How to write a blog post?

Why is it essential to know how to write a blog post? No matter what you search for online, it is highly likely that you will come across multiple blog posts on the very first pages of search engine results (SERP). Blogging is vital either for companies eager to capture the attention of their target audience or just for individuals willing to share their knowledge and expertise with others.

Even though a plethora of people associate blog post writing simply with content writing, there are multiple other steps that you have to take into consideration after preparing content. For instance, without proper optimization of your blog post page, it will be impossible to rank high in SERP. Such factors affect the success of your post in multiple ways. Below you will read about the steps that will allow you to write a blog post that will be destined to succeed.

Appropriate planning will allow you to give the purpose to your article that you can support throughout your writing process. Moreover, thoughtful planning can guarantee a significantly better success of your blog post. For instance, while you searched for “How to write a blog post” you may be triggered to write your post on this topic. Especially, if the results don’t respond to your question. However, if a keyword is hard to rank for, you may be left with an article that no one searches for.

Here are the steps that you have to follow in advance to make your blog post more appealing.

1. Identify the problem of your target audience

The answer to the question “how to write a blog post” starts with identifying the problem. Usually, we search for a blog post to get more information about the topic that we are interested in or to solve the issue that we are facing. In order to write an attention-grabbing article, it is vital to determine what solution you have to provide. Choosing the topic that has high search volume is essential as it will be pointless to rank high for the keyword that no one is searching for.

To determine the problem that you have to deal with you can simply brainstorm with your friends and colleagues. Similarly, you can put yourself in the shoes of your target audience and write down ideas. However, nothing compares with direct feedback of your readers about their interests. If you can reach and question them, you will get the most relevant ideas that you can use for your blog post.

If you still cannot determine the issue that you have to address, you can use online sources to find the topic idea. Have a look at your old blog posts that performed well to get ideas from headlines that you have not addressed explicitly. Likewise, you can use the free keyword planner provided by google ads and find the relevant topic suggestions for your sphere. High volume is a good indicator that people are interested in that keyword.

2. Determine your main keyword’s variations

Even though the subject might seem quite appealing because of the high search volume, the competition may make it impossible to rank well. There are websites that can provide “the difficulty” statistics, besides the search volume and other important information. Semrush and ubersuggest are two powerful websites that can help you make the appropriate decision (Both websites offer trial). Try to focus on those keywords that have competition lower than 60 (out of 100).

95% of people don’t look at the second page of search results and more than half of that clicks go to the first three results. This data signifies the importance of the ranking. The difficulty statistics show the competition for the first 20 results, but it doesn’t tell you how hard is it to rank for the first 3 results. If you would like your article to have noticeably high reach, you have to type the keyword in google and check the domains that rank high. MozBar free Plug-in for chrome can show the domain and page authority of these websites and you can use this information to determine the chances of ranking high. Even though there are many other factors as well, comparably high domain authority will be a good indicator that you will struggle to rank high.

3. Choose the headline

After a thorough research, list the keywords that you would like to target. The record must include the main keyword and the secondary keywords that you can use in order to avoid making your article look stuffed with specific words. Similarly, make sure to choose the one that truly reflects the information that you are going to provide. Misleading pages are usually ranked significantly low and will be doomed.

There are certain points that you have to take into account while choosing the title. If it’s relevant, use numbers and percentages as they influence the perception of credibility and usefulness. The titles in question form will also increase the curiosity and trigger your target audience to read your post. Similarly, The study of 900 million articles showed that the Headlines that are between 14-17 words get the most shares. If you cannot think of an appropriate headline you can visit portent website that can generate the suggested headlines based on your target keyword.

4. Choose an appropriate call-to-action (CTA)

If you are interested to know how to write a blog post, most likely you have certain purpose in mind. Every post has a different purpose that will depend on your specific needs. It is vital to know beforehand what role it must play in order to write with your goal in mind. Here are the main call-to-action that you can choose from:

Make a purchase

This is the most important action that you can think of. Putting a purchase CAT key is the most straightforward method that you can use. The purpose of every business is to have an optimal return on investment (ROI). In your case, the main investment may be just a time devoted to writing, but without income your business will never be able to succeed.

Trial

If you would like to gain the trust of your target audience before asking them to pay, you can always offer a trial. You can even devote the whole article to explaining the benefits that your services offer.

Subscribe

Similarly, you can always ask your visitors to subscribe if they would like to read new articles as soon as they are posted. This method can be used to offer new discounts in the form of Email marketing. Getting an email list of your visitors is a crucial step for creating long-term relationships.

