How To Create Simple But Effective Posts For Your Blog

Hopefully you will have a blog for your business, if you don’t then you’re missing out! A blog not only gives you the ability to share relevant content to your audience but it also gives you a chance to promote yourself and even use all important keywords to drive traffic to your website.

The world wide web isn’t what it used to be, the almighty Google requests for all websites to be content rich. This means writing an awful lot of articles, but it’s okay when you know how to make them in a heartbeat. So below I am going to show you my process, step by step, and hopefully it will help you to create quick but great articles too.

Do Your Research

Don’t dive in head first thinking you know exactly what people want to read, because people change their tastes all the time. You need to narrow down your audience and find articles that they are already sharing. A good way to find things to write is to steal ideas from top competitors, whatever they share is going to have been researched before being written. You can use hashtags in social media networks, such as Twitter and Google+, to see what people are sharing.

For example, I want to write an article for a makeup website, so I can use the hashtag #makeup and see what people are sharing. If you see a trend, pick up on that and create an article around that. Alternatively you can look through the most shared content on the internet via Buzzsumo. You can even simply rewrite articles from other people, just make sure you don’t directly copy any of their text.

Come Up With A Powerful Title

Once you’ve got an idea of what you’re writing about you need to come up with your very own unique title. Let’s say I’m drawing inspiration from a blog post called “this is how you should be contouring your face”, I’m not going to copy that title or even use the same words. You need to pick out key words, so in this instance the key word is contouring and it is a how to guide.

Next you will need to try various titles and test them in this headline analyser from the Advanced Marketing Institute, which can tell you how effective a title it is. It’s an excellent tool which can really help you see where you’re going wrong. Keeping it short gives you brownie points as well as using personal and emotional words. The original title gets 25% in the tool, so I need to aim for higher. From this I am going to go along with the title “Contouring 101: What To Do” which gets 40%.

Start Your Article With An Introduction

Like with a good book, you want to build the story up rather than get straight to the point. Even if it is only a sentence or two long, an introduction can help the reader to know exactly what they’re about to get into. If you haven’t got a very specific title, you’ll need to elaborate in your introduction to say what you’re going to be covering. This stops people from getting halfway down only to realise that the article isn’t going to help them.

Your introduction should only go up to 100 words in total, otherwise it’ll be too long and will put potential readers off. In your intro you’ll need to address what issues you’re covering and basically tell the reader what the aim of the article is. So, I could say (for my example article) that I’m going to be showing them step by step how to create the perfect contours on their face with ease, etc.

Break Your Article Up Into Bite-Sized Chunks

This is something that can really help you if you’re not used to or struggle with writing articles. An article should be around 500 words on average, more if you’re writing a guide. With this in mind you can make it easier on yourself by breaking the article up into sections. If you know what you’re going to talk about then you can give some sub topics to cover within the article (like I have done with this article).

Every section should be around 100 words long, which means you can have around 5 different sections you can cover or more if you prefer. You can use this word/character counter if you don’t have one built into your website. So, for this contouring article, I could start with the following structure and then work from there (using this structure I should get in around 700 words in total for the whole article):

Title

Introduction

– What You Will Need

– Where To Start

– Darker Highlights

– Lighter Highlights

– Blending

– The Finished Product

Check All Spelling And Grammar

Once you’ve created your article you need to make sure that it doesn’t have any errors in it. You could ask a friend or colleague to read your article for you before you post it, you should be able to see spelling mistakes as they will hopefully be underlined in red. If you don’t have a built in spell checker you can use this one.

Grammar is slightly more difficult as there’s no real way of knowing if it is right in the first instance. There are many online tools you could use, but they mostly focus on spelling and can be a bit hit and miss. The best way to find out is to get someone to read it, preferably someone who has good grammar themselves! Some mistakes can be more obvious to a new pair of eyes, which is why this is helpful.

You should also make sure that you have not copied anyone else’s work. You may have written the whole article yourself from your head, but it still doesn’t hurt to check as duplicate content is an absolute no no. You can check duplicate content using Copyscape, which is paid.

And there we have it! If you’re in need of a blog for your website simply talk to your website developers. If you’re in need of a website altogether you can talk to us.