No matter how great your blog post is, it is meaningless if it can’t bring more readers to your business blog. In order to create a blog post that brings more readers to your business blog, you really need to go an extra mile. In this article, you can understand how to write a blog post for your business blog to get more readers.
Step 1: Understand the purpose of your blog
This isn’t funny at all, but many people make a huge mistake in this step. They typically forget the purpose of their blog when it comes to writing blog posts.
Nobody starts a blog without a purpose. Ask yourself what is the purpose of your blog.
Is it for building your brand presence?
Is it to sell your products/services?
Is it just for SEO purpose?
Believe it or not, you need clear and well defined objectives to succeed with blogging. So the first step is to understand what is the purpose of your blog and what do you want to achieve with that.
Step 2: Realize who you want to target
The next step is to understand who is going to read your content. You need to realize this even before deciding what to write. Many businesses start blogging without having a clear understanding about their target audience. This is one of the many reasons why many blogs fails.
Be specific when it comes to targeting your audience. Who should read your blog post? Would it be men or women? If so, what age range they should be? Are you targeting house moms of age range 30-40? Or are you targeting businessmen of age range 45-55? You must need a clear understanding about those things.
Step 3: Get the topic that interests your target audience
As you’re a business owner, your readers are going to be your target customers. You need to understand what your target customers want to know from you. To come up with an excellent blog post idea that best serves your target customers, you need to ask yourself the following questions.
What are the important questions your customers ask?
What are the most common problems your customers have?
What do your customers should know to make great purchasing decisions?
What do you suggest your customers read or watch?
The funny part of blogging is that you don’t need a completely brand new idea each and every time to write a great blog post. Sometimes when you come up with an appealing topic, you can see there are already many similar articles written by others (your competitors or industry leaders) on the same topic.
This is not a problem at all, because you can take it for your benefit.
How?
Nobody is perfect! Even your competitors as well as industry leaders make mistakes; there may be flaws on their content too. This is a bonus for you. Just understand what they forgot to explain or which of their ideas couldn’t impress their readers. This is very easy to find out. Simply go through the comments on their blog, and see what their readers don’t like or complain about.
Read this article to quickly come up with interesting blog post ideas that engage your audience – 4 quick ways small business owners can come up with interesting blog post ideas.
Step 4: Do keyword research to pick the right keywords
Keywords play a crucial role in bringing lots of targeted traffic to your blog. Well, you don’t need to be an SEO expert to find the right keywords. There are tools like Google Keyword Planner, Market Samurai. SEO Book etc. that will help you do some keyword research and find the best keywords.
In order to pick the right keywords, you need to keep a few things in mind. Don’t pick a very competitive keyword assuming that you’ll get a lot of traffic. Competitive keywords usually take a lot of time and hard work to get ranked. You don’t have to pick such keywords unless you’re ready to put efforts on huge promotion. A sound strategy is to find a long tail keyword (keyword with 3 or more words) that is less competitive and has a lot of monthly searches.
Also, keep in mind that getting into the first page of search engine results for a least searched keyword is way better than getting into the fourth page for a highly searched keyword. So whatever keyword you choose, your goal should be to get into the first page of search engine results.
Step 5: Prepare an outline
The next step is to prepare an outline that supports your topic idea. What are you intending to write? Just write those points down. This doesn’t need to be perfect. Basically, this is done to prepare a rough idea about various sections you’re going to cover.
A great blog post should start with an introduction part. Then, there should be different sections that are arranged in short paragraphs. Finally, there should be a conclusion part. Creating an outline early in the writing process will help you plan what to discuss and what not to.
Step 6: Do the research to validate your facts and information
Sometimes, you need to validate your facts and information even if you’re an expert in your field. Doing a pretty good research will help you get a lot of information on almost any topic and validate your ideas. When it comes to research, Google is your best friend. The more you do research the better will be the results.
Read the blog posts of influential people to get better ideas, and also go through multiple sources to make sure that the facts and information you’ve collected are correct. However, make sure that you’re collecting information only from authoritative sources.
The reason is if you mention an incorrect fact or give a bad advice to your readers, it will create a bad impression among them. This can probably take their confidence away from your brand especially when they are new to your blog.
Step 7: Give a catchy headline
No matter how nicely you’ve crafted your content, it isn’t going to grab your readers’ attention without a catchy headline. You really need to spend time coming up with great headlines.
Here are a few things you should follow when it comes to creating headlines.
Be specific: Never confuse or mislead your readers with your headline. Be very specific and let your readers know what they will get by reading your blog post.
