How to Write Compelling Blog Posts
Writing as a blogger the easiest way
How to write a blog post is one of the most common questions that many beginner writers have. Unfortunately, most of the blog posts on the subject do not give you the answers to what you’re looking for.
These tips are what I’ve learned over the years of being a writer. I have adapted some from other aspects of writing, such as writing books, for blogging.
Know your audience
This is first because you need to understand who your target audience is. Who are you writing for?
The simple way to do this is to have the person in mind who you think would be interested in your blogs.
How old is this person? Where do they live? What’s their occupation? Why would they want to read your posts? Do they like pineapple on their pizza?
Core content
What’s your blog about? Is it going to be serious? Satire and parody? Are you going to have one niche? Related niches? Different niches?
If I use myself as an example, my general niches are:
How to write?
Blogging
Books
The spinoffs of those main subjects include AI ethics, using AI as a tool, SEO, promoting, marketing, formatting, sales, and many other topics.
Research and proof
Unless you are writing fiction or prose, it’s important to give out credible information, statistics, and facts. This can be in the form of personal experience and anecdotes if you are writing about something personal or that you can do.
If your title is something like
“I made $5k income with this one writing trick, and so can YOU!”
You have to show the proof that you made $5000!
If you are writing a piece about your three-month homestay in Japan, you need to add pictures of yourself in Japan!
Actionable information
Let’s go back to the title
“I made $5k income with this one writing trick, and so can YOU!”
Many bloggers will give you evidence that they did this through screenshots and descriptions. And that is where they stop.
If you want to be successful as a writer, you must tell your reader how you made that much money using the one writing trick.
If we use the Japanese story, we don’t want some quick anecdote about your nerves getting off the plane. We want to feel what it would be like living in Japan for three months!
Headlines that stand out
Writing eye-catching headlines is the foundation of your blog. Without actually using out-and-out clickbait, you must make your titles interesting and SEO friendly.
One of the easiest ways to come up with SEO-friendly titles is to use AI to suggest high-scoring SEO titles for you. After inputting the titles into a free headline analyzer such as aioseo you are looking for a score of 86+
The reason you have to do this is that the AI is not perfect. Some or most of the titles it will give you won’t score over 86. However, this is still faster than typing away trying to come up with a title yourself!
Introductions that intrigue
That first sentence after the headline is why people decide to keep reading. Again, don’t make promises you can’t keep, but make it captivating using anecdotes, questions, or bold statements.
If your Title is the worm, your Introduction is the hook. Most readers decide if they want to read something after the first paragraph. So it’s rather important to work on that first sentence. I have written the first sentence for this post three times so far!
Structuring for success
Choosing the structure for your post, be it the classic narrative, the listicle format, or the step-by-step guide.
A tip that most writers still don’t adhere to is to use shorter paragraphs and less block text. The reason I recommend this is that many people read on their phones and a mass amount of text is difficult to navigate.
Body Magic
The body of your post is just as important as the headings, first sentence SEO, discoverable keywords, and so on. But many bloggers are putting in all that effort getting the right amount of SEO words to get featured on Google’s first page, the perfect hook in the first line, and then the most important part of the actual blog is meaningless drivel.
The diamond in the rough
Make sure your writing is grammatically correct, with the right tenses, spelling, and punctuation.
I always run my articles through first Grammarly then ProWritingAid.
Grammarly corrects and goes to the next mistake, ProWritingAid you have to click on each mistake it finds so it is a lot slower. Use Grammarly to remove most of the basic mistakes before going to Pro for the advanced stuff.
The free versions are more than adequate for your blogging needs.
SEO Smarts
Optimizing your post for search engines without stuffing it with keywords and making it unreadable.
Yes, SEO is important and many people want to be on the first page of the Google search engine. This is understandable, however, if you do overdo this, your writing becomes almost useless and unreadable.
A happy medium would be a combination of keywords to get the post noticed. Using SEO keywords where they don’t disturb the reader
Titles, Sub-headings, SEO descriptions, tags, and hashtags.
#writing #blogging #GoogleSEO #articles #howtowriteblogs
Call to Action
A call to action is you asking the reader to do something for you. Subscribing to a newsletter, reading other pieces you’ve written, following, commenting, or giving likes.
I prefer to put mine at the bottom of the article and only use one or two. For example, please give me a like and a follow. Or other posts that you may like and link a relevant post.
Below are two examples of other posts I have written.
Conquering Writer’s Block
Writing on Medium
Thanks for reading
Clap, follow and comment if you want to
Paul
