One of the most common phrases I read as I started blogging was you must have good content and content is king. There I was wondering how do I write a good blog post?
What exactly do they mean when they say good content?
There are so many posts out there, but only irresistable post get attention from the readers.
Everyone wants their readers to show some love to their content by either leaving a comment, sharing or even subscribing to their blog but it just doesn’t happen.
You need to put in a little effort for that to happen.
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Today you will get to learn how to write a good blog post and what it entails.
1.Research
The first step on how to write a good blog post is research. The best way to do your research is on Pinterest, or you can even search on google.
You need to understand your readers first. Will they be interested in this post? Will this post be of any value to them?
Know the problems that your audience are going through then try to solve them. You need to create content that people are looking for and want.
Find out what type of posts resonates with them most.
By doing your research, you should be able to come up with a purpose for your blog post.
All blog posts should have a meaning. Ask yourself is my article valuable to my readers?
2.Keyword search
After you have done your research and you now have a clear understanding what your readers want, and you have also found out the purpose you need to do a keyword search.
Keywords are words you want your blog to rank for.
There are millions of blog posts being published day in day out, and yours can easily go unnoticed.
Finding the most appropriate keywords is something you can’t afford to ignore.
Personally, I use both Google Keyword Planner and Jaaxy.
I love Jaaxy I find it more comprehensive and through too. On Jaaxy you will be able to see the number of searches that specific keyword receives per month, the number of websites competing in google for that same keyword, keyword quality indicator whether great, ok and poor.
3.Catchy blog post title
You need to craft a catchy headline.A blog post title can either make or break your post.
Blog post titles are what draws people to click on a post. Call it a bait. Use it to entice anyone who comes across your article.
It’s true when they say a headline can break or make your post. Catchy headlines are your key to more traffic and subscribers.
What should a good headline look or sound like?
A good headline is short
Evokes emotions.
States what the post is all about.
Simplicity. Keep the headline simple in a way that one doesn’t need first to check the meaning of some of the words you have used in your title.
I love using Coshedule headline Generator which helps me come up with impressive titles and also ranks them for you.
I wrote a very detailed and comprehensive post on 7 tricks to crafting a catchy blog post title.You will understand why you need to come up with a catchy title,what makes up a good title,Different ways to come up with a title,blog names generators ,a complied template of 71 blog post titles and powerful adjectives to help you brainstorm.
Related post:7 Tricks to crafting a catchy blog post title
4.Good Introduction.
Your introduction is important as your headline.
For you to write a blog good post, your introduction needs to be awesome. After your headline, it’s the next thing that someone reads when they come across your post.
You need to capture the interest of your readers with the first few sentences and get them hooked on reading the whole post.
Make your reader curious and eager to read more.
There are many ways you can do this, for example, you can start with a quote, tell a short story, a joke just find out what works well for you.
Related post: How to write an epic about me page.
5.Make good use of subheadings
There is nothing as boring as opening an article, and all you find are huge paragraphs. This can instantly make you lose the morale to continue reading the post, and you just click the exit button.
Make your paragraphs short maybe 2 or 3 sentences and have lots of white space.
With experience from reading other blogs, I find that am drawn more to blogs that have so much white space as I find them easy to read and more inviting.
You can also make use of different fonts in your subheadings.
Since I started blogging on WordPress, this became very easy to achieve, all I have to do is to make use of H2.H3 …… which google loves.
From your subheading, one should be able to have a clue what your post is all about. Let’s face it not everyone has the time to read a post with over 1000+ words.
6.Pictures
You can talk about how to write a good blog post and leave out pictures.
Pictures are everything.
We are visual beings, and we are attracted to what we see.
Good pictures aren’t reserved for fashion bloggers only but also for all bloggers.
Your images should be appealing with help you to attract even more readers.
You may not afford to buy an expensive camera now or even to hire a photographer, but you can make use of stock images so that shouldn’t be an excuse why you have dull pictures on your blog post.
Am a huge fan of stock images and I love ivory mix. Their stock images are so beautiful.
All you have to do is to sign up for their newsletter, and you will have access to more than 300 images and every month they will send you more.
Once you have gotten your images and you want to make beautiful graphics for your post, you can do on PicMonkey or in canvas or even using Photoshop.
Personally, I mostly use Canvas and sometimes Photoshop.
When I was trying to figure out how to use canvas, I stumbled upon this post which has a video embedded in it and it made my work easier.
7.Spice things up.
For you to make your readers remain glued to your post, you need to make your article more scannable.
Meaning that with a few glances anyone should be able to read the most important parts of your post.
Use bullets, numbers, text boxes and click to tweet it will help you to break the monotony of words.
