Being here means you are in search of an answer on how to write a blog post.
Writing an awesome blog post is not at all difficult if you keep few basic things in mind. Once you make these things a common practice, applying them throughout your website, you will start seeing the results.
Blogging is an effective tool to promote your products or services. Posting blogs on relevant topics regularly attract your niche audience to your website, enabling you to update your social media account consistently.
However, creating thousands of blog posts for your website is not enough. It should be attractive enough to grab the attention of your audience.
Is it seems a bit frantic to you? No worries! Here are 15 tips to write an awesome blog post that can drive traffic to your website immensely.
Select a Trending Topic
Read our blog: How to choose blog topic?
How do you select a topic for your next blog post? Well, some handy techniques can be followed to pick up the topic:
- Know the audience for whom you are posting.
- Write about the topic you can talk about.
- Pick a problem from your niche and provide a solution to it.
There are many useful tools as well to make the job even easier. Most importantly, the topic you choose must be trending. There is no point in putting a lot of endeavour into a tedious topic. Buzzsumo and Google Trends are the widely used tools to decide what to write for a blog. Buzzsumo is a premium tool, allowing limited free access.
On the other hand, Google Trends is a completely free tool, giving access to unlimited data regarding trending topics on Google. It enables you to select your preferred country, language, time range etc. to track the most trending searches in your region.
These tools can be used by any person who is ambiguous about the topics to pick.
Write a Striking Headline
Headlines are the center of attraction for any article. More than 90% of the viewers only read the headlines before reading or sharing them. Hence, you just get 15 to 20 seconds to grab the attention of your reader.
Here are some tips to write a clickable headline:
- The headline should be creative and attractive enough to prompt the viewer to read more.
- Write a title that begins with numbers as listicles get higher engagements.
- It should engross the interests of your readers.
- Keep it under 65 characters with space.
- Keeping in mind the prime keyword for which you want your blog to rank higher.
- Use headline analyzer tools like CoSchedule, MonsterInsight, SEOPressor etc.
For example, you want to educate your audience about different types of indoor plants. Thus, your focus keyword should be indoor plants. Now to gain the recognition of your viewers you need to insert some appealing words alongside the keyword. So it can be like this
15 Best Indoor Plants to Upgrade Your Home Interiors
Once you create a title in this way, use headline analyzer tool to check how your title would appear in search engines.
Write a Solid Introduction
Bringing traffic to your blog doesn’t end your struggle. You need to hold them on the webpage too. 55% of readers read the blog only for 15 seconds. Hence, your introduction paragraph must be compelling enough to retain them to read more. Otherwise, it will lead to a higher bounce rate of the webpage.
Focus on the quandary that brings your reader to your site. Address that question like
Do you know? Or Are you in? Etc.
These types of small questions reassure the audience of coming to the right place.
Try to write a short introduction paragraph. It will allow the visitors to see the main content in a trice. Otherwise, they may feel overwhelmed with the intro paragraph, leaving the page right away.
Write in Conversational Tone
People get more engaged with informal conversations rather than reading an essay will full of facts and data. Though data and facts are necessary to understand the importance of the subject matter, it needs to be presented in an idiomatic way to make it easier and interesting.
When you write in such a style, your audience can relate to the blog. This way you can provide them a person more of a website, with whom they can interact. Eventually, it will encourage your audience to comment on your posts and come back to you again in search of a new thing to read.
Remember one thing, whenever your visitors post a comment on your blog or ask a question to you, reply to them at the earliest as it helps to build strong relationships with the viewers.
Draft a Longer Content
Over the past few years, long-form content is getting more recognition than short one. It is justified enough as only the longer articles explain and cover every nanoscopic detail of the topic. Hence, after going through such articles, the readers get complete information on such subjects.
A long article is better from the SEO perspective also. When search engine bots crawl a webpage, it discerns every single HTML coding, word, and punctuation. Hence, the more search engine bots will crawl your page, there will be the higher chance to get indexed. According to research, articles in between 2250 to 2500 words get the highest amount of organic traffic.
Again, after analyzing millions of web pages, it is found that long-form articles get 77.2% more backlinks than web pages with shorter content
However, focusing on the details is more important than the length. If you are writing something that can be concluded within 1000 words, you should go for it. Unnecessary stuffing to reach higher word count may provide a negative impact on your content.
Emphasize on Formatting
Formatting your blog is equally important to make it readable. Obviously, no one will read a 2000 words article written in a single paragraph. Following are some formatting tips to make your content more appealing and easy to understand.