Be unique: Always try to stand out from the crowd with your headline. A unique headline that no one else has used is better than a generic headline.
Be valuable: Your headline should highlight the value of your content. Remember, your readers are spending time on reading your blog post, so make sure that it is worth their time.
Invoke urgency: There are lots of “read-it-later” types of readers out there, so you need to create a headline that invokes urgency making your readers read your post right now. A headline is actually a promise you’re giving to your readers that they will get what they are looking for.
Step 8: Work on the body of content
If your headline acts as a “promise”, then your content should fulfill that promise. Your readers would be expecting more from you once they are impressed with your headline. For this reason, you need to create solid content that provides full value to your readers. When you include keywords on your article, make sure that they appear naturally. Also, overstuffing your article with keywords can hurt your SEO efforts, so use them wisely.
For creating a killer article, you can follow this format.
Introduction
An introduction acts as a welcome message to your readers. Write an introduction that creates anticipation and tells your readers why they should read your article.
Subtitles
We’re living in a busy world, so you can’t expect readers will read your content line by line. Thus, it is your duty to organize your blog post with subtitles so that your readers can at least get the idea with a quick read.
Short paragraphs
Make sure that your paragraphs are short and easy to read. A blog post with too lengthy paragraphs not only will look awkward, but it will also bore your readers.
Bullet points and highlights
If you are listing certain points or statements, you can use bullets or numbers to make them easily viewable. You can also highlight the important points in bold or italics so that they will stand out.
Conclusion
It is important to write a conclusion that summarizes your whole content. Here you can also provide further advice or suggestion to your readers if there are any.
Step 9: Include relevant pictures or graphics
A fantastic picture or graphic on your blog post is equally important as quality content. Studies have shown that blog posts with pictures are more appealing to readers than those without one. Make sure that your picture or graphic is visually appealing and relevant to your post.
Use your own pictures if possible. If you can’t create pictures yourself, you can find them on the internet, but make sure that you’re not violating any copyrights.
Here are a few sites that provide free pictures.
www.stockphotosforfree.com
www.photober.com/free-photos
pixabay.com
Step 10: Include call-to-action in the end
It is very important to include call-to-action in the end of your blog post. This will prompt your readers to take an action and eventually you may generate some leads. A call-to-action or CTA can be anything like a free giveaway offer, links to your products/services page, links to related blog posts, questions to your readers, or even a request to leave comments.
Step 11: Place social share buttons
It is important to place social share buttons on your blog post. This will allow your readers to share your article on their social media pages so that many people will come to know about your blog.
The more your content gets shared, the more people will come to your blog. However, you need to make sure that you’re choosing the right social media platforms where your target customers are present. Picking social media platforms that don’t have the audience you want is not a good strategy.
Step 12: Proofread your blog post before it will go live
Accuracy matters! Nobody is interested in reading an article with full of mistakes. Read your blog post loud and make sure that it is free of spelling, grammar, punctuation and sentence structure mistakes. You also need to avoid fillers and repetition of words.
Once you’ve finished editing yourself, it is a good idea to seek for a second opinion. Share your article with one of your close friends who have better knowledge and ask for his/her opinion.
Step 13: Optimize for search engines with On-page SEO
Inserting a few keywords here and there in your article does not do the job for you. You need to do a bit on page SEO for getting your keywords ranked on top search engine results.
You can’t imagine the power of On-page SEO; high quality blog posts with proper on page optimization mostly may get ranked on search engines easily. This may not happen every time as there are many factors affecting SEO, but you still have a chance to rank many blog posts with proper On-page SEO.
The following things are important for On-page SEO.
URL
You should include your targeted keyword on your URL. Make sure that your URL is short and search engine friendly.
Title tag
Title tag is also important for search engines. Include your keyword on the title tag.
Header tags (h1, h2 etc)
Headers like h1, h2 have a huge impact on search engine ranking. Search engines always check what is written on your header tags so you need to include your keyword on header tags.
Meta description
Meta description is the content that is available to search engine users then they found some results on search engines. Write a great Meta description that best describes your blog post by including your keywords.
Anchor text
If there are similar posts on your blog, you can link those pages back to your article page by putting the keyword as anchor text.
Image alt tag
Image tag or img tag defines an image in your HTML web page. Make sure that your “img alt tag” contains your keyword for all the pictures you’ve used on your blog post.
Conclusion
Creating quality content that provides value to your readers is an important factor for successful blogging. In order to create great blog posts, you need to think from your audience’s perspective. Try to write what your target audiences want, not what you like. Focus on your process and results will follow. Good luck!