Blog writing is for a crucial medium to connect with your target market. You will also get fresh content for your newsletters and create opportunities to generate leads through blogs. What’s more, regularly creating and maintaining blogs will help improve your websites’ search engine ranking as well.
In this blog post, you will learn about insider tips on how to effectively create and maintain blogs on your website.
Table of Contents
1. Create an Outline
Before writing blogs, you must create an outline by writing the main points for the post. Consider jotting down as many points as you can about a topic. Next, you should connect the points and group them to create a logical progression.
Remember that the outline that you create is not set in stone. You can add more points to elaborate on the topic. Moreover, if you think that some points don’t make sense, you can delete them from the outline.
2. Create a Catchy Headline
Your hours of labor in creating a blog post filled with lots of valuable information will amount to nothing if you can’t grab the attention of your target audience.
A headline is the first thing that your audience will look at when they see your blog post. So, you need to make the most of the opportunity by creating a catchy headline.
Make sure that the heading is specific to the topic. Don’t mislead readers by creating a heading that bears little relation to the content. Your target audience should know exactly what the blog post is about by reading the article.
Consider spending about 15 minutes brainstorming possible headlines. Your goal should be to create a heading that forces online readers to read your blog post.
3. Go for Long Posts
Long blog posts are preferred for ranking high in search engines. Expert bloggers such as Neil Patel recommend writing at least 1200 word blog posts. Long blog posts provide an opportunity for your blog post to rank for multiple keywords.
But you must avoid adding unnecessary words to increase the word length. For instance, instead of writing ‘it is important that you drink eight glasses a day, you can write ‘Drinking eight glasses a day is important.
The more concise your blog post, the easier it will be for the readers to understand. Your readers can gain more information by zipping through your post without much effort. Following are some tips to create concise blog posts.
- Avoid prepositional phrases. Instead of writing, ‘The decision by the management was final’, you should write, ‘The management’s decision was final.
- Avoid linking phrases. Instead of ‘Jones was writing about the weather, consider ‘Jones wrote about the weather.
- Avoid nouns ending in –tion. Instead of ‘Sam and Jones will collaborate in the creation of a new guide’, you should write ‘Same and Jones will collaborate to create a new guide’.
- Use simple verb phrases. Don’t write, ‘The study findings show that social media marketing works. Instead, you should write, ‘The study concludes that social media marketing still works.
4. Use Conversational Style
You should write the blogs as if you are conversing with your online readers. Consider slipping into their shoes when crafting content. Empathy in the blog style will help attract readers.
You must avoid sounding too formal or academics in your blogs. Your goal should be to connect with your readers rather than alienate them.
If you want to capture the attention of your readers, you should talk to them as if you are reading their minds. You should write from the perspective of the readers. Consider their pain and pleasure points when crafting the blogs.
Remember that what sets bloggers apart from researchers and journalists is their tone of voice. You must let the readers know in the blogs that you share the same thoughts and feelings. This will result in more emphatic content that will win the hearts and minds of online readers.
5. Trigger Emotions
One of the most effective ways to captivate and engage with your readers is to trigger emotions. You should consider the feelings you want the readers to experience when reading the blogs such as happiness, joy, comfort, courage, love, and so on. You may even want to trigger negative emotions such as anger, fear, and sadness in some situations.
Map the emotional journey of your readers when you start writing the blogs. You should infuse emotions in your blogs to make the audience feel captivated when they read your blog post. And one of the best places to trigger the emotions is in the introduction of the post.
6. Write with a Rhythm
Your blog post should have a varied pace to keep the attention of the readers as they read the blog post. The pace of the introduction should be quick. You can slow things down in the body of the blog post.
To infuse your blog posts with rhythm, you should follow these tips.
- Vary the length of the sentences. You can follow this rhythm: short, long, short or short, short, long.
- Use delayed transition words like therefore, and, so, etc.
- Keep paragraph lengths one to three sentences long
You need to make the readers follow each sentence. Consider reading the sentences out loud to make sure that the writing is moving forward rather than stalling. The best blog writers are similar to composers who make sure that the entire content flows smoothly from the start till the need.
7. Optimize Your Blog Posts
You need to optimize your blog posts for search engine optimization. This is important to ensure that your blogs remain visible on search engines.
Every blog post provides you with an opportunity to drive traffic towards your website. You should include high impression keywords on your sites. Consider searching for effective keywords by using Google Keyword Planner. And then include two or three in your blog post.
An important thing to remember regarding optimizing the site for SEO is that your focus should be on the readers. Don’t write for the search engines as it will alienate the readers that will hurt search engine rankings.
Your goal should be to write informative posts. You must deliver value to your readers by writing in an easy-to-understand style. Use subheadings to break up a large text. Moreover, you should avoid rambling and remain laser-focused on the topic.
Adding one or two images is also important to capture the attention of the audience. This will attract the attention of the readers and also provide you with an opportunity to rank images on Google Image Search.
8. Add Plugins
Plugins are program codes that you can add to your website. Different types of plugins are available on the WordPress blog platform. You can install plug-ins for additional features such as adding a contact form, social media buttons, or creating an image gallery or your website.
Some plug-ins can also optimize your website automatically or search engine. The plug-ins will automatically optimize your blog post for mobile screens. Moreover, you can also install plug-ins that will optimize your blog posts for search engine ranking.
Stick with reliable plugins for your website. Plugins from unknown authors may contain malware that could steal your website login information.
9. Ask for Action
You can ask your readers to take some action at the end of the blog post. You can request your readers to subscribe to the blog post by entering their email addresses. Also, you can request them to read another related blog post. This will result in increased time spent on your website that can have a positive impact on the search ranking.
Remember that you are not limited to any one action. You can have different types of call-to-actions (CTAs) on your blogs. The CTAs can address different stages of the marketing funnel.
Conclusion:
Blogs are essential for anyone who owns a website. Publishing blogs regularly will let you create a strong online presence. It will allow you to connect with your target audience and also improve the search engine ranking of your website.
Writing blogs regularly can be difficult if you are an online business owner. Fortunately, you can hire blog writers for blog writing services. The small investment can bring lots of opportunities to connect with the target audience, generate leads and promote your brand.
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