- Use Subheadings:
Segregate your blog into small portions with relevant subheadings to make it look arranged. The subheads shall clearly describe your paragraph. Use H2, H3 tags for subheading to get the SEO benefits.
Most of the readers first glance through all over the content to evaluate whether it is worth reading. Subheads help them to understand the content within a moment.
· Keep Paragraphs Short:
Besides giving subheadings, try to write shorter paragraphs. It makes the text legible and comprehensible. Don’t write more than 3 to 4 lines in a single paragraph.
You may have noticed, books or newspapers don’t contain such short paragraphs. Digital screens make reading difficult. By using small blocks, you can give them a comfortable view.
· Use Bullet Points
You definitely observed bullet points in several blogs. Bullets allow you to write a list of information or features of products or services in a short and crisp way.
· Increase Line Spacing and Font Size
Small gaps between lines or words give a cluttered look to your content, making it harder to read and understand. It may lead to a higher bounce rate even after providing valuable information.
Too small text fonts also provide the same result as above. Keep your text font size at least 12 and use widely popular font types such as Arial, Times New Roman, Calibri etc.
Avoid Redundant Content
Write on a variety of topics to avoid repetition. Obviously, you work hard to produce 100% original content.
Say, you write content on
Step by Step Tutorial to Build a Website using WordPress.
Again, a few months later you choose the topic
Beginners Guide to Create a WordPress Website.
Both of the topics are quite similar, conveying the same sort of information. Hence, keep in mind the topics you have already covered while creating a new post to avoid such redundancy. It can hurt your website ranking massively as search engine bots mark them as duplicate content.
Use Relevant Images
A blog is created to communicate with the audience and to make their job easier. Therefore, whatever is the best method to convey the idea is to be used.
The use of relevant images, videos or info-graphics creates a good impression on the mind of viewers. People often post slides also in the form of images to convey the right ideas.
There are free as well as premium resources to have stock photos. Shutterstock is a premium resource, providing over 200 million royalty-free professional stock images.
Use Internal and External Links
Don’t forget to mention the link of your recent blogs which is under the same topic or is making the idea somewhat clear. These are also called crosslinks and Google considers it a lot while indexing your blog. Google finds your content/ posts best when they are linked from somewhere else.
Say, you have drafted an article over Guide to Build a WordPress Website. Now, if you have other blog in your site for WordPress plugins, you can link such a blog using an anchor as plugins are an integral part of a WordPress website.
Give links to other relevant websites also boosts SEO score. Say, you are creating a post on How to Link Your WordPress Website with Google Analytics Tool. Here you may provide a link to the Google Analytics website to help the readers.
Use of SEO Tools
Read our blog: Must have tools to track website data
SEO is an unavoidable part of blogging as your website rank is hugely dependant on it. Let’s have a look at a few basic SEO tactics
- Use focus keyword in the title, H1 tag, image alt tags, and URL
- Write compelling and relevant meta description inserting your keywords
- Make use of internal and external links
- Use transition words
- Use related keywords
- Write simple sentences avoiding unnecessary use of passive voice
- Use header tags and paragraphs
- Write more than 600 words of content
Yoast SEO gives a readability score to improvise the content. It is very convenient to see if you fall under a good area by following the guidelines provided by Yoast. This plugin has free as well as premium versions. The free version enables you to optimize your content for only one keyword.
Add Social Share Buttons
It is immensely important to make it easy for our viewers to share your blog/ content. They just sometimes need it for future references or sometimes they eager to share it with people immediately. The key here is to provide the right social media button according to your post/website. For example, many business websites use an icon of LinkedIn to connect while some don’t.
Optimize URL Structure
Keep your URL as short and descriptive as possible. Your post URL is equally important and should not be considered lightly.
Your URL should contain keywords and page titles including hyphens to separate the words. Avoid using dynamic URLs as it is considered inferior from the readers as well as SEO perspective.
Remove Distractions
Ask yourself this question – are there any elements on my blog/website that I don’t need? Or they are just there without any use. Remove such distractions because you don’t want to be judged on them. Everything in a blog/website should be there to solve a purpose and to make things more clear.
Wrapping It Up
Use simple words to present your ideas in front of the viewers. Proofread your blog after completing it to avoid any grammar or spelling mistakes. As your competitors are also trying to rank on the same keywords, it may take some time to get your blog on the first page of search engine results. If it is unable to rank even after a considerable time, it is better to do A/b testing to conclude which idea is preferred by your audiences.
