Writing a blog post is one thing. Writing a great, shareable blog post is another altogether! You may remember from your school days that there are certain formats to writing a formal letter for example: address, date, subject line – much like an email. The same goes for a blog post and I am going to show you how to write a blog post that it is beautiful and shareable in 5 steps.
1. Plan Your Keyword
You will first need to decide WHAT you want to write about. You might have a topic in mind already (see my post on Editorial Calendars and how to plan your content!) but if you don’t, you can research your topic by looking at popular keywords with a tool like Google Adwords Keyword Planner. You have to base your content on a keyword, otherwise your posts won’t get found in all the din on the internet. By testing my keywords for this post, I can see that a keyword like How to write a blog post has a fairly high search volume (3,600 per month on average) but low competition, so it’s a good choice.
2. Test Your Headline
Now that you have your keyword and know what you want to write about, putting it into a catchy title that will get hits on Google is the next step. Enter CoSchedule – one of the tools I use daily. CoSchedule Headline Analyzer is a free tool that scores your headline on a set of tried and tested metrics. Aim to get a green test score and you’re good to go!
How to write a blog post in 5 steps didn’t do so well, but I got the green light as soon as I added easy to the mix!
Now, you’re ready to start writing!
3. Introduce your Topic
The first thing is your introduction paragraph. If you have an SEO tool installed on your site (I use Yoast SEO, a free plugin on WordPress and can highly recommend it!) it will advise you to include your keyword in your first paragraph. Describe the WHAT, the WHY and the HOW:
- WHAT : the problem that you’re going to write about (how to write a blog post)
- WHY : why is this important (there is a structure to a great blog post)
- and HOW you’re going to solve that problem (by showing you 5 steps to writing a great blog post)
4. Create the Body
The beauty about blogs are that they are highly conversational. So write like you’re telling a story, and having a chat with someone on your chosen subject. Take them through your idea step by step and in a logical fashion so that someone who has no idea what you’re on about would be able to understand. If you know your topic well, this is the easy part!
5. Conclusion
I always find it strange in the movies that people don’t say goodbye when they talk in the phone; they just kind of end of the conversation and then that’s that. But in a post, you want to sum up what you’ve discussed and invite the reader to comment and maybe have a look at some other stuff that you’ve written on relevant subjects. The idea is get people to stay on your site!
Here are a few extra PRO tips:
- Edit, spell-check and edit again – nothing says amateur more than faulty copy.
- Aim for more than 350 words, but ideally less than 1,000. Your readers want the information in small, bite-sized chunks.
- Include a links to external sources, information and other sites; this will help your SEO.
- Include a couple of images in the post itself and make sure that you have a beautiful feature image.
- If you are not using your own images – ALWAYS CREDIT THE SOURCE! It’s the right thing to do.
- Put your keyword in the alt tag on all of the images. Click here for instructions.
By following this simple template, you will be able to consistently write good blog posts. It really is about sticking to a format and sharing your knowledge in an understandable and easily relatable way. I really hope that you found this post on how to write a blog post useful. Have a look at the post that I wrote on how often you should be writing these beautiful posts of yours. My next post will be about the characteristics of a PRO blogger – it’s going to be a big one!
(see what I did there!? 😉
Happy Blogging!
