Blog

How to Write Effective Blog Posts

By

February 20, 2015

Comments are Disabled

Internet Marketing

An effective blog is one that has lots of great posts in it, so you’ll want to write as often as you can! But it happens to all of us. You’re a busy person. You pour time into your business and fulfilling your customers’ needs. The last thing on your mind is writing an article for your blog. When you finally find time to sit down and write a blog post, it dawns on you that you just simply don’t know where to start, and that can be the reason we subconsciously put off the task. But try a few of these tricks, and you might find some inspiration to start typing and ultimately create an effective and entertaining blog post.

1) Don’t Overthink It

It can seem daunting when you are trying to come up with a good topic for your blog post. But rather than racking your brain about a new topic, why not find inspiration in what’s happening in your business or industry right now? Is there a brand new piece of technology that everyone’s raving about? Perhaps you just got a new shipment of shirts, or you’re designing a new color scheme for an upcoming event. You can easily draw inspiration from your current tasks, and you may even find that writing a blog post serves double-duty so you can brainstorm/focus on that current task AND write a post about it. Pretty cool huh?

2) Consider Your Audience

Consider the fact that other people will be reading your blog post. While having a personal and conversational vibe to your posts is very engaging to your audience, you don’t want it to come off as a private journal or a place to rant about your workload. Do keep in mind what message you’re putting out there for others to see. You should also consider whether your blog post is of any value to your readers. If you write about interesting and relevant topics, then your readers are more likely to come back for more. Repeatedly post boring or non-important articles, and people will form a habit of skipping and ignoring your posts.

3) Name It Well

The title of a post is the first impression, and you only get one shot. You want it to be eye-catching and relevant to what you’re writing about. Depending on what type of writer you are, you may find it’s easiest to title your post first… or you may get a better idea after you’re finished writing. However you come up with a title, you’ll want to make it as relevant as possible. There’s nothing worse than clicking on a post based on the title, and then reading halfway through to find out the author has wasted your time with a totally different topic than you were looking for.

4) Include Keywords

Keywords are a fairly important part of your post, but you shouldn’t be so focused on them that you make the post sound awkward and forced. The keywords should come naturally as you write the post, and if you’re writing about topics that are relevant to your business, then this will be second nature. Another great approach is to pick out some keywords or products that you want to focus on, and use that as your inspiration for the entire post. Don’t try to repeat that keyword all over the post, but rather use it as a general topic of conversation. See this post as a perfect example – I’ve mentioned “blog” and “post” and “write” several times, but they didn’t seem forced. That is the result of writing naturally, and letting the words fall where they may.

5) Review & Proofread

Now you’ll want to review your post for any typos or grammatical errors. You should also preview the post on the frontend to see what it will look like to your visitors. Does the post look really lengthy? Are there really large blocks of text? Try making the content more readable by breaking it up into separate sections and paragraphs.

6) Finally, Optimize

Optimizing should be your last step. The best approach is to first write a post with your audience in mind, with a general topic relevant to your business, and just have some fun with it. Act as if you’re talking to a prospective client or a friend that is interested in what you’re doing these days. Then, you can worry about the optimization afterwards. Now read back through your post and say to yourself “Is this relevant to my current campaign strategy?” You may have a specific keyword, product, or goal in mind… and you want your blog posts to help you get to that goal. So sprinkle in a couple more keywords, consider how you’re going to link back to the blog post, and do a few more blog optimization tricks once the bulk of the writing is finished.

In Summary

Hopefully these tips will help you relax and start writing posts a little more often. Try and take your blog posting a little less seriously, and approach it with a more fun and playful attitude. Once you get past your writer’s block, you will find that each post comes to you much easier. Happy writing!

Latest posts by JT Website Design Inc. (see all)
 

Comments are closed.