What Everyone Should Know About Writing a Blog Post

It's quite disappointing when you write a blog post and 4 people read it. And you know that one of those is your mum. You think the information was great and the headline was oh so catchy. But it didn't appeal to your readers. How do you write a blog post that your audience will read?

I am not talking here about the great tips people tell you on how to write a blog post. Like having a brilliant headline, or knowing your audience. All of these things are true, and you should be considering them. But what should you consider about the blog content when you write a blog post?

People come to your blog for a reason. They like your content. They maybe even love your content. So keep it that way. The blog posts that you have on your blog, need to be reflective of your content. You may well be writing the blog for yourself as a diary or to provide an outlet for you to discuss what you like, but if people don’t like this particular piece of content and you end up with no visitors, what’s the point?

I have a great new kitchen gadget (yes I am the queen of kitchen gadgets) that I can bore people endlessly about. But I am not going to write about it on my blog because it does not fit with my content. You are not interested in my gadget so why would I write a blog post about it. 

You will have many people coming to your blog. There will be visitors that visit your blog because they have read it before, liked what they read and want to come back for more. There will also be visitors to your blog that come from search engines or social media after searching for something. You need to make sure that you cater for both of these groups of visitors.

Anyone that reads your blog regularly, will want to see some of your sparkling personality from you and your writing. People like to feel a connection with the person writing the blog. This is good because if people feel as though they know you, they’ll keep coming back for more.

However, the visitor that is finding you from search engines will be wanting to find information. They will have typed in something specific and will be looking for your blog to provide them content about what they are specifically looking for.

So when you write your blog posts, you need some of your character in the posts, but you must ensure the content is good. This will lead to new readers becoming regular readers.

This is why you need to write in a friendly style with humour. But at the same time, you need to get some information across to the reader. There is no reason that a post cannot be personal, entertaining and informative at the same time. Just don't overdo one part. Try and balance the three. The blogs that master this are amongst the most popular blogs on the internet.

Remember that you are an authority on what you’re blogging about. Let’s say you’re writing about gardening because you know all about it - people will want to hear what you have to say and will want your advice on certain issues.

A good idea for making a post is always to make a ‘top ten’ post. You can have something such as the ‘top ten plants to plant this spring’ or the ‘ten best plant foods on the market’.

You can write about your personal experience testing out the plant foods or share a list of your favourite plants and people will love to read it because they are learning and being entertained at the same time.  And it is from your point of view.

The most die-hard fans will be the ones in similar situations to you. Maybe you have a tiny courtyard garden. People with tiny courtyards gardens will hang on your every word. Those with gardens the size of Blenheim Palace garden may read your blog because they are mildly interested. So you may be an authority in the gardening world, but an absolute authority on tiny courtyard gardens.

I am sure you know that people these days have the attention span of a goldfish. Everyone tells us that because of our reliance on social media and digital information we have dumbed ourselves down. It's true! Well it is in my house anyway.

Whatever the case, people don't want to read pages and pages of just text. Your blog posts will be more popular if they are easy to read. Any text is easier to read if there is a lot of white space.

Space out the text. Have smaller paragraphs. And smaller sentences. If you can! People scan text more than they read it in detail just to pick up small points. This is where subheadings come in. Your subheadings will break up your text into smaller subtopics. People can then choose which parts they want to skim, and which bits they want to read in detail.

I am a firm believer in writing for people, not the search engine. However, there are easy things you can do that are not too 'in your face' for your reader. Keywords are obviously the important part and the location of said keywords. Always make sure they are in:

• The title.
• The first paragraph.
• One subheading.
• Sparingly within your post content.
•  In your photo 'alt title'.

So, what have we covered? We want to continue to build our authority through blogging. To do that, we will write blog posts that people can and will read. To help them, we are going to write posts to appeal to our readers whether regular or new. We are going to starting looking at optimising our posts for search engines.