9 Steps For Writing A Great Blog Post

Everyone loves a great read and everyone loves a really informative blog post that they either learn something from or find really interesting. But, not everyone loves writing them, and for many businesses owners it is a constant challenge to write something that not only reflects what they want to say, but that is good enough to really get the customers through their doors.

When it comes to writing content, it is fair to say that it is not everyone’s cup of tea, but in the age of content being the king and long live the king, if you do not invest in your content then at some point if you have not already, you are going to drop behind your competitors that are probably investing heavily in it. Writing, whether internally or outsourced, is something you simply have to start thinking about for your own website, as Google loves it, and therefore, so must you.

Here are 9 steps that will help you to write a blog post to be proud of.

Do Your Research

If no one wants to know about a subject you are considering writing about, then you have to question, what is the point? If you are writing to get traffic and new business then you need to be thinking about not only a related subject but also a subject that is going to get people searching. Sadly, writing about what you love is not always enough, as it is also important to write about what other people love and therefore will bring you the visitors to your site that you can then convert into business. Look around your industry and see what other people are writing, and also remember to look at search volumes to make sure that your effort has the potential to be rewarded with lots of people that are going to find your blog, via search or other promotional methods.

Come Up With A Killer Title

A title is so important for many reasons – it gets you noticed, it helps the search engines understand what the post is going to be about and a well optimised title can help with your rankings going forward. Really take some time to think about not only what your title is going to be from an SEO point of view, but also what is going to capture the attention of the people that get a million Tweets or Facebook updates a day and will only scan quickly and make their choice based upon it. Think about engagement and what is going to intrigue the user to click through, rather than describing your post in great detail, because you only have a few seconds to really capture the attention of people online, so you have to make sure you do this with a title that is going to stand out and get people clicking.

Write For The User, Not The Search Engine

Gone are the days of writing for Google and trying to influence rankings with standard and overly SEO’ed content, which for me, is one of the best forward movements the industry has ever seen. Writing crappy and short articles that are simply content fillers is no longer the way to do things, whereas writing high quality, relevant and engaging content really is the way to make not only the search engines, but potential customers fall in love with you and your business. We have all fallen into the trap of writing for the sake of writing, but it is now so crucial to only write quality content that it is better to write less often but offer more quality when you do, which is why consistency and quality should be high on your list of things to think about when writing your site blogs and articles.

Don’t Forget Content Keywords

Although keyword density, in my opinion, should be chucked in the SEO rubbish bin of 2008, there is still a need to make sure that your content is themed correctly and that you have the correct keywords within your content to make it rank. For example, if your business is selling cars and you were writing about what you watched on TV yesterday, this is not really going to help your ongoing SEO cause, so you need to make sure your content is relevant to what you are trying to achieve and has enough content keywords within the blog to make this quite clear. As I said at the start, write for the user, not the search engine, but you do still need to make sure you have some mention of your keywords within the blog post, as this will help with your overall ranking efforts going forward.

Think About How It Looks

Always make sure that you think about just how your blog looks to the visitor and how you would approach reading content if it was not your site. Try to split your blog post up into readable sections and clearly label them with catchy headers, as most people will scan the content first to see if they want to read more, which is why headlines and subject headers are so important to make people want to read on. You really do only have a few seconds to capture the attention of people and only a few more to make them want to stay on the page when they have clicked through, so you have to make your posts easy to read and easy to follow, else you are just going to lose people, not through bad quality, just through not laying your information out correctly.

Linking

The two elements of linking you need to put into place for your blog posts are external and internal, because both of these are well worth doing and will, in the long term, help your rankings in the search engines. Internal linking is when you link a keyword or keyword phrase to other pages on your site and external linking is when you link off to other, high quality and authority websites that might be featured within your blog post. For example, if I was writing about social media, I would tend to internally link to my own social media services and externally link to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, but always thinking about what I am linking to and making sure it is related and authoritative enough to be worthwhile. Do not just link for the sake of linking, as you need to make sure you do not go overboard in terms of quantity and also make sure that the links you place are relevant to your content, else you run the risk of doing more harm than good.

Optimise Any Images

Any blogger or content expert will tell you need to have an image or two within your blog to help with engagement, and whilst I believe this down to the blog post and the images you have available, if you are going to use an image then make sure you optimise it correctly. Make sure it has a decent Alt Tag, is named correctly and has a caption that is also surrounding your SEO efforts, and at the same time make sure you have compressed your image so that it does not take an hour or so to load, as people may be looking at your blog post on their mobiles or away from a decent Internet connection and if your image comes high up on the page, this could stop the rest of the content loading quickly and therefore send people away from your site.

Share Socially

Facebook, Twitter (X) and LinkedIn are just a few key places to start releasing your content once it is written, which is why you need to develop these channels and grow an avid and interested following. Social signals are not only a decent part of the SEO strategy these days, but by having social media channels that are working and growing will help your business, with new and existing customers able to stay in touch with your latest offers and advice. Every business simply must invest their time in getting a social media presence up together, and whether you outsource or manage this yourself, you should never underestimate just how important all of these social platforms are when it comes to growing your business and increasing your sales. Once your content is written, get it out there, tweet about it, post it and Google+ it, as the more people that see your content, the more chances it has of becoming a really talked about piece of work.

Shout And Promote

The chances of people finding your blog through the search engines in the early days are to be honest, low, so you need to make the most of your existing customer list, friends, colleagues and anyone that knows you and ask them to also promote your blog post and spread the word. Many people fear asking others to share their content due to various reasons, but the worst that is going to happen is that they say no, and the best, well, could see your blog post quickly become quite popular very quickly. Never fear shouting about the content you have written if you have spent time to write something that is of excellent quality, because if you have offered something that is going to help someone, advise someone or intrigue someone, then get people talking about it and never be afraid to ask!