Writing any type of content calls for inherent creativity. Blogging is an essential tool for successful marketing. Hence, we need to learn how to start a blog as well as write the best posts for it, as each article can reflect and support our business.
It is vital to remember that without a quality and well-optimized blog, SEO can be negatively impacted, making any other effort to promote a site or the brand it’s representing futile. Similarly, without updating our sites with regular posts will lead to fewer pages for us to put our valuable calls-to-action on, which help generate inbound leads.
At times, we may find ourselves in a state of confusion on the overall content strategy development, while trying to set up a posting schedule for our content, pumping out blog posts, without much success. To prevent this, we need to remember that the quality of our content is what matters most.
Having high-quality content on your blog is what will make people flock to your website more than a regular schedule. While both are important, quality is a major factor. It will make the customers always want to read our content whenever it comes up.
Below is a step by step guide where you’ll get insights on how to write high-quality blog posts. It will help both enjoy blogging while turning prospects into buying customers.
1. Pick a Topic That Will Set You Up for Success
Remember that the process of writing an attractive blog post starts long before you open up your word processor. If you don’t take time to settle for a topic and an idea that you want to write about, then you are set to fail. Take time and decide on an idea that you can cover in-depth.
If you don’t have a better way to come up with a topic, you can always look for keywords related to your niche with the help of Ahrefs. Knowing what’s trending in your niche is a surefire way to find something that will both attract readers and potentially climb the search engine result pages.
So you found a keyword, and have a good idea of why people look for it on search engines. If you want to create a high-quality post that will be useful to the readers and will help in drive traffic to your blog, you need to settle on a unique idea that should meet as many of the following criteria:
- Relevance. You should settle on a useful and interesting topic that will capture the attention of your target audience. For you to settle on this, you need to have a well-detailed audience profile in place. Figure out how your article can solve a problem or answer some critical questions your readers might have.
- Uniqueness. To have unique content, you should do some research on different sites. Also, avoid duplicating material that you had previously posted. You also don’t need to have completely new content. However, you can try providing a unique spin which will make your post different.
- Longevity. When you are writing your content, you can focus on topics that aren’t necessarily the latest trends. A post that will be relevant for a long time would be best for your blog unless you are running a news-focused site.
- Depth. While shorter blog content can be useful and engaging, making content easier to get into, you should work on any given topic. Remember that long-form blog content tends to provide the best returns on your blog.
2. Create an Outline
Having a well-done overview for your blog post offers many benefits, while a poorly done draft may lead people to have a negative association with your concept. A poorly done outlining can suck most of the creativity out of the writing process. Also, take up most of your time.
A well-done outline provides many benefits. For instance, having put a framework in place helps you focus on smaller concerns such as your choice of words and the flow of your article when you are writing. It also helps you to have a free flow of thoughts rather than having to figure out what you are going to write next.
An outline also ensures you have covered all the vital points on your post and in a logical order. Creating an outline helps research too. Even if you are familiar with the topic you are about to write, doing some research will help you come across new ideas or even write the topic from different angles.
Most importantly, an outline will help you not to deviate from the main topic that you are writing about as you have a road map to refer to when working on your content.
Lastly, a good framework should include an SEO plan. This should include the number of times target keywords should be used, any internal links that could be related to the post, and more.
3. Writing the Blog Post
As we have seen, writing a blog post is a creative process, and each person will have a different approach while writing. Here are a few tips that can be of greater help for us when we are writing a blog post.
- While writing the first draft, you should not worry about self-editing. Don’t mind the mistakes that you make while writing down your first draft. Just get all your ideas down to the last point as there is plenty of time to go back and edit your work after you are done writing.
- Don’t worry about writing too much. It is advisable to write more than the required length of your post rather than too little. It is easier to trim down on a lengthy article and make it perfect than adding ideas and words on a short article in which you are more likely to add too many fluffy words.
- Write the introduction and a conclusion last. After laying out the rest of your post, you are guaranteed to have a better idea on the best way to open and close it is.
Always keep in mind all the key writing aspects such as an environment that you feel most comfortable in or the time of day that you are most alert, focused, and full of ideas.
4. Editing the First Draft
This is the step that most bloggers, especially the first-timers, tend to make mistakes in. Just writing a blog post and quickly passing it through for spelling mistakes does not make it ready to be published.
Editing is a fairly systematic process that will require multiple things for you to look out for. Let’s go over the essentials:
- Avoid editing your post immediately after you have finished writing. You are more likely not to notice some mistakes in your article if you start editing right after you have finished writing. Allowing some time to pass before editing helps you see the post more objectively and helps notice mistakes, as you’ll have a clearer head.
- Pay attention to detail. Some of the things such as spelling and grammar may seem simple but are a crucial element when establishing your credibility and also help put your focus on the content and not on your mistakes. Be sure to use an editing assistant like Grammarly.
- Don’t just edit the text. You should edit your entire post, including images and other media, the formatting, metadata, among other aspects for a perfect blog post. Make sure that your content is perfect from the headline to the slug.
- Always preview your post before publishing. Always make sure that you read and inspect your post in preview mode, as this helps see any formatting error and will show the content exactly as visitors will see it.
- One final proofread. Once you have made all the necessary edits and perfected the spelling and grammar, give your post one final proofread to see if that’s the type of post you want to have on your blog, or if some revisions are still in order.
Editing tends to take a lot of time, but it is worth it. You are guaranteed a high-quality blog post that you will be happy to call your own.
Conclusion
Writing a high-quality blog post can be harder than it looks. Not only does it need to be grammatically perfect, but also have an easy to follow the train of thought. But most importantly, your content needs to be useful to your readers. I hope this guide helped put you on the right track to creating a great blog post. Good luck!
