20 Nov The Formula for Writing the Perfect Blog Post
You’re staring at the blank page for the second day in a row. The cursor is blinking, but nothing comes to your mind. You just don’t know where to start from. Or even worse scenario: you haven’t published anything the last couple of weeks. Still, you procrastinate. You’ve been waiting for some inspiration to come and haven’t even started writing.
Let’s be honest, this inspiration never comes. Sit down, plan some time dedicated to this activity and follow a tight plan for writing a quality blog post. Yes, we know it’s hard to create a state-of-art piece of writing. There are some simple rules to follow which will take you the extra mile to publishing a catchy and useful post. Here is our formula.
Pick a topic and working title
You’re a specialist in your field, so you should know well your audiences and what their interests are. You can start with a pretty general topic. If you’re a nutritionist the topic should be connected to healthy eating and balanced diet. You can write on “Foods for a balanced diet and healthy weight”. Or you can “play” with the title, depending on the focus you want to give to your post and narrow the topic. Try with “The top 10 foods you should be eating for the best body”. Or even more specific one like “The 5 superfoods for weight loss”.
The working title is very important for giving you the direction of your writing. Of course, after writing your masterpiece, you can change it a little bit. You can use different keywords, as soon as they correspond well to the content. “The 5 superfoods for weight loss” might become “The 5 superfoods which will help you burn fat and lose weight”.
Write a catchy intro and plan the content
When you plan the topic, hundreds of ideas start to pop up in your head. You should brainstorm, and write down everything. Don’t worry about incomplete or stupid ideas. Afterwards, you’ll decide what to use and what to leave. Based on that, build up the structure of the blog post with the main points you want to go through. Next start writing the intro. It’s best to introduce the problem (which the reader might be facing). Then briefly describe what the solution would be. This gives a reason to the readers to go further and find a quick fix to a problem they might have. Remember, this is the part when you have to captivate the attention of the readers. If your intro is not worth a pinch of salt, nobody will read the whole article. How to write an attractive intro? It’s best to show some sense of humor (if you have some), so you can tell a joke. If not, you can give some interesting facts or statistics. You can also tell a short story.
Write
And now comes the time to write! In fact, you have already done the heavy part. You are already a specialist in your field and you have a good idea of what you’re writing. You just have to fill in the gaps. Start writing on every point in the structure you have decided to use. Put there all the knowledge you already have. If needed, make an extra research to add some facts, interesting data and good examples. And never forget to provide proper attribution when using external sources. If you experience some problems with the writing itself, there are some handy tools that can help. When you’re missing a word and trying to find synonyms, go to thesaurus. If you’re still missing the flow, you can add some adverbs at the beginning of some of the sentences. This way the text will go smoothly and consistently.
Edit
You have already finalized the text. Yes, you’re pretty close to the end, but you still have some work to do. Nobody likes messy posts that look ugly and are full of mistakes. To escape from this, give the article to a knowledgeable colleague of yours. Make sure that any grammar mistakes or incomprehensible sentences are corrected. After that take care of the text formatting. All texts should be one and the same font and size. Huge blocks of text should be broken up. Put headings and subheadings and style them consistently. Define similar borders and double check for any texts floating in space. Keep the same style in every blog post on your blog. In this way, your brand will look more professional and the materials will be more easy-to-read.
Include a catchy image
When you’re ready with the whole text, look for some nice images that will make the post even more captivating. There are plenty of websites providing free stock photos like Pexels and Unsplash. You can also make your own graphics or diagrams when representing some sort of statistics. Of course, you can add other 3rd party images, but never forget to mention their owner.
Final Touches
After including the best images you could find, format the text one final time. Add some links to the external sources/brands/tools/places/etc. you have mentioned in the post. Make sure they open a new tab without distracting the reader from your own website. You should add some adequate tags which will be useful for the reader to find their way in the sea of blog posts. Include some links to articles connected to the current topic which the readers might find interesting. The final step is to put a call-to-action sentence at the end. It represents what you as a marketer would like the reader to do. It also gives some extra value to the readers. This could be an e-book to download, newsletter subscription, registration for an event, etc.
And don’t forget to go back to the title. You can change it a little bit now, depending on the content you have already written.
SEO
After you’re done with this, optimize your post for the search engines. You can stuff some keywords, but make it wisely and unobtrusive. Don’t be obsessive with the keywords. For sure, their excessive number will not be the thing that brings you the traffic you’re dreaming of. Take care of the URL and make it shorter and key-word friendly. You should have already added Headers and Subheaders. Put Meta Description, Page Title, and Anchor Text. Make sure that the post is optimized for mobile devices and is visualized properly.
It seems that your blog post is ready to be published and to become a star. If you need some more support, don’t forget to read about our favorite digital tools for writing here.
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