The Best Tips and Practices For Writing A Blog Post
Have you ever had a question and searched on Google for an answer? Most likely you were brought to a blog post about whatever topic you were looking for.
Blog posts are posts to your site that are written to share insights, thoughts, and stories about topics related to your business field. A good blog post needs to be interesting and educational. You don’t want your readers getting bored, do you?
Blogs can help boost your traffic, build your brand awareness and credibility, increase your conversions, and bring in more revenue.
Types of Blog Posts
There are many types of blog posts but some included are:
“How To” Post
This kind of post helps you solve a problem for your readers. They are posts much like this one you are reading right now. It is a step-by-step guide to help educate your consumers about a topic.
List-based Post
List-based posts, or listicles, use sub-headers to break down the posts. This makes it easier for users to read or skim and understand the information easier. These are also great for offering tips to help solve a problem.
Newsjacking
In this type of blog post, you use your blog to share important news related to your industry. The main goal is to get your consumers’ attention and show that your blog is a trusted source for all things happening in your industry.
Understand Your Audience
The first step in writing a good blog post is to figure out who your target audience is. Ask yourself questions like:
Who are my customers?
What do my customers want to know?
What will resonate with them?
What will show that I am a trusted source of information?
You want to build a persona around who you think would be reading your posts and what they would want to know the most.
Choose Your Topic
When starting your blog post, you need to choose a topic to write about. You can start with a general idea and then hone in more and more.
When starting out with blogging, start smaller instead of going big right off the bat. You can start with a listicle or curated collection instead of writing a full article about running a business.
Create a Title
When first starting to create a title, come up with a few different ideas that all could work for your blog post. Try to narrow it down the more you mess with it so you can focus on a specific topic instead of a much broader topic.
Narrowing it down will help you be able to write a more clear and organized post, and will also help users know what exactly they are going to be reading about.
You can always go back and change the title later on so don’t worry about it being perfect right away.
Your title should be catchy to draw your readers in and should also include keywords for what the post is about. Again this is to help them know what it is they are going to be reading and to help Google also know what your post is about. You can use sites like Coschedule or Advanced Marketing Institute to analyze your titles for you.
The title should be descriptive enough for your readers and Google to know what the post is about but you don’t want it to be too long as well. Your title needs to fit in the character limits that are set by search engine results pages. It should be around 60 characters long, but try not to go over that. You don’t want your title to get cut off when it shows up on a search engine.
Write Your Introduction
Your introduction is where you need to grab your reader’s attention. Your first section needs to be interesting enough for your viewers to want to continue reading this post.
Start out by telling a story or an interesting fact that will draw them in. Then you want to describe what your post is going to be about and how it will help the reader.
Create an Outline
Creating an outline for your blog post can help you organize the information so you don’t get confused while writing. It also helps the readability of the post by making sure information is grouped correctly and is coherent. It’s best to create your sections and subsections so you know where everything is supposed to go.
Write Your Post
Now it’s time to write your post. You can use the outline you just created as a guide when writing it. While writing you can always gather more information, examples, and data to fill in any gaps you may have or use it to further back up your points.
External Links
Throughout the post, you should include external sources, which are links to websites other than your own. Having external links helps your credibility, so readers know that the information you are giving them is true and accurate. They also allow for them to gain more information without being overloaded by having all of the information in one post.
External sources can also help you build relationships with other sites/companies. If another company sees that you are using their site as a reference in many of your posts, they may start to use you as a reference as well.
When using external links, it is important to make sure that they are set to open in a new window. This will stop your readers from leaving your site and moving on to another.
Internal Links
It’s also important to include internal links in your posts as well. Internal links can be other pages of your site, including other blog posts. These make it easier for readers to find out more information without having to search for it themselves.
A good rule of thumb is to have at least 1-2 links to your own articles. Having the internal links will also keep people on your site, instead of going to another site to find answers. This lowers your bounce rate and helps with your page views.
Edit Your Post
Once you have your post all written, it is important to edit the post and make sure it all looks and sounds correct. Have someone proofread your post to see if there’s anything you may have missed. You can use online editing checklists, like the one found on HubSpot, or grammar checkers like Grammarly. After proofreading your post, it’s time to move on to the other elements.
