it Easy to Digest

There’s nothing wrong with creating long-form content—in fact, search engines love it! But you want to make sure it’s easy to digest. This means creating subheads, bullet points and making sure your paragraphs are short and sweet.

Why? A lot of people still scan. That isn’t to say the blood, sweat and tears your poured into writing a fantastic post isn’t appreciated, it’s just that not everyone will read every single word.

Use this knowledge to your advantage by bolding important sentences, breaking up your content into subheads, using bullet points and by summarizing your main points at the end of your post. (For more on how to write the perfect blog post, check out this post.)

Sprinkle in Statistics 

Just like adding an expert quote to your posts helps make them stronger, so does sprinkling in some statistics and hard data. And even if you aren’t a trained journalist, this is fairly easy to do.

You can typically trust sources like government agencies or research studies. Just be wary of quoting from places like Wikipedia without double checking. While Wikipedia is a great starting point, it’s still written and submitted by its users and isn’t guaranteed to be fact checked.

Edit, Edit, Edit

Writing is just the first step—the magic happens in the editing process. And for really great copy, you’ll need to edit, edit and edit some more.

If you’ve read your post 1,000 times already, here are a few things you can try:

• Print out your copy, it always looks different on paper
• Read your copy out loud, you’d be surprised how much you can catch this way
• Use a tool like Grammarly to check for grammatical errors
• Kill your adverbs
• Have a friend read your post

If you’re looking to write better copy, just keep these 5 tricks in mind: Know your audience, make it easy to read, quote a source, sprinkle in statistics and embrace the editing process. These 5 things will instantly elevate all of your copy, which is a great way to establish a connection with your reader!

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Marlene Srdic is the founder of Glitz & Grammar, a blogging and copywriting agency that specializes in stylish copy for stylish brands.