Having a blog is a fundamental part of the success of your marketing strategy; so much so that in a survey carried out by HubSpot it is confirmed that blogs are among the three most used means of communication in content strategies.
If you have already decided to create a blog for your company , then you should know that these articles must be of high quality and have to attract the right audience, which will help you convert visitors into leads.
A blog post or publication is any article, news or guide that is published in the blog section of a website. It typically covers a specific topic or query, is educational in nature, is between 600 and 2,000+ words, and contains elements such as images, videos, infographics, and interactive charts.
With a blog, you can post ideas, thoughts, and stories on your website about any topic. They can help you increase brand awareness, credibility, conversions and revenue . Most importantly, they can help you drive traffic to your website.
Today, people and organizations from all walks of life run blogs to share analysis, how-tos, reviews, product information, industry findings, and more.
What makes a good blog post?
Before you blog, make sure you know the answers to these questions: “Why would someone keep reading this entire blog post?” and “What keeps our audience coming back for more?”
For starters, a good blog post is interesting and educational. Blogs should answer questions and help readers solve a challenge they are experiencing, and they should do it in an interesting way.
It’s not enough to just answer someone’s questions, you also need to provide actionable steps. For example, the introduction should hook the reader and make them want to continue reading your post. Then use examples to keep your readers interested in what you have to say.
- Define a strategy.
- Select a main theme.
- Consider all your on-page SEO.
- Organize your content.
- Develop the content of your blog.
- Write an engaging introduction.
- Insert calls to action (CTA).
- Review, correct and edit your post.
- Measure the performance of your blog.
1. Define a strategy
Before even starting to write your blog, it is important that you define in which sector you want to position yourself, who you want to attract, what you want users and clients to achieve through your post and what are the topics in which you hope to establish yourself as an opinion leader .
For this, it is also essential that you clearly know the audience to which you are going to address. What information are you interested in knowing? What do you identify with? That is why it is useful to generate buyer personas (consumer profiles). Consider what you know about your buyer personas and their interests when defining the strategy for your publication.
For example, if you want to attract millennial readers who want to start a business, you probably don’t need to provide them with essential information about social media, since most of them are very familiar with these platforms.
Even so, it would be advisable that you give them information on how to adjust their social media dissemination to move from a more informal and personal vision to one that is more business, professional and focused. That kind of tweak makes the difference between posting generic stuff on your blog and posting what your audience really wants (and needs) to hear .
But you can only know this and achieve it when you establish a strategy that allows you to see the complete panorama of opportunities that your blog can take advantage of, taking into account what you want to achieve. And, of course, and when you strive to create buyer personas as close as possible to your target audience.
To create buyer personas you must think about the type of target audience that your company and blog want to address.
2. Select a main theme
Before you unleash your creativity, you need to choose a topic for your post.
Depending on the topic you want to position yourself with, you should ask yourself how many more articles on the same topic you can write. A great way to represent this is to resort to the topic clustering strategy , as it will help you deconstruct your main theme into sub-themes and complementary themes .
This allows you to define the angles with the greatest organic potential and those most related to your product, even if they do not have as much search volume. In addition to the creation of different content, this strategy also helps you to have blogs ready for internal links and thus connect readers between articles in the same cluster.
We know that generating ideas for blog posts can be a bit exhausting, but with a little effort you can get a great list of alternatives to develop.
To get you on the right track, we recommend creating a search metrics report that revolves around the topic you want to address. This will be the best way to plan the content of your post to improve the organic traffic of your blog.
3. Consider all your on-page SEO
There is a step prior to writing your blog that you cannot leave last and this is the SEO of your post. We recommend thinking about SEO insights and then developing your content around that.
Some of the aspects in which you should improve the SEO of your blog are the following:
meta description
Meta descriptions are the descriptions that follow the post title on Google search results pages. They provide searchers with a brief summary of the post before clicking on it.
They are usually between 150 and 160 characters long and start with a verb like “learn”, “read” or “discover”. While meta descriptions are no longer a determining factor in Google’s keyword ranking algorithm, they do give searchers an overview of what they’ll get from reading your post, which can help improve your clickthrough rate. in searches.
Page title and headers
Your post and page titles are the most important elements for on-page SEO. For this moment you can opt for a provisional title, which will help you naturally include interesting keywords or phrases for the audience you are targeting.
If you’re a plumber, you might start with a working title about leaky faucets. Later, you could optimize your title with different provisional ideas; that is, different ways of approaching the subject to help you direct your writing. For example, you might decide to narrow your focus to something like “tools to fix leaky faucets” or “common causes of leaky faucets.” A working title is specific and will lay the foundation for your post so you can start writing.
Do you notice the evolution from the theme to the provisional title, and then to the final title? Even if the working title doesn’t end up being the final one, it provides enough information that you can focus your post on a more specific topic, rather than a generic or overwhelming topic (more on that in a bit).
Remember that your title should contain keywords. Also, keep your headers short (preferably less than 65 characters) so they don’t get truncated in search engine results.
Anchor text (or anchor text)
The anchor text, or anchor text, is the word or words that link to another page, either on your site or on another website. Carefully select the keywords you want to link to from other pages on your site, as search engines consider this when ranking your page for certain keywords.
