If you have ever read a blog post then you have consumed content from a thought leader. A thought leader is someone who is an expert in their industry. It is likely that if the blog post was written effectively, you would have gained useful knowledge and had a positive opinion about the writer or brand that created the content.
You can connect with your audience through blogging and enjoy benefits such as organic traffic from search engines, content for social media promotion, and recognition from a new audience.
If you are new to blogging and are unsure of where to begin, it is time to stop making excuses. We will provide helpful templates to simplify your blogging efforts and show you how to create and manage your business’s blog effectively for better SEO results.
Let’s get started with an important question.
Blogging may mean different things depending on your niche — so let’s begin with this definition.
What is a blog post?
An article published on a website in the blog section is called a blog post. A blog post is a written piece on a specific topic that is meant to educate the reader. It is usually between 600 and 2000 words long, and can also include other types of media like images, videos, infographics, and interactive charts.
Businesses can use blog posts to share insights, thoughts, and stories on their website about any topic. They can help you with marketing, making you more credible and helping you to make more sales. The most important thing they can do is help you drive traffic to your website.
In order to start writing posts for a blog, you need to learn how to create one. Let’s dive in.
1. Understand your audience.
Before you start writing your blog post, it is important to consider who your target audience is.
Ask questions like: What do they want to know about? What will resonate with them?
The process of creating buyer personas helps identify who your ideal customer is and what they want. When coming up with a topic for your blog post, keep in mind what you know about your buyer personas and their interests.
For example, if your readers are millennials who want to start a business, you probably don’t need to provide them with information about how to get started on social media because they already know how to do that.
However, you might want to adjust their social media approach by giving them information about how to be more business savvy and network focused. understanding your audience and what they want is key to publishing helpful content.
Don’t have buyer personas in place for your business? Here are a few resources to help you get started:
- Create Buyer Personas for Your Business [Free Template]
- Guide: How to Create Detailed Buyer Personas for Your Business
- [Free Tool] Make My Persona: Buyer Persona Generator
2. Check out your competition.
There is no better way to draw inspiration than to look at your well-established competition.
Blogs that are popular and have high reviews are worth looking at because they have a good strategy and execution. The reason for doing this is not to copy these elements, but to gain a better understanding of what readers appreciate in a high-quality blog.
There are multiple angles you should look at when doing a competitive analysis:
- Visuals: Look at the blog’s branding, color palette, and theme.
- Copy: Analyze the tone and writing style of the competition to see what readers respond well to.
- Topics: See what subject matter their readers enjoy interacting with.
3. Determine what topics you’ll cover.
Choose a topic to write about before you start writing. You can start with a broad topic for your blog, and then narrow it down to a specific niche as you go. This will help you find your niche and focus your content.
Some ways to choose topics to cover include asking yourself questions like:
- Who do I want to write to?
- How well do I understand this topic?
- Is this topic relevant?
4. Identify your unique angle.
What makes you different from everyone else? It is important to decide the direction your blog will take in the future, and there are many ways to do this.
- What unique experience makes you a trusted expert or thought leader on the topic?
- What problem will you solve for readers?
- Will you share your opinions on trending debates?
- Teach your readers how to do something?
- Compare or share original research?
The topics you write about should be chosen based on what makes them unique.
5. Name your blog.
This is your chance to be creative and come up with a name that will give readers an idea of what your blog is about. Some tips on how to choose your blog name include:
- Keep your blog name easy to say and spell.
- Link your blog name to your brand message.
- Consider what your target audience is looking for.
If you’re having trouble coming up with a name for your blog, you could try using a blog name generator.
Be sure to check that the name you choose isn’t already taken, as this could reduce your visibility and confuse readers who are trying to find your content.
6. Create your blog domain.
A domain is the part of a web address that comes after the “www.”
Your blog’s domain will look like this: www.yourblog.com. You can choose any name for the domain as long as it is not already in use on the internet.
Want to create a subdomain for your blog? If you already own a cooking business, you might create a blog that looks like www.yourcompany.com/blog. This means that your blog will have its own URL on your company’s website.
Some CMS platforms offer a free subdomain service, where your blog would live on the CMS platform, rather than your business’s website. For example, it might look like this: yourblog.contentmanagementsystem.com. To create a subdomain that belongs to your company website, you will need to register the subdomain with a website host.
Hosting your own website is very inexpensive- as little as $3 a month when you commit to a 36 month term.
You can connect your custom domain to HubSpot’s free CMS or to premium editions of CMS Hub. This allows you to take advantage of security features and a content delivery network.
Here are five other popular web hosting services to choose from:
7. Add Subheadings and Shorter Paragraphs to Break up the Page
Formatting is super important for blog posts. In my opinion, there is nothing worse than reading a blog post that is just one long paragraph.
If you want people to read your article, we recommend using subheadings to break up the content.
Anything you can do to make your blog post easy to read will help the reader take the action you want them to.
A shorter paragraphs will help your readers understand your post better.