8.Call To Action
This is where you allow your readers to do something after they read your post. Ask yourself, what do you want them to do after they read your post?
Maybe you want them to leave a comment, share your post or even subscribe to your blog.
Why not leave a question at the end of the post allowing engagement. Such as, what do you think of this post?
Make it easy for anyone to share your posts by installing share buttons such as Sumo me and Shareaholic.
9.SEO your post.
SEO can be hard to understand, but once you grasp the basics, then it will be easy for your post to rank higher on google. SEO simply means search engine Optimization.
The first thing you need to do is to install Yoast plugin. Yoast plugin will show you how to make your post SEO ready.
Some of the things to think about are:
-
Interlinking
Interlinking is where you link your post to other old posts or relevant pages on your page. Doing this will help you boost your blog traffic and reduce the bounce rate.
-
Write longer posts
You should get into the habit of writing longer posts. Aim to have at least 1000+words in each post you write.
-
Picture optimization
You have to make sure that your pictures are correctly optimized.When uploading your images make sure you add an alt text and if possible add a keyword.
Rename the file name and your pictures too using a keyword.
There is so much to talk about when it comes to SEO so I highly recommend this post as it goes go into details such as picture optimization, different places you ought to place your keywords, interlinking and much more.
10.Proofread your article
Reading a post that has so many mistakes can be off-putting. I get it, we are all human, and we are bound to make mistakes.
If you want to create good content, you must proofread your article. There is no other way to put it.
I remember back in campus I used to spend hours and hours just going through one assignment. How I wish then I knew of Grammarly.
Grammarly has made my life easier. Am able now to go through my articles in a short time.
Read all about Grammarly in this post.
11.How to write a good blog post: Layout Check
Before you hit the publish button make sure you preview your post to see how it will look when it’s live.
Doing a preview will help you to countercheck on few things such as enough white space, short paragraphs, eye-catching pictures and so on.
Grab GG
Grab a list of 71 blog post title templates and powerful adjectives that will help you come up with catchy title which will help you to boost your traffic and get more subscribers.
Quick summary on how to write a good blog post.
1.Research
2.Keyword search
3.Catchy blog post title
4.Good Introduction
5.Subheadings
6.Pictures
7.Spice things up
8.Call to action
9.SEO your post
10.Proofread your article
11.layout
That’s it for how to write a good blog post.Hope you found it helpful.
What else do you think I should include in this post?Let me know in the comments below.
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Good article
Wow. This is a terrific post. Thank you so much for all those tips.
Thanks for the tips, I usually struggle with my heading so i found this helpful. thanks for sharing.
These are all really helpful tips for writing a blog post. I do a lot of them already, but it’s always a good reminder to read about it!
This is so informative! It will be especially helpful for those times when the writer’s block sets in.
Blogging takes a lot of background work that many will never see.
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Author
Very true,so much goes on behind the scenes.
this is really helpful for newbie bloggers like myself. i’m still grasping the basics of SEO so every little bit counts.
This is a good list of tips and I do follow most of them already. A couple I’m NOT doing and probably should be, are the keywords and the alt text on images.
Author
Yes, you need to start focussing on the keywords and the alt text on the images as it will help you with SEO.
This article is so informative. thanks for sharing
Well. This is pretty helpful for beginners. Not only that, your 11 points are always important for any blogger.
some really good tips here so thank you for sharing them! I find proof reading being key just to quickly fix any errors made in writing!
I try to follow all these things with each blog post. The hardest for me is the “hook.” I’m a very matter of fact writer so that great introduction isn’t easy. This was part of a presentation at a recent blogging conference, too, so I’ve been working on it! Thanks for all the reminders.
I was always guilty for years of not writing blog posts for SEO ranking purposes and only just starting to adapt to the idea of it and definitely love how you’ve summarised everything here so neatly for us to refer back to when we need to 🙂
Helen xx
http://helenchik.com
This article so informative and useful for anyone who is new to blogging. Especially loved the way you have structured this post, making it so easy to read, understand and implement.
These are some excellent tips! I’ve never heard of Jaaxy before. I definitely need to work on trying Google Keyword Planner. Thanks for sharing. This has been very helpful to me.
Super helpful tips for those who are new to the blogging game.
Great tips. I struggle so much with SEO. I definitely need to do better there. I didn’t realize that longer posts could be helpful though. I will have to think about editing some of my current posts.
I try to do all of the things you have mentioned above when writing a post. Especially the research part because I don’t want to publish something that doesn’t make sense or is untrue. There are a lot of things to remember when writing a post but if you include them in your writing routine now they’ll become second nature to you!
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