I’ve shared a lot of my different tips for writing content that engages your readers and attracts the search engines. Sprinkled among those tips I’ve even talked about style and editing tips and the importance of outbound links. Today I put together a list that brings it all together: Ten tips for writing a blog post. Let’s get down to basics.
Tip #1 – Be a real person
The reason people like blogs is because they like to hear your personal opinion or viewpoint. If all they wanted was facts they could visit a company website or read an encyclopedia. Let your readers know there’s a real person behind the blog.
Join 12,004 bloggers taking my FREE Course: How to Start a Money-Making Blog in 7 Days»
Tip #2 – Use outbound links
Linking to other relevant blogs lets your readers know you’re not just making this up. It increases your credibility. Your readers won’t leave you for that other blogger. Rather, they’ll appreciate the fact that you backed up your statement with another reliable source.
Tip #3 – Less is more
Your readers are looking for the answer to a question and they have a limited amount of time to find it. Use the minimum number of words to effectively convey your message.
Tip #4 – 500 words is more than enough
More than 400 words and your readers won’t absorb your whole message while they’re on your post and they’ll forget what they did learn after they leave.
Tip #5 – Use attention-grabbing headlines
Let the reader see exactly what he’s going to learn with your title. Readers won’t take time to decode a mysterious title, they’ll just choose move on to the next one.
Tip #6 – Be passionate
No, I’m not talking about romance. Use language that lets your readers see how excited you are about your topic. If you’re bored, they will be, too.
Tip #7 – Use formatting
Use bullet points, sub-headings, paragraphs, bold, italics, and white space to make your content easy to scan and absorb.
Tip #8 – Edit your post
Naturally, you want to edit for spelling, grammar and formatting errors, but edit for length, too. Before you publish, go back and remove unnecessary words.
Tip #9 – Use keywords
I look to use my keywords in my opening and closing paragraphs and once or twice in the body of the post. The search engines are more intuitive now and they’re able to identify synonyms, which makes your writing sound much more natural.
Tip #10 – Be consistent
While it’s important to post consistently it’s also important to be consistent in your writing style so your readers will always know what to expect.
You’ll see thousands of tips for writing blog posts all over the Web and every blogger has his or her own ideas about what works best. While there isn’t a single thing about blogging that’s carved in stone, you can use this list of ten basic tips as a solid foundation for all your web content.
3 Comments
“Tip #4 – 500 words is more than enough”
Seems to me there is some disagreement in the blogosphere on this one. Google tends to pour more love on longer articles, and I have seen some evidence that longer articles increase time-on-site — although “padding” will ultimately make your readers go away and not return.
I think the best advice I’ve seen so far on that topic is “write enough to cover your point adequately” and only write on one topic. If 500 words is enough, fine.
However, I’ve found that the longer articles on my my most active sites get much more traffic than the short ones.
I do see you took your own advice here — right at 500 words for this article.
I’m new to blogging, and I agree with almost everything you say here. You actually describe my behavior as a reader. Except for the 500 word guideline. I find that I am often disappointed when a post fails to cover a topic as completely as it seems to need. I am willing to read 2000 words or more of good, solid information on an interesting topic. Recently I have read that research shows longer posts do better than short ones in terms of attracting subscribers and page views. Do you disagree?
Excellent tips presented in a clear and concise manner. This blog post itself is a wonderful example of how to write a good blog.