At OptinMonster, we tend to break up each paragraph into smaller parts every few lines or so.
Notice how small the blocks of text are. We usually limit ourselves to 2-3 lines of text, and only 4 lines if something really needs further explanation.
We do this to help our readers understand the information they are receiving in a shorter amount of time.
Remember, not all kinds of content are created equal. In books, big blocks of text are fine. But blog posts are different. The goal of these kinds of videos is to provide concise, useful information in a brief period.
And they want all that information yesterday.
break your text up into smaller sections with subheadings to make it easier for your reader to follow, and keep your paragraphs short to help them take in more information in a shorter amount of time.
You can further improve your writing by using short sentences in addition to short paragraphs.
8. Add Images
It takes the human brain less time to process visual content than text. Images are a great way to make your posts more engaging.
There are a lot of great free resources for finding high-quality, royalty-free images.
It would be better for you to take your own photos or create your own images. While stock photos are convenient, they lack personalization.
We use Shutterstock, a premium stock photo site, for OptinMonster.
Creating images is a great way to break up text in an article.
9. Optimize for SEO
In the blogging world, SEO can be tricky. You should never put your user’s experience over SEO. On the other hand, you shouldn’t ignore SEO, either.
The goal is to find the balance.
Organic searches on Google result in a large amount of traffic for most websites. OptinMonster included.
We recommend that you optimize your blog post for important SEO ranking factors if you want to maximize your SEO ranking.
This used to mean that you would have to hire an analyst to do it for you, but now there are tools that make it easy for you to do it by yourself.
The All in One SEO plugin is the most powerful and easy to use WordPress SEO plugin. Here’s what you get:
- Actionable checklist to optimize each page
- Detailed content and readability analysis
- Easily add SEO elements like meta title, description, and focused keywords
- Add XML sitemaps and schema markups to improve SEO rankings
- Competitor analysis to outrank the competition
- Integrate with other tools and social media platforms
This is the most beginner-friendly SEO tool so anyone can use it to get their pages to rank.
10. Set Up an Exit-Intent® Campaign
If you want to turn your visitors into subscribers and customers, you need more power!
No matter how great blog posts are, they have their limitations. That’s why lead generation tools exist in the market.
OpintMonster is the most powerful lead generation and conversion optimization tool.
OptinMonster enables you to generate conversion strategies, for example lightbox pop-ups, slide-ins, notification bars, banners, and scroll boxes.
The majority of visitors who leave your site will never come back. This means that you only have one opportunity to persuade a customer to make a purchase before they leave your website.
You can do this using OptinMonster’s Exit-Intent® technology. This text describes a function that detects when a visitor is leaving your site, and then displays a popup.
Ask your customers if they would like to subscribe to your emails or newsletters, or offer them a discount if they buy now!
How is this possible? Let’s take a look at OptinMonster’s powerful features.
- 100+ readymade templates to create stunning campaigns in minutes
- Drag and drop visual builder that anyone can use
- 9 different campaign types to choose from such as popups, floating bars, and gamified wheels
- Tons of targeting options such as Exit-Intent;reg, time spent on page, visitor’s source
- A/B testing to optimize results
- Analytics and insights to improve campaigns
Once you install and activate OptinMonster, you will be able to choose from a variety of campaign types and templates.
Then, use the popup builder to customize the popup. After you follow these steps, you can create display rules to control when, where, and to whom your popup is shown.
After you publish your campaign, you will see an increase in conversions.
11. Add a Clear Call-to-Action
Here’s our final tip for writing a blog post that converts: include a clear call-to-action.
Be sure to include a call to action in your text so that your readers will know what you would like them to do. This could be asking them to leave a comment, share your blog post, follow you on social media, or purchase your product.
Your call-to-action should be easily distinguishable from the rest of your content so that it stands out.
The most common type of call to action for blog posts is asking readers to share the content if they enjoyed it.
If you read OptinMonster’s blog, you will have noticed that most of our articles end that way.
If you have great content, most readers will be excited to share it. Most people will be happy to buy your product if it is awesome.
You need to ask in order to get people to do things.
12. Publish and promote the blog post.
Make sure to share your post across all of the marketing channels you have available to you. The more people that see your article, the more likely it is that someone will read it.
Channels to expand your blog post promotion strategy include:
- Social Media Marketing: Sharing your content on the most popular social media networks like Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, etc.
- Email Marketing: Sharing the newest post with your email subscribers to find.
- Boosted Posts or Paid Ads: Allocating budget toward advertisement on search engines inorganically.
- Word of Mouth Marketing: Actively influencing people to read your content organically.
13. Track the performance of the blog post over time.
Make sure to keep track of your post’s performance over time to see if your blog strategy is working well enough to achieve your goals.
There are many website traffic analysis tools that can help you understand your audience’s behavior on your blog posts.
Ready to blog?
Blogging can help you build brand awareness, become a thought-leader and expert in your industry, attract qualified leads, and boost conversions. If you want to start a blog, follow the steps and tips we covered earlier. This will help you get started and improve your blog.
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