The Complete Beginner's Guide to Write a Blog Post

December 4, 2018 · 13 mins read

Categories: seo |

Blogs are the best way to generate traffic to your business. With the incoming of other easy platforms for sharing your knowledge like Video or Audio, you might think that blogging is dead. But in reality, blogging has become the most important aspect of any business.

And there are reasons for writing blog posts for any business.

More than 90% of the organic traffic to small businesses, comes from blog posts.

1. More than 90% of the organic traffic to small businesses, comes from blog posts.
2. Blog Posts are the cheapest way to transfer your expertise on a topic
3. It is easy to change the content and update.
4. Know your industry
5. Feel the pain of the customer
6. Read customer reviews
7. Check for trending keywords
8. The Deep work
9. Who?
10. What?
11. When?
12. Where?
13. Why?
14. How?
15. Write a non-resistable headline
16. The Body: First few paragraphs
17. The Real Body
18. The End
19. After the end
20. After publishing
21. Conclusion

According to Entrepreneur.com, Blog Posts is the best way in which a business can drive traffic.

Blog Posts are the cheapest way to transfer your expertise on a topic

Being an entrepreneur, you are the best expert in the respective industry you are working in as you working on the same thing everyday. You can share your expertise by writing a blog post. You don’t need some kind of costly instrument for creating a blog post. You can easily do it on your own computer.

It is easy to change the content and update.

You might have seen, Updated 20.. in many of the blog posts that you read. This is because it is easy to change the content when it is written in the form of words. Now consider changing something in a video. You will have to create the whole video again to update the content.

Writing a Blog Post is not just thinking about something and writing about it. There is a well-defined structure that most of the professionals use out there. In this blog post, we are going to look into that structure in some detail.

The first step is to come up with blog post ideas. I personally maintain a Google sheet where I write all my blog post ideas and keep on marking them done, once I am done writing that post. This way I keep track of everything. You can also maintain such sheet or maybe write it somewhere for your use. This way I am never short of ideas on what to write about.

But how do you come up with the list of ideas anyway? You might ask.

Well, first of all, you have to write very newbie articles related to your business. For example: If you are in the finance industry, you can write about what documents are required to get that loan, how to pay your bills, how to structure your budget and not get trap in a dept.

Once you have written on all those topics, you can start writing on other topics. Writing down all those topics will help to generate authenticity for your blog in the eyes of the reader. They come to know that you have everything that they want to read. There is a possibility that they might end up being your customer for the same reason.

Know your industry

Now that you have written about all the basic topics, you can start about the new hot things going on in the industry, these are the topics which interest most of the people on the social media and grab their attention. To accomplish this task you need to know the industry in a bit of detail.

Feel the pain of the customer

If you are a business owner, you must have analyzed your customer data and felt like nearly 40% of the people in the funnel are getting stuck on step 4 of the procedure and its pretty hard to solve it using technology. What you can do is to write a blog post and next time anyone who gets stuck on the step will get an automatic notification to read the post.

You can ask your customer about the things that they want to read about. You can also go to your competitor’s blog and see what they are writing about and share your own expertise on the topic( But never copy).

Read customer reviews

Most of the business owners get this thing wrong, they get so caught up building things that they stop thinking of reading the customer reviews and knowing how the customers are responding to there products.

Always hear to your customer but believe only on data.

Whenever customer shares some feedback always try to dig as much as possible try to validate the user feedback using the data that you have. This way you can save yourself from working on a solution for which there was never a problem.

Another important thing that you can do is keyword research. You can go to any of the tools like Google keyword planner, Bing webmaster tool or UberSuggest to do some initial keywords related to your niche.

We always recommend going with a keyword having low difficulty and high search volume.

Now that you know the topic on which you are going to write, start by creating an outline of the topic. This is the time when you can pick up your paper and pen and start creating an outline.

Posts with bullet points gets far more traction than a post without bullet points.

Create bullet points of all the topics that you discuss in your post.

Another good idea is to find quotes around a topic. Quotes are the best way to attract the reader’s attention.

The Deep work

There’s always a need for people who go deep.

I recently, read a book called, The deep work (I recommend it), in which the writer recommends the readers to go as deep as possible on any topic in life. Going deep always helps.

Your post should always be giving the answer to these 3 Ws and an H also a famous post by Richard Nordquist. Although he wrote the post in term of journalism, we can use it for blog posts as well.

Who?

Answers who is the post for. You must tell who is the post for. For example, we wrote in the headline itself, that the post is for beginners. Mostly it doesn’t stop advanced people from reading the post.

What?

Answer what the post is about. This must be done in the first two paragraphs only, just restate your headline in a different way and you are good to go.

When?

Not that important for the blog posts in general, but if you are writing news post for the finance industry, you must state when did the government come with the following policy.

Where?

If the post is affected by geography, don’t forget to mention. It’s very important.

Why?

Most of the professional blogger try to do it in the first paragraph. It answers why the topic is important.

How?

