You’ve heard that writing blog posts is essential to the health of your website. Blogging is the best way to post fresh content on your website, and Google tends to favor websites with fresh content. Most importantly, blogging helps you build trust with both your current and future customers. By consistently providing customers with new, valuable information, they’ll feel confident working with you.
If you’re getting started with a blog, you may not feel like you know how to write a blog post that will resonate with your audience. Don’t worry – even experienced bloggers need to rethink their blogging techniques sometimes.
Here are 7 helpful tips for writing a blog post that gets results:
- Pick a targeted topic – Whenever you start writing a blog post, you should have a clear idea of what you are writing about. This keeps you focused, your readers interested, and provides opportunities for other blog topics in the future. It also helps optimize your website for long-tail keywords – especially if you choose your topic based on a keyword.
Think about frequently asked questions you recognize from your customers. Or, figure out what keeps your customers up at night. Then, write your blog posts to address these issues.
For further help picking a topic, see Jeremy’s article about creating an editorial calendar for blogging.
- Write to one person – This helps keep your blog post personal, which is better for building trust with people. When I write a blog post, I always think of a friend and pretend I’m writing to him/her (right now I’m writing to Doug Cooper – hey man!). However, you may choose to think of a client, or somebody who isn’t as savvy with your industry.
- Engage from the beginning – Even in your title, you should draw people in. Make people want to read your post – and feel like they will miss out if they don’t read it. Then be sure to give them what they were expecting with the rest of the post.
Side note: Engagement is not manipulative. Never use manipulative persuasion to get people to read your content. It’s not a great way to build trust.
- Highlight important facts/information – People may not want to read your entire post, especially if it is a long one. Highlighting important information helps readers skim through and find the content they want to read, fast. Using bullet points, bolded font, and images works well.
- Write in short, punchy sentences – If you keep sentences short, people are more likely to remain engaged in your topic, and will remember content better. It also makes your blog post seem more personal. This goes back to writing to your friend. In a normal conversation with a friend, you probably don’t use long, extravagant sentences. To get an idea, go back and look at a few recent e-mails you’ve sent to friends. Chances are, you kept your sentences short and didn’t overthink them.
- Include images/graphics – We live in a visual society. People get bored easily without simple, visual cues to keep them going. And often, a picture can say more than a thousand words. Therefore, use images to enhance your content and keep your readers engaged.
Side note: If you use images in your post, be sure to include “alt text” that contains a keyword relevant to your post.
- Tag your posts with relevant keywords – Most blogging platforms allow you to tag each post with relevant keywords. Not only can this help SEO, it allows readers to see other posts you’ve written that are related to your new article. If you’ve kept visitors engaged with great content throughout your post, they’ll likely want to learn more by reading another related article. All the while, you are gaining their trust!
For example, hopefully you’ve learned a lot about how to write a blog post from this article, and now want to take it to the next level. Therefore, I’ve tagged this post with “content” and “how to write copy for seo”, in case you’d like to keep learning.
Happy blogging!