You have to rely on catchy titles and brief descriptions to grab the attention of some lead.
And the bad news here is, people need to know more. The more effectively you convey important information about your product or service, the more are the chances of the reader trusting you as legitimate.
Good news? You can do this with your blogs. More information equals more chances they remember you for long.
How to do it better? Don’t make it boring. God, no. The last thing you should expect from your reader is to go through long paragraphs, yawning all the while.
So here’s your step-by-step guide on how to write a blog post. (Okay, a good blog post!)
How to write a (good) blog post?
The fact that ‘good’ is bracketed in the sentence is because the goal is to first write a blog post-it can be bad, it can be average or it could turn out really good. But no pressure. Start from where you are. The only way then is upwards.
Let’s start, then.
- Step 1- Understand your audience.
Often repeated, seldom followed. But the truth is, it cannot be replaced by anything.
If you are catering your service to someone, and you don’t know their expectations, you might as well abandon the whole thing because that is destined to fail.
Ask yourself questions before starting- Who are you writing for? Are you providing strong enough reason for them to keep reading?
Take help of the free tools available on the internet to create buyer personas. Time invested in doing that is only going to give you exponential returns later.
- Step 2- Plan your blog post
Planning is a broad term, let’s break it into parts-
- Choose a topic: Now that you have a good understanding of your audience, you know well what they want to read. You can start with a bunch of topics and then narrow them down to a few that holds more chances to rank higher.
- Create an outline: After you have your topic in hand, come up with an outline, deciding on the length of the introduction, main body, and the conclusion.
An outline would also involve deciding on the dimensions you are going to cover in that blog.
- Time for research: When the layout is all done, start with the research. And research extensively. You should have a genuine want to make it worth it for your readers to give their time to you.
Make sure to prepare a list of statistics, interesting quotes, and infographics that you want to include.
- Step 3- Write the blog!
Have your excitement intact till you reach this stage. Often bloggers are excited to the point of researching and writing down calligraphically the headings and pointers. When it comes to actual blog writing, a lot of them start procrastinating.
Which is the reason why we were taking that pressure off of your blog having to be ‘good’.
Now, how to write one?
- Write a captivating introduction- The introduction for your blog is the flag bearer of the entire piece. It has got to be having elements that captivate the reader.
Catch the reader, tell a joke, a shocking statistic, and an anecdote. Anything to keep them going until they realize yours is the blog they are looking for.
While maintaining the flow, talk about a problem they could be facing and explain how the blog could help them with a solution.
Once the reader is hooked to your blog, the job of your introduction is done. Next is fulfilling the expectation that you arose in your reader.
- Write an informative body- Whatever answers you gathered in your questions for knowing your audience, go through them in this stage of the blog. And fulfill them.
Make sure you have a structural flow to the body of the blog. A structure helps maintain the focus for the reader. Structure it in a way that after every crucial piece of information, the paragraph concludes in a way that the reader feels accomplished on reading that.
It is an often employed psychological trick to give an incentive for the reader to continue reading.
Include infographics, statistics, and proper headings as a necessary decoration to your blog.
One bonus tip here is to keep your paragraphs short and the sentences shorter. The goal remains the same. Make it easier for the reader to read. Give them reasons to stay.
- Give your readers closure- A satisfying closure will leave an impression on your reader’s head.
The goal? To make sure they come back to read more. Or even better would be they following a recommendation of some other blog of yours.
Brief them about what they might have learned from the blog or where they could use the information to make themselves/their business better.
Give them a quote as a takeaway. Or a book recommendation related to the topic. Book lovers will thank heavens for that!
- Step 4- Editing
Just when you think you have edited enough, edit more. That’s the rule. To bring your blog to near perfection. Leave your blog for some time and clear your head to come back to it with a better perfection.
That is what Stephen King does to edit his books. Of course, we don’t have months to spare for a blog, so we should come back to our blog in a few hours or a day or two.
Cut out the redundant parts of the blog, check that the words don’t get repeated. It is off-putting for the reader.
See if you can use better words and better phrases. Check if the spellings are correct. Run through softwares like Grammarly to better your blog.
Run through your blog as many times as you consider important.
- Step 5- Give your blog a solid heading
No, we did not forget to give it a title. We just kept it for the last and there’s a reason for the same. After you have written your blog, edited, and finalized it, you as the author know best to sum it up in a few words and give it an accurate title.
If we start with the title to write the blog, you have limited yourself and your creativity. But if you keep it for the last, you have used your creativity to explore all dimensions there are to it.
- Step 6- Optimize your blog
The creative part is over, now comes the technical part to make sure you get noticed by your audience. Don’t tweak your content to insert keywords. The reader would instinctively know it is forced. Instead, look if you can organically integrate keywords as a practice to optimize your blog for On-page element optimization.
Work on the Meta description, it will help to improve your click-through rate.
Page titles and URLs could be worked upon. Keep the titles short. And URL keyword-friendly.
Optimize it for mobile use as more than 60% of Google searches are conducted on phones only.
As we have already mentioned, do not procrastinate the write-up in the hope of writing a ‘perfect blog’ someday. Perfect does not exist. Write a blog, start from where you are and the only way you can go then is up!
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