This is the part which you should answer in the end. Also, this is the most important part of the post, so never hurry. Most of the bloggers answer all the questions very well and in the end, when it comes to answer this question, they write anything. Never compromise on this one. This is the one thing for which you started to write anyway.

After making an outline, you can start writing your post. We will discuss the process from start to end.

Write a non-resistable headline

The first and foremost thing that you write in a blog post is the headline. The headline is the most important part of your Search Engine Optimization( SEO) process. This title is visible to anyone who is searching for a keyword on the search engine. If your headline is not great your CTR would be low. We wrote a smart tactic guide which you can follow to write good and clickable titles.

There are some tricks that you can use to make your headlines better.

I know we have discussed this before But this is such an important topic that people miss so much, that I have to write it again. Your headline can be easily derived from an ongoing trending topic. People tend to read about these topics and eager to read more about the topic.

You can make use of this knowledge and keep an eye on Twitter and FaceBook for trending topics in your niche. Also use Amazon Book reviews for the books in your niche to generate an headline.

Steal Copy Smartly

You can steal the headlines from the professional bloggers in the industry. But don’t be too naive and copy the whole thing as it is. Be smart and make changes accordingly.

Use some tools

We recommend Title Maker tool by portent for generating ideas for your headlines. Just put in the topic on which you want to write on, and the tool will generate topic titles for you.

Make it smaller

Once you are done with everything, try to make the title smaller. MOZ recommends to keep it under 60 Character and more than 50 characters. Otherwise your title will not be visible on the search engine like Google.

Never lie

Never lie in the headline and promise something which is not achievable. Always deliver the content which is said to be delivered in the headline. Othewise readers will click on the headline will read the content in the try to find the answer, which they never will and return back increasing your bounce rate.

Use Adjectives

According to the headline guide by Marina Barayeva, we should use strong adjectives while writing the headlines of a post. One good example of this is:

A `one and only` guide for…

These adjectives will help to gain more traction for your blog post.

Make use of numbers

According to the same guide, try to use odd numbers in the post headlines. According to a study by backlinko, posts with odd number converts by more numbers as compared to the posts with even numbers. This type of tactic plays with the subconscious mind of the reader. Odd numbers give a sense of exploration to the reader. When they see a odd number they tend to ask in the mind, Why, why an odd number( Why 5, Why 7). To find the answer they end up clicking the link.

Now that you know how to write good headlines, let’s discuss the topic on how to write good body with good entry paragraphs.

The Body: First few paragraphs

This represents the first few paragraphs of your post. In these paragraphs you can bind the reader to your post.

Ask few questions

Just start by asking a few questions. For example:

Do you want to make extra 100 dollars this month?

Do you want to learn this new skill?

Most of the time the answer to this question, should be yes.

Think is terms of the reader

Think about what your reader might be thinking at the moment and convey the same thing as words.

Throw some numbers

Its always a good thing to back your topic with numbers( with links). For example,

According to this( the link) research 50% of the people living in given area, use drugs on daily basis.

Make a promise and deliver on it!

Make a promise but never forget to deliver on it. For example:

After reading this post you would be able to …

The Real Body

This is the part in which you start answering the How of the post. Be aware to give everything that you have in this part. Never hold back anything.

Use Sub-headings

Make use of different subheadings. This makes your article far more readable. This is also good for the people who just want to skim through the article quickly.

Write small paragraphs

If you read about blogging and SEO, you must have read, Neil Patel’s blog. If you take a closer look, He write very small paragraphs. Most of them are just 1-2 sentences.

After seeing the success that he had with his blog, you can start following this small detail. This small detail can bring you far more readers than you can think of.

Follow a format

Some people never follow a format. Somewhere they are using h4 and suddenly they start using bold text instead of headings. Consistency is the key to everything. If you keep on changing the order, reader will get confused and will move away from the page.

The End

This is the part which represents last two-three paragraphs of the post.

Conclude

Never leave the post without a conclusion. This is the part where you can recape everything that you have discussed in few words.

Call to Action

If you want to ask something from the people or want them to do something, this is the part where you want the people to ask it for. If you want the people to share the post, never hesitate to ask. People share more when you ask them to share the post, they comment more if you ask them to comment.

After the end

You also have to perform certain tasks after completing the post. Following are the basic operations which you can perform.

Proofread

This is the most important part of the post. People tend to make mistakes while writing. Even I make a lot of mistakes. You can avoid all of them by proofreading it. Just go through the blog post once and you will be good to go.

Use Grammeraly

There is nothing bad then reading a post with bad grammar. Make use of tools like grammarly.

Read our posts related to SEO for this. Its very important to get readers from Search Engines.

After publishing

Writing the post is not the only thing. Do these tasks to get the readers for your post.

Share the post as much as possible. Share on all the social media channels. You can drive a lot of traffic from all these channels.

Read and answer comments

Always keep an eye on the comment section and answer the questions which pop up in the comment section.

Conclusion

Writing a blog post can be tricky. But if you follow the discussed guidelines you can succeed in the process.

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