Download Free resources

Offering free content that can be used to ease the hard work is another important method to get emails of the visitors. Such resources can be a time-saver for many people and can trigger them to visit your website more frequently for such useful content.

5. Set a deadline

Parkinson’s law suggests that time constrains help us to accomplish tasks much faster. It may seem a useless step for some of you, but it truly works. All of us have an inborn habit to procrastinate at least to some extent and without such constrains we will not accomplish tasks in time. Use the time that you required for a previous article as a baseline and make sure you improve it time by time. However, this progress doesn’t have to sacrifice the quality of your content.

6. Create an outline

Having an appropriate outline is imperative for multiple purposes. Firstly, most of the visitors will skim to decide whether they will read your article or not. Appropriate headline structure and sequence will make the text easy to skim and comprehend. Secondly, the planning process will allow you to determine the distribution of your keywords in order to make it clear to Google what the content is about. Lastly, the proper structure will allow you to appear in google snippets, increasing the chances of converting potential customers. Here is an example of Google snippet.

7. Get the content about your topic

In order to write a blog post that will attract the attention of your target audience, it has to be useful. Simply writing about a topic that you are not familiar with, will trigger your audience to stay away from your website next time. Using multiple sources that will be listed below will allow you to increase the credibility of your target audience, making them returning visitors of your website. Below you will find different methods of getting content for your blog post.  

Based on your knowledge

If you are already aware of the topic that you are writing about, it would be best to rely on your education and experience and share it with others. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have to read, especially if you would like to draw a parallel among different approaches. However, you will not find a more reliable source than your personal experience.

Online research

Blogs are important source of information covering multiple topics. If you would like to read about the ideas of different writers you can always check their blogs and gather the information that you will elaborate on. Though, don’t forget to keep the source of the information and include it in your article. It is a vital step as using the ideas of others without mentioning the source is unethical and unfair to the writer.

Articles from famous journals

An article is usually more trustworthy source compared to a blog posts, when they come from reliable journals. If you would like your blog post to look more professional you can focus on articles that are based on research and will provide the data that is the most relevant. Don’t forget to take into consideration the date of the article as it might be outdated.

Books

When we talk about trustworthiness books are the most important sources. If you have time to research the topic explicitly, this is the source that you have to focus on. Even though technological improvement makes it possible for everyone to write a book, you can always find a writer who will provide useful content. Simple online research will suggest the books that are worth reading, providing a value that you look for.

Social media channels

You may be surprised to see this method listed here. Even though most of the information provided in social media channels is either misleading or unreliable, some pages will provide the most vital information. For instance, Google’s Instagram page frequently posts useful information related to its algorithm and suggestions that you can use to rank high in SERP.

8. Put yourself in your reader’s shoes

Even though you may think that you are ready to produce an amazing blog post there are still some considerations that you have to think about. Simply knowing the keywords that you have to use and the information that you would like to share is not enough to grab the attention of your target audience. Each audience has its preference for the tone, structure, headline length, and many other characteristics. The Internet may provide you with the useful data, but you have to make sure that it is provided in your readers’ preferred language.

9. Write a blog post

We come to the stage when you have to put your skills at practice, write content that will follow the previous steps, and create a first draft of the blog post. However, it is vital to know what truly is content writing, and for what purpose you can use this information.

What truly is content writing?

When there are so many terms, it is hard to distinguish one from another. Content writing is an entire process of web content creation, including planning, research, writing, and editing of web content. Even though it is usually associated solely with blog posts and articles, it serves a much bigger purpose in digital marketing.

Besides its main purpose, process of content writing includes the following objectives:

• Email Marketing;
• Social Media posts;
• Video scripts;
• Posts on discussion websites;
• Web page content;
• Podcast descriptions;
• Etc.

Suggestions for making the content writing process easier

Firstly, if you are a busy person who is always in motion you may consider the different options for writing the first draft of your article. Google Docs has an excellent function called “Speech to Text” that will allow you to record your content and convert it to a text. To access this amazing feature, you can press “tools” and then “voice typing” while you are in google docs. Take into consideration that this is solely a draft and you will have to make appropriate corrections later.

Probably you have heard that content is a kind and that’s for a reason. Google enrolled new algorithms that is meant to determine the overall value of the content. Google favors the content of the article over keywords and any other factors that we have already discussed.

