Easy Ways To Kill Your Blog Posts
You’ve decided to start your company blog. Congratulations! Business blogging is one of the best things that you can do for your company website....
5 min read
Katie Coon : Sep 30, 2015 12:55:38 PM
Trust me, I didn’t know how to a write blog post when I first started to write them. I mean, who cares, right? What’s the point? I’m trying to grow my business, how the hell is a blog post going to help me do that?
Before I joined InTouch, this is exactly how I felt. But having witnessed firsthand the importance of writing a blog post and how it relates to attracting visitors and generating leads. I now understand the strategies behind it and how important it is to have a complete blog post blueprint.
Many people don’t understand how important writing a blog post is for attracting visitors to your business website and probably ask themselves why should I blog to build my business?
I can sympathize with you! In this post, I’ll show you how to write a blog post in a simple formula that will have you captivating your readers and attract the kind of visitors you want.
You must know your target audience. What kind of problems does your ideal customer have and how can you help them solve it? What will resonate with them? Should you develop a buyer persona?
Hubspot.com defines a buyer persona as a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.”
It is a good idea to develop a buyer persona, and include information like; customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. The more detailed you are, the better chance you have of creating the right content to attract the right visitors.
No matter what, make sure whatever topic you choose will resonate with your ideal customer. There’s an old saying that goes something like, “No fun for the writer, will be no fun for the reader.” Addressing issues that your ideal customers may have, especially in what could be considered dull and boring areas, still need to be engaging and provide something of value to your ideal customer.
A working title should be fairly specific concerning the content you are about to write about. Leaving the working title in too broad a perspective, can potentially lead you astray from the main focus of the article you were originally writing about.
Google typically displays the first 50 – 60 characters of a title. So don’t jabber on or your title is at risk of being cut off on the search results page. Try keeping the title length to 55 characters or less. By doing this you can expect to see at least 95% of your title being displayed.
Check Your Facts
No one is perfect and everyone makes mistakes but when writing, it is crucial to choose authoritative sources like: official organizations, government websites, heavily sited research papers and preeminent industry experts are all good examples. Double check and question everything until you’re positive your information is correct. This process builds trust and loyalty between you and your readers.
Once you have published your blog post if you find that the information you posted is incorrect, own up to it immediately. Be honest, be accountable and fix it. You can always publish an update and re-share the post to drive visitors back to you again.
Information overload! Start by organizing your ideas and thoughts about what topics you want to cover in the article.
Create an outline of your thoughts and ideas to keep you focused on your topic and structure of your post. This process of organizing your content and research, articles or data, will help you be much more productive.
You now have organized your content, gathered all your research materials, let’s put it all together. Write what you already know, use your own experience and expertise and input your additional research and data, where appropriate.
Worried about length of your post, you should be.
Remember, attention spans are short. Don’t make it too long that you lose your reader half way through, don’t make it too short where the reader gets no value from reading it.
As a general rule a typical blog post that is 200-400 words is considered short, medium blog post is 400-600 words, 600-800 words is considered long and 800-1200 words is very long.
There is no right or wrong answer here. Your main focus should be providing answers, solutions and value to your ideal customers. If you do that the length is not as important.
If writing is not your thing, consider blogging services that can do all the writing, research and publishing for you.
Almost there. Proofreading and editing is just as important as writing your post. Have someone read over your post, chances are there are things like grammar, punctuation, spelling and even formatting that have slipped by you. Avoid repetition, check the flow of your post by reading out loud, have a person or two proofread your work and make it simple and to the point.
Using images helps break up content so it will be digested a little easier and can help tell your story from a visual stand point. Don’t forget to stay up-to-date on copyright laws. You can use free services like Flickr as long as you use the author’s information.
A call-to-action is an image or text that prompts your readers to take action. A “call” to take “action” is what it literally means. What do you want the reader to do next – subscribe, download an eBook, register for your event, read a related article, etc. CTAs help convert visitors into business leads.
It is a win-win for everyone, you potentially get a promising lead and your visitors get relevant solutions to their problems. In our article 8 Reasons Why Your B2B Leads Aren’t Turning Into Sales it will give you a good overview of how to convert your leads into potential customers.
Ready to optimize your post for search?! It’s not about cramming in every keyword you can. You want to be specific with your keywords.
Your URL, headers, ALT tags and keyword(s) within the content of your blog are huge!
Make sure you use your targeted keyword in your URL, title header, alt tags, and in the content of the blog article.
As a general rule, use your targeted keyword 0.5% to 1% of the total number of words in your article.
Use a Meta description. Meta descriptions are the descriptions that are located below the post’s page title on Google search results pages. It is a short summary of the blog post and is used to encourage the person to click the link. Meta descriptions do not play any part in SEO rankings. They are used primarily to help your overall click through rate.
Your keyword(s) should be contained in the meta description and typically be no more than 150 characters.
Google now prioritizes websites in search engine result pages (SERP) that are optimized for mobile. If your website or blog post is not mobile optimized, Google will penalize you in SERP’s.
Now, review your entire article. Does in answer the question or statement in your title? Does it stay on point or wander off in different directions?
Is it visually consumable? In other words, when you look at it do you see miles of text lumped together or something that looks like it would be easy to consume?
Lastly, does it offer something of value to the reader? Remember, solve their problem not tell people how good you think you are.
Now, go ahead, publish your blog! All that hard work has paid off.
Once you’ve mastered the complete blog post blueprint, what are you supposed to do next? Check out our article What To Do After You Have Written Your Blog Post.
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