It is also important to check the pages you link to. Consider linking to pages that you want to rank well for that keyword. In the end, you could get a ranking on the first page of Google results, instead of the second, which is no small feat.
mobile optimization
It is increasingly important to have a website that is responsive or designed for mobile technology. In addition to making sure that visitors to your website (including visitors to your blog) have the best possible experience, optimizing your technology for mobile devices will allow you to improve your website’s SEO.
Surely, you already have more than clear the importance of the mobile optimization of your website. From 2015 until the last updates of the Google algorithm in 2022, those sites that are not optimized for mobile devices are penalized.
Approximately 61% of organic visits to search engines are made via mobile phones. This makes it more than clear that mobile optimization is essential if you want your content to rank correctly for the search intentions you want to cover.
If you need help with on-page SEO, our free CMS has an SEO recommendation tool so you can improve both your overall site and your blog.
4. Organize your content
Sometimes posts can have an overwhelming amount of information for both the reader and the writer. The trick is to organize the information so that readers are not intimidated by the length or amount of content. You can organize the information in various ways: sections, lists, tips or whatever is most appropriate for you. But the post must be organized!
Let’s take a look at the post « Guide on how to use Snapchat for your brand ». This post covers a lot of content, so we broke it down into different sections using the following headings: “How to set up your Snapchat account”, “How to use, send and view snaps”, and “How to use Snapchat for business”. The sections have been separated into subsections, which are more detailed and also make the content more dynamic.
To finish this step, all you need is to create a draft of your post. In this way, before you start writing, you will know what points you want to cover and what will be the best order to develop them.
5. Develop the content of your blog
The moment of truth has arrived: writing the content itself. We couldn’t forget about that, of course.
Now that you’ve covered the most important SEO points and the topic cluster you’re going to focus on, use the draft as a guide to make sure you detail all the points as needed. When writing about a topic you know, you can do a little more research to gather information, examples, and data to back up your points.
Don’t forget to provide proper attribution when incorporating external sources. For example, if you’re writing a digital marketing blog, you might want to incorporate some up -to-date marketing trend statistics , which are attractive to give more weight to what you say in your post.
If you find yourself having trouble linking sentences together, you’re not alone. Finding the way can be really challenging for many people. Fortunately, there are hundreds of blogging tools that you can take advantage of and improve your writing skills.
In the same way, you can take into account the essential characteristics of a blog so that, in addition to having good SEO optimization, it also has a better structure and the right tone for your target audience.
6. Write an engaging introduction
Now that you’ve covered the main topic and subtopics of your blog, it’s a good idea to start writing a winning introduction. Sure, this section is the first one readers see, but there are many authors and copywriters who build on it until they finish writing their entire post. Why? They already have all the details of the blog and thus can justify and give a more accurate introduction to its content to make it attractive.
Although you can start writing your blog from the introduction, we recommend that you wait a bit, because throughout your development of the topic you could include subtopics or interesting facts that you do not mention in your introduction and then you would have to make many unnecessary corrections.
Another point that usually gives a lot to talk about when writing a post is the ideal length of a blog article ; However, it is useless to think of a certain number of words if you do not have the ability to write a captivating introduction based on your goals and your buyer persona.
First, you have to grab the reader’s attention. If you lose your reader after they see the first few paragraphs or even the first few sentences of your introduction, they’ll stop reading before they even give your post a chance. You can do this in a variety of ways: tell a story or joke, be empathetic, or captivate the reader with an interesting fact or statistic.
It then describes the purpose of the post and explains how it will address a problem the reader might be experiencing. This will give them a reason to keep reading and create a connection about how your post can help them improve their work or life. Here’s an example of a post that we think grabs readers’ attention right away.
7. Insert calls to action (CTA)
In general, calls to action are considered to benefit the marketer. Visitors read your post, click on the CTA, and sooner or later, you end up generating a lead. But calls to action are also a valuable resource for the people reading your content. Use your CTAs to offer more content similar to the topic of the post they just read.
CTAs should be placed at key points throughout all of your content. Although there is no limit to the number of CTAs allowed, it is best that they correspond to the length of your text and that they are consistent with what you are addressing in the section.
For example, in the middle of your blog you can add an invitation for readers to read other content from your cluster. This way you keep them longer on your site and they continue to feed more on the topic they are interested in.
If you have doubts about which are the best positions to put your CTAs, you can run an A/B test and see how your readers react with various options . In this way you will have less margin for error and you will know what type of CTA to add and where to add it strategically based on the behavior of the users.
8. Review, correct and edit your post
You’re not done yet, but you’re about to. The review process is an important part of blogging, so don’t neglect it. Ask a classmate who knows grammar to proofread and proofread your post. He also considers creating a list of key points that you can’t miss during the review.
Make sure you choose an attractive and relevant image for your post. Since social networks prefer to process content with images, visual elements have a lot to do with the success of your blog content that you share on social networks. In fact, according to recent HubSpot research, across all social channels, posts with images and photos, along with video, are the most used content type to increase audience engagement .
visual appearance
Nobody is going to read a publication that has a bad presentation. And it’s not just the images that make a post visually appealing, it’s also the format and organization of the post that matters.
Here is an example of this in one of our posts.
