4 Rules For Writing a Successful Blog Post — Effortlessly
Write a post that matters
Writing seems like an easy job from the bird’s eye view. Those who don’t write or still planning to get into it, are unaware of what’s inside.
The idea of writing is beautiful and straightforward until you sit and actually start doing it. There are a lot of tiny things you have to take care of when you write for an audience. And, these tiny things decide the destiny of your piece. A successful write up goes through these steps.
- Idea
- Research
- Formatting
- Writing and Publishing
- And finally, Marketing
Every part has its own importance and needs proper work. But, in this article, I will be focusing on a part that content is judged on — the writing part. Here are 4 simple yet highly effective hacks to write a highly consumable post.
Prioritize the current draft
Can’t say about you but I had a weird approach towards writing the content. I used to keep some points and information to use in the next article so that I could write a part-2 of the current post sometime later. It was like I did not want to waste that whole information on just a single article. And resultantly, my pieces were less compelling than those of others.
The point I am trying to make is — when you have enough material and ideas to write a lengthy piece on a particular topic, just write it. Don’t save half of that information to write a part-2 or another article later. Your task at hand is a top priority. Use all your knowledge and research to make your current draft perfect and as useful as possible.
Don’t care about the length of your post. It doesn’t really matter whether you write a short or long-form article (2500+ words) as long as it serves the purpose and is easy to read. Also on Medium, a well-researched long-form article can get more reading time than the shorter ones.
In short, never compromise on the quality of your content for —
- The sake of keeping it shorter.
- Saving information and ideas for another article.
Don’t publish/edit immediately after finishing writing a post
Earlier, I used to get my articles through a quick editing process after finishing writing it. I didn’t see any point in keeping it in drafts once I know It’s ready to publish. But after publishing when I looked at that piece after a day or two, I usually catch a few mistakes along with sentences/paragraphs that could be written better.
My advice is — Don’t publish immediately because you need to take a little time to edit your piece. And, do not also edit your work right after finishing it. The best editing process requires you to put on a hat of a reader, and not a writer’s who wrote that thing. When you edit with a fresh mind, you are able to do justice with this process. Wait until you are able to take a look at your article with fresh eyes.
Write the introduction part later
When writing a piece, what order do you follow?
Is it Intro>body>conclusion>title & subtitle? I guess so as this is the most straightforward and common order to write a blog post.
Most of us write the title later or edit the previous one after finishing the post. But why?
Because we know the title is a critically important part of a post. If the title is not good enough, the post will not get read — no matter how great it is. After finishing the writing part, our writer mode is fully activated and the flow of ideas is at the peak. This is the state when we come up with the best title ideas. Agree?
Now let me ask, is the introduction part any less important? In my understanding, it’s as crucial as the title itself. You can attract people to click through with your catchy titles. But, if your introduction part fails to grab the readers, most of them will click away, increasing your bounce rate as a result.
Write an intro that not only gives a small description of the article but also keep your readers hooked. The practice I follow to write the intros that pretty make it easier for me is writing it in the end. My usual order to writing a post is —
Body>conclusion>introduction>title.
Try this order the next time when writing a post and you will feel the difference. This little hack will not only improve the quality of your intro but make it easier for you to write one.
Understand your readers
Medium has a quality reader-base. Why do I say that?
Well, considering the fact that the majority of Medium’s active readers are writers themselves, it shouldn’t be that hard to get it.
If you primarily write on Medium and want more eyeballs, don’t write repetitive content. Like, do not write about the basic steps to do on-page SEO. Rather, write an article about an SEO hack that you believe very few people might know about. To be clearer, anything that you know is easily searchable on Google, won’t work here on Medium. Medium is not a search engine. People come here to read something unique that they don’t find everywhere else.
So what exactly Medium wants you to write?
Medium loves your unique perspectives and experiences with something. When I said don’t write obvious and repetitive content, I didn’t mean the niches. You can write in almost any niche and get your share of success. The only thing that matters is whether your content is giving your readers a different angle to think or not. Let your experience do the talks.
Takeaway
If you just care to search, the internet is full of hacks and strategies to help you with writing better. Some of them might work for you and most of them not. But the only strategy that has been around for ages and works for everyone, is practice. When you develop a habit of writing daily, you figure out what works and what not, automatically. You get to know many premium secrets you have never read in any book or article.
Keep in mind what others suggest. Discover your own hacks. Becoming a good writer is a long process and you can’t get there without skipping a step. Keep practicing.