How do you write awesome content for your audience? That’s a big and important question. With 70 million blog posts published on WordPress alone every month, you need to write content that will stand out. That’s why we created this ultimate guide on how to write blog posts that people want to read.
We will be sharing the best tips for writing a compelling blog post that your audiences want to read.
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Understand Your Audience – Blog Posts
In order to create a successful blog, it’s crucial to understand your audience. Understanding your audience means knowing their interests, preferences, and needs. It is not enough if you only know the basic information about them. Instead, the more detailed you know about them, the better you can create content for them.
When you have a clear understanding of your audience, you can create content that resonates with them. This will lead to more engagement, traffic, and conversions. Here are some ways to understand your audience for a blog.
1. Define Your Audience
The first step in understanding your audience is to define who they are. This means identifying their demographics, such as age, gender, location, income, and education level. It’s also important to understand their psychographics, which includes their interests, values, beliefs, and motivations.
And if possible, create a customer avatar for your audience. You can draw it out and explain his/her information there. Ideally, if you can define your audience by their daily schedule, you are good.
By understanding your audience’s demographics and psychographics, you can tailor your content to meet their needs and preferences.
2. Research The Audience
One of the best ways to understand your audience is to conduct research. There are several ways to do this, such as using surveys, social media analytics, and website analytics. Surveys can provide insights into your audience’s preferences and behaviours, while social media analytics can show you what types of content your audience engages with the most. Website analytics can help you understand where your traffic is coming from and what pages on your website are most popular.
3. Use Personas
Personas are fictional characters that represent your target audience. They are based on real data and research, and they help you understand your audience’s needs, goals, and challenges.
When creating personas, it’s important to consider your audience’s demographics, psychographics, and behaviour patterns. You can use these personas to guide your content creation process and ensure that your content meets the needs and preferences of your audience.
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Planning On What To Write
Before you start crafting your masterpiece of content, you need to know what kind of content to create, and the goal of your content. If you are looking for long-term organic growth on search engines, then you need to first conduct keyword research. This is to know what your audiences are searching for and how you can match it with your content. And of course, to target those keywords in your content so your content can show up in the search result when they search for it.
1. Create A Content Plan
Once you have identified your niche and target audience, it’s time to create a content plan. A content plan is a roadmap for your blog. It outlines the topics you want to write about and when you plan to publish them. You can create a content plan using a spreadsheet or a content calendar. Start by brainstorming ideas for your blog and then organize them into categories.
The key to winning in content marketing is to be consistent with your content. When your audiences start building up, they would be looking forward to your regular content update. So, consistency is the key to keeping and growing your loyal audiences. Not only that, search engines will prefer sites with fresh and updated content as well. If you don’t update regularly, it will hurt your SEO as well.
2. Conduct Research
Before you start writing, it’s important to conduct research on your topic. Research helps you to gather information, understand your topic better, and identify gaps in existing content.
You can conduct research using online resources, books, interviews, and surveys. Or the best thing you can do would be to look at who ranks on the top for the keyword that you want to rank for. Study and analyse their content and see what they are doing to get them ranked at the top.
Are they having a long-form post or media-rich post, or they are big names with high reputations and high-quality backlinks? By understanding your competitors, you can work towards outranking them.
3. Create An Outline
Once you have gathered all the necessary information, it’s time to create an outline for your blog post. An outline is a blueprint for your content. It helps you to organize your thoughts and ensures that your post flows logically. Start by creating a rough outline of your post, including headings and subheadings.
Create A Compelling Headline – Blog Posts
Your headline and sub-headings are the most important element of your blog. People will first read your title to decide whether it is worth it for them to continue reading. Then they will scan through your sub-heading to understand what your blog is about. So, if your headline is unable to catch their attention, they will just exit and leave. And even if they decided to continue reading, most of them won’t read every single word.
They will read the sub-headings to know what you are talking about and read the sections that they really interested in or think that it’s helpful for them. Knowing this human behaviour, your headline is the deciding factor or the entry point for your audiences to your content.
Hence, it Is very important for you to craft a compelling headline. Here are some tips that you can include in the headline:
1. Include your target keyword or keyphrase in your headline
2. Hook your audience with your headline. You want to tell them you are having a solution that they need, but not reveal it in the headline. Make them interested and continue reading it.
3. Use the “How To” headline such as “How To achieve {their goal} without {pain}”
4. Use numbers in your headline such as “5 simple hacks to {achieve their goals}”
5. Include emotional words in your headline
There is different headline copywriting formula that you can use to write a compelling headline. However, the key to getting the perfect headline for your content would be running a split test and seeing which version will get the highest clickthrough rate.