Don’t forget that the content that you write is simply a first draft that you will edit later. Highlight the main keyword, synonyms, and LSI keywords (keywords that are frequently used with the main keyword) that you use in order to have a look later at distribution and density.

10. Make final text correction

Read after some time

Yes, reading your article on your own is the best way to make appropriate corrections. Even though it is hard to notice your mistakes, while reading it after a certain period you may look from a different perspective. First drafts sometimes are quite vague and you will be the only one who remembers what you wanted to express by each sentence. Hence, there is no better option than checking everything on your own.

Give it to someone else to read

This is another important step; however, you have to choose the person who will represent well your target audience. He/she must have the same expertise as your readers in order to check the readability of the article. Make sure that he/she provides an honest suggestions and apply accordingly the necessary corrections.

Evaluate the complexity of the sentences

Even though using complex sentences will make you sound more professional, it may trigger readers to quit your website much faster. You may consider using such sentences only if your target audience consists of professionals in the field. In this case, you may even sound more reliable. There is a plethora of websites and plug-ins that will accomplish this task for you, but Web FX is one of the best. It will allow you to shorten your sentences and make them more readable.

Grammar does matter

Whether you are writing for a general audience or for elite, you have to make sure that you don’t have grammar mistakes in your blog post. The best tool that you can use is Grammarly that also offers Microsoft Word plug-in for correcting grammar issues. It doesn’t matter what level do you have in terms of grammar, there is always a possibility of an occasional mistake. This tool will definitely help you to solve this issue.

11. Optimize the page for search engines

You may have thought that the name “how to write a blog post” implies solely to writing skills. However, optimization is a crucial step that you have to follow. In this list the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) comes after content writing and that is for a reason. With new Algorithm updates, Google is becoming more and more clever. As it already determines the idea of the whole sentences rather than simply keywords that might even be out of place. However, SEO Still does matter and it is vital for optimizing blog post page for guaranteed high visibility.

Keyword Distribution

As you have already read there are multiple types of keywords. After you make appropriate corrections to an article, you can check the keywords that you have used (highlighted while writing the first draft) and distribute them properly in the whole blog post. 0.5% is the main keyword appearance limit that you have to follow. You can use the genial plug-in called Yoast SEO that will remind you about such issues and suggest relevant corrections. However, don’t forget that the main goal is readability, and including keywords in inappropriate places will negatively affect the performance of the page.

Insert a call-to-action (CTA) key

As we have already discussed, you have to choose CTA action that you would like your customers to do. Now it is time to include a key that will be meant for converting readers into loyal customers. There are multiple ways for including such key. Avoid using pop-up menus as they may affect the speed of the website, it can also make the website look spammy and trigger customers to quit.

12. Publish the Post

Now it’s time to publish a post. It is vital to make your blog post look esthetic in order to keep visitors on the page much longer. Simply arranging the text in word file doesn’t mean that it will appear the same way on the website.

Find relevant images and upload them

Images make a blog post more appealing and memorable as well. There are many people who are able to acquire information better when it’s represented visually. Many websites offer free and paid images that you can use for your blog post. Make sure that they are relevant to the topic, they have to make sense with the content of the web page. Moreover, optimizing images for the web is vital to make sure that they don’t take a lot of space on the page, leading to slow loading time.

Optimize with Yoast SEO

We have already discussed the role of this unique plug-in. There will be suggestions that you have to follow in order to make your post appealing to search engines as well. Being a perfectionist with this tool will mean less customer-friendly article. Make sure to follow the suggestions that truly matter, but you may leave out several errors if they can mess up the content of the article in terms of readability.

13. Follow-up steps

If you have thought that writing a blog post is a one-time activity you may think again. Adding new backlinks, modifying time-sensitive data, and editing grammar mistakes are just some of the important steps that you have to follow time by time. Google always favors the recent content and if you don’t update the posts they will lose reach significantly. Think of blog posts as pages that require constant monitoring. 

Takeaway

Knowing how to write a blog post that will derive desired results is not an easy task. You have to follow all the steps that you have just read about. You may think that these steps are too much for writing a simple blog post. However, if you would like to get the desired outcome from your article, it is vital to make it flawless. Following these steps becomes a habit after writing several articles and you will notice a significant decrease in time required for accomplishing all these tasks.

If this process makes you feel overwhelmed you can always get an expert’s advice or get your content written by a professional. If you are interested, Marketing Adviser can provide such services for you. Just follow the link to fill in a form and I will get back to you ASAP.