Blogging has exploded over the past couple of years. From what started off as a platform for small projects or creative outlets, blogging has now become a key component of marketing strategies. Why? A solid blog can offer many benefits to a business, such as website traffic, search engine ranking improvements, providing an outlet to position the brand and creates a platform where brands can develop relationships with customers.
So, how do you create a blog that does all of these things?
Identify Your Audience and Industry Trends
Make sure you have a clear understanding of who your audience is and what they would be interested in reading. Have a look at your competitors and see what they’re doing and what’s working for them. Are there any gaps that you could fill? You should always have your finger on the pulse for industry trends and developments; try and incorporate these into your blog posts as much as you can.
Define Your Blog Post
Once you’ve identified your audience and industry trends, you can get started on your blog post by picking a topic. From here you can start playing around with different working titles – incorporating keywords you think people are likely to search (and reflect the purpose of your post) is a good idea, but try and keep the title sounding natural. Once you’ve established this, start creating a basic structure of what you will be covering in your blog post.
Introduce the Post
Aside from the blog post title, the first few sentences of the blog post are crucial in keeping the reader’s attention. This can be done by telling a story or joke, being empathetic, or starting it off with an interesting fact or statistic.
Next, describe the purpose of the post along with a brief outline of where the blog post is going to take the reader.
Write and Edit
Now you’ve reached the fun part! Here you will simply be filling out the structure that you created earlier. Once you’ve finished writing, don’t forget to go through and edit carefully – while grammar and punctuation may not seem too important in this day and age, they really are crucial. If people have to work hard to understand what you’re trying to communicate, they may just give up altogether!
Optimise Your Blog Post
You don’t have to get too technical to optimise your post for visibility in search engines. There are a couple of quick and easy things you can do:
Keywords – just like with your title, try and add in relevant keywords throughout the body of your text. Just make sure you don’t ‘stuff’ the post with them – just aim to mention it a few times where it works.
Anchor text – this is a word or phrase that links to another page. This page could be another blog post you’ve written, or something on a different site written by someone else that is relevant to your own post. If you link to something else, just make sure it adds to the reader’s experience!
Add In Visuals
Depending on what your blog post is about, always include at least one image to make the post more engaging. Creating your own images is preferred but if you don’t have the capacity to do that, don’t worry – there are plenty of royalty-free image sites that that you can source images from.
At the end of the day, you can write a technically perfect blog post, but it really comes down to that old quote about writing what you know. If you pick a topic you’re passionate about, that will spill out through your words, creating content that is engaging and honest. Your own written voice is one of the most valuable assets you own when it comes to blogging!
Looking for inspiration? Check out our post on how to add life to your writing!
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