Featured Images
Your post should include images that are visually appealing and relevant to what you are talking about. According to Optinmonster, “articles with images get 94% more views as opposed to those with no visuals.” It’s best to use your own photos or create your own images.
Using stock photos can work but they aren’t very personal. You can use sites like Canva to create images and featured photos for your posts.
When using the photos, you need to make sure that they all have the proper image credits and sources. This is especially important when using images off of Google, as you don’t want to use an image that is not available for use.
If you do choose to use stock images, websites like Shutterstock and Pixabay are great sites to use. These sites not only have images, but they have video and music as well. While videos and music may not be relevant to certain blog posts, they can be helpful in other situations.
It is very important when using images to make sure that they all have alt tags/text. Alt tags/text is the copy that appears on a webpage if an image fails to load. These tags/texts are extremely important when trying to rank on a search engine.
Since search engines can’t view pictures in the same way we can, they need text to explain what the image is. Make sure to stick to describing the image though, and not just adding keywords as doing that will harm you more than help you in the long run.
Visual Appearance
It’s also important for you to make sure that your blog post looks appealing to your readers. Using headers and subheaders to break up large blocks of text will make it easier for your viewers to skim and obtain the information they are looking for.
In the post, you should use H2 and H3 headers to further explain what each section of the post is going to be about.
Using whitespace and shorter paragraphs will also make it easier on the eyes when reading. Shorter paragraphs make the information stronger and less complicated.
Paragraphs with fewer words tend to contain fewer errors and encourage the viewers to continue reading.
Bullet Points & Numbered Lists
The use of bullet points and numbered lists in your blog post also makes it easier for your readers to skim through the post. They are used to highlight the best or most important information within the post.
While using bullet points is a great way to keep your views on your posts, make sure not to overuse them. Overusing them can cause the points to lose their effectiveness.
Tags
Not only do you want your images to have tags, but you also want the post itself to have tags. As said by an article on HubSpot, “tags are specific, public-facing keywords that describe a post.”
They allow your readers to choose a topic they’d like to learn more about and search for those topics only. Keeping the tags relevant is super important as you don’t want to confuse your readers. The tags should be relevant to things that were talked about in the post.
Create a Call to Action
It is extremely important to create a call to action on each blog post. You can have some within and at the end of the post. Adding a call to action lets your readers know what it is you want them to do next. A call to action can be anything from subscribing to your blog, downloading some type of content, registering for an event, or purchasing your product/service.
You can offer them more content that is similar to what they had just read or you can ask them to share the content if they enjoyed reading it. Having them share the content, grows your viewers and creates more traffic to your site.
Optimize for Search Engine Optimization
It is important to make sure that all of the above is optimized best for SEO. For example, with keywords, you need to make sure that you are only adding ones that are natural and won’t affect the experience of the reader. It’s also important for you to make sure your site/posts are mobile-friendly.
Meta Description
Once you’ve created your post, you now need to add a meta description. A meta description is what shows up on search engines below the title of the page. It should be a short summary of the page, staying between 150-160 characters.
While these don’t help Google’s keyword ranking, they will give your readers a look into what the post is about before having to click on it, which will help improve your click-through rate.
If you don’t create your own meta description, Google will just grab the first few sentences of the post and cut off the rest. This doesn’t look good to your readers and may make it difficult for them to decide if they really want to read your post or not.
Anchor Text
Anchor text is the words that link to other pages, whether internal or external links. It’s important to choose which words you are linking carefully and keep Google in mind when doing it.
Google does look at your anchor text when considering where to rank you, so making sure that things are correct and make sense is critical in ranking well on Google.
Conclusion
Writing and posting blog posts can be a critical part of the success of your website. They are a great way to show your knowledge of your product or service and gain some credibility.
Blog posts aren’t always easy for everyone though so in some cases it can be very beneficial to ask for help from other companies who specialize in content creation to help you manage or write content for your site.
We here at Small Hits take content creation very seriously and we think you should too. Reach out to us if there’s anything we can do to help you create content and grow your business.