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Write a Captivating Introduction – Blog Posts
The introduction of a blog post is critical as it sets the tone for the rest of the post and can determine whether or not readers will continue reading. A good introduction should grab the reader’s attention, provide context, and give them a reason to keep reading.
1. Start With A Hook
The first sentence of your introduction should grab the reader’s attention and make them want to keep reading. This could be a question, a surprising statistic, a personal anecdote, or a bold statement. Your hook should be relevant to your topic and provide a clear indication of what your post is about. It needs to be something that your audiences are interested.
2. Provide Context
After your hook, it’s important to provide some context for your post. This could be a brief overview of your topic or a background story that sets the stage for your post. Providing context helps your readers to understand the purpose of your post and why it’s relevant to them.
3. Preview Your Main Topic
Once you have provided some context, it’s a good idea to preview your main points. This gives readers a roadmap of what to expect in the rest of the post and makes it easier for them to follow along. You can preview your main points by listing them or by using subheadings to break up your content.
4. Keep it Concise
While it’s important to grab your reader’s attention and provide context, it’s also important to keep your introduction concise. Your introduction should be no more than a few paragraphs and should not give away too much information. The goal of your introduction is to entice your readers to keep reading, not to summarize your entire post.
5. Edit and Revise
Once you have written your introduction, it’s important to edit and revise it. Look for any grammatical errors or typos, and make sure that your introduction is clear and easy to read. You may also want to rearrange your sentences or change your wording to make your introduction more effective.
Add Subheaders And Bullet Points – Blog Posts
People don’t like to read long posts full of words. When you have long paragraphs, separate them into smaller paragraphs with sub-heading and sections. Also, when possible use bullets and lists so that it’s easier to read.
Not only that, you should have the same font size and type throughout the post. Keep it clean and simple so that it’s easier for your audiences to read.
Include Images and Visuals – Blog Posts
Words are boring, and an image speaks a thousand words. Human processes visual information better than plain text. This means if you can include some images or videos in your blog post, you will be able to capture your audience’s attention and make them continue to read your content.
However, the image selection and quantity of images are very important as you don’t want to distract your audiences with too much of images. Or images that are irrelevant to your content.
Provides Value To Your Audiences – Blog Posts
What’s in it for me? This is the most common question your audiences will ask when they read your blog post. If they don’t find any value in your blog post or things that benefit them, they will not be wasting their time. There are so many better options out there. They can just go ahead and get the information they need.
If you are not going to provide your own insights or unique value in your blog post, then why do they want to read it? When creating content, think about your audiences. What do they want to read and will it benefit them?
Proofreading Your Copy
We are at the final step of writing a good blog post. It’s the final but also the most important step.
Firstly, you need to proofread our content to make sure there is no grammar or spelling error for your content. This is how you show your professionalism to your audiences. If you can’t even perfect your language in your blog post, it will leave a bad impression on your audience. You can use tools like Grammarly to help you to monitor and suggest the correct grammar and spelling.
Next, you need to also read the flow of your blog post and the content to see whether it makes sense. Sometimes when you are writing, you don’t realize the flow and whether it sounds right. This is why, you will need to proofread your content when you are done.
Then, if you are using WordPress as your blogging platform, you can use an SEO plugin like Yoast SEO or All In One SEO to optimize your blog post for SEO. When you have the plugin installed, below your post editor page, it will show you the best practice for on-page SEO. This will include how is your blog post structured, different tags and keywords whether are they optimized
Publish Your Blog Post
This is the final step. As you have completed your blog post, it’s time to publish it and show it to the world. You can click on the Post-> Add New button on your WordPress dashboard and copy your blog post to the post editor.
After you have completed all the settings and configurations, then you can click on the publish button to publish it.
Congrats.
However, your readers will not know or discover your new content if you don’t tell them. Unless you are very famous and have huge followers that will read your content regularly, you need to promote your blog. You can promote it on social media platforms, YouTube or via emails to your audiences on your email list. Share your blog on every platform that you can think of and let people know you have written the masterpiece.
Final thoughts: How To Write Great Blog Posts
It doesn’t matter if you are a writer or not. Know your audience, choose your niche, topic and keywords and then, follow the steps above, you will be able to create engaging content for your audiences.
You might not be perfect when you are just starting out, but with practice and consistency, you can create high-quality content for your audiences as well. And the best part, you can monetize your blog and make money online.
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