Blog posting becomes a dirty word for a lot of business owners. Dedicating time, knowing what to write about, knowing how to write a post are common hurdles/excuses. But there’s no doubt content creation must be a part of any business’s digital marketing strategy in 2017 and there is nobody better positioned to do it than someone within your own business (if you want to get any real results).
Here are the five most important components of any blog post that you should consider. Trust me, they are not that difficult.
An intriguing or compelling title
First thing’s first, you need to get users interested in your content. It doesn’t matter how well written your article is, if nobody is there to read it. In some cases you want the title to be specific and straight to the point of what the article is about. Make clear the benefits of reading your article.
Other times you may want to allude to what the article is about, or allude that the story is amazing or shocking. This is commonly known as a ‘click bait title’. Some examples might be ‘You will never believe what happened when we….’, or ‘The one trick that made me $100,000’. Be warned, if your post isn’t that good you may frustrate users, but it can be an excellent way to get more click throughs.
TIP: use a specific, keyword rich title for the title on your post page, but (using a plugin like Yoast SEO) add a more click bait style title to the Facebook title when your post is shared.
Format your post for readability
Most people aren’t up for reading a novel worth of text on the internet. In fact if your post is a solid block of heavy text, you might find your bounce rate (people leaving the page shortly after first loading it) might be higher.
Breaking up your post with titles, subtitles, paragraphs and bullet point lists makes your content far more digestible. Readers like to skim, and find information quickly and easily. Formatting your posts like this can also help your writing by breaking an idea down into components. When I write a blog post like this one, I actually write the title and subtitles first, then go back and write the content.
Add rich media
If the old phrase ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ is still true, a video is worth a million. Not only does rich media make your post look more aesthetically pleasing, it also engages the reader. At minimum, a good photograph helps set the tone or theme of your post.
It can also be a way to visual boring data. Turn some mind numbing statistics into a branded and styled graph, or a bullet point list into an infographic.
Link to your own content and others
Most of the time you are creating content to raise awareness about your business and it’s products, so it’s important to add links to internal pages of your website to generate fresh new leads. But don’t be afraid to link to relevant external sources. An old school train of thought was that linking to other sites somehow weakens your search engine rankings. There’s actually been shown to be correlation between external links on your site and increased rankings, all be it very minor.
Add a call to action
Last but certainly not least, if you’ve done everything right and attracted users to read your awesome post, capitalise on it. You’ve positioned yourself as a helpful, knowledgable industry leader. Don’t just leave your reader with nowhere to go. Offer your services, a helping hand, a next step, something else to do, anything. Even something as simple as a request to share the post on social media is something. Don’t let your hard work go to waste.
With that being said, if you liked this post and are ready to roll on your own website blog posting, it would be amazing if you could give this post a share on Facebook.
