Are you struggling to come up with interesting and engaging content for your blog? Writing good content is essential for any successful blog, as it helps attract and retain readers and establishes you as a thought leader in your industry.
A blog can be a good starting point for whoever who wants to start their journey in the Content Writing & blogging space. Your blog acts as reference material, as well as, a portfolio for your work.
Writing a blog is an art they say, but not many people successfully make it as a blogger, in the end, Is blogging that difficult? You’d argue. I’d say no if you are a beginner it’s always better to have patience and learn from others and avoid making mistakes that would slow down your progress. So, where to begin?
If you’re looking to improve the quality of your blog content, there are a few key strategies you can follow. In this article, we’ll provide tips and best practices for writing compelling content that will keep your readers coming back for more.
Tips to Write Effective Content for Blogs
Find your objective behind Writing Content
You need to find out and decide why you really want to write and for what purpose. Is it to drive traffic to your website via your blog? Is it to engage people and provide valuable content that can ease their work? Or for something else?
Whatever may be your reason/objective you must be clear on those before moving further and drafting your first article.
Ideally, you must have these two objectives in mind to write your blog:
Content should drive traffic to your website
This means you need to write content with the objective of driving visitors to your website and letting them know that you’ve published this amazing piece of information that can help them in an intended way.
Content should engage people
Your content should engage the maximum of visitors and provide them with some value. The content you post must be relevant to your blog and be fulfilling so that the reader finds his way back if he needs something to look for as he already had a positive experience with your blog.
Write on topics that people are interested in
As a beginner, you want to put your thoughts out and express yourself via your blog. So you go ahead and publish an article that you’re sure will be loved by many and you start to expect a barrage of visitors coming to your blog and appreciating what you’ve written. But in reality, that’s not going to happen, at least not anytime soon.
Like I first said at the very beginning, you need to have patience as you have just put your first step in. You need to understand the fact that people are not interested in what you think or say until and unless you are a celebrity or a billionaire you are not either of them.
Focus on writing what people are interested in and avoid writing on topics that you think will be loved by people. Focus on topics that are really asked for to gain an initial push for your blog.
For Example:
If you have a tech blog focussed on Smartphones then you can write an article about:
- Best 5G Smartphones under 15000 in India (or any country)
And not on:
- Why you should not use Transparent Back Cover
As the former topic seems relevant and is most searched for by users on the internet. So, you need to write on topics that have a higher search volume and less competition from other bloggers.
The latter has less search volume and would gather less user interest. Thus it has less relevance and should be avoided.
How to find topics to write content on?
Now that you know what type of topic you must focus on writing content for, now let’s find out how to find such type of topics. This introduces us to a term called “Keyword Research”.
Keyword Research is important. If you want to write articles that you think should deserve a spot on Google Search Results then you need to do an extensive search and find topics/keywords that are best suitable for your blog.
Once you know what your target audience is, it becomes easier to find relevant keywords. You need to spend some time and may also need to shell out a bit on a tool that can help you in finding the right keywords.
But as a beginner, you don’t want/can’t spend too much money on expensive tools. Here are a few alternatives that you can rely on ubersuggest and keywordtool.io can also help to get the work done.
All in all, keyword research must be progressive and you need to spend a lot of time to find the best keywords that have the potential to rank your article. Here’s a video you must definitely check out that can help you in Keyword Research.
Creating an Outline of your Article
Having a Structure or an outline of your article definitely helps. An outline helps you identify your boundaries and makes sure where to stop and not to cross the line.
Content is like a Puzzle, like in a puzzle you need to assemble all the pieces to form a picture that looks tough until you have the outline created, the same goes for content creation.
By having an outline you can think better and can include all the critical points that you think must be added to the article and be conveyed to the reader to make it more interesting and informative.
This can also help you from an SEO perspective as structured articles perform better and attain a better place in the SERPs as they are successful in satisfying the algorithm.
Be fully aware that Algorithms determine your ranking
You have to understand the fact that Google is the master and has perfected its algorithms in such a way that they are the ones deciding whether the article is helpful and suitable enough to be on the first page of the results or somewhere on the lower pages.
This is important because there are many sites offering services that claim to boost your ranking on the results pages in a short period of time. As a beginner, you are most likely to fall for these types of (black hat service) websites after experiencing less to no traffic on your website after you publish a few articles.
You need to be patient and follow all the required stuff that would rank your blog organically without involving in any of the black hat practices that can harm your blog or put your website on a blacklist if ever caught by Google.
To get a better ranking on SERPs you need to decide on a Focus Keyword. Focus Keyword is that keyword/query for which you want your article to rank. You need to include the Focus Keyword on your post URL, title, meta title, and meta description.
And, not just that you also need to support the Focus keyword with related keywords. Having Related Keywords in your article will help google to determine that your content is useful and covers all the aspects that the user needs an answer to.
You can find related keywords by searching any topic on Google and finding the related searches section which can be found at the very bottom of the result page. These keywords help users to find out more about the article which you will be writing.
Drafting a click-worthy Headline/Title
The headline is the first thing that a visitor sees when he clicks on the listing of the search results. So, you need to make sure that the headline catches users’ attention and impresses them to click.
“The main task of your headline is to persuade people to click on it. Then it’s the content’s work to make them keep reading …”
So, before writing your headline, make sure you are providing the answers to these questions:
- What is this about?
- Is this for me (the reader)?
- What Promise are you making?
The answers to these questions are sub-consciously searched for by the visitor when he first sees the headline/title. So, you need to choose your headline wisely and not miss it.
You also need to avoid creating clickbait headlines, clickbait headlines are those which can gather maximum attention and clicks on your headlines but in reality, they just gain clicks and do not at all provide any solution to what’s promised.
These types of headlines will cause much harm to your website’s reputation and will turn away your visitors and benefit your competitors. Clickbait can also cause high bounce rates which will affect your ranking.
Make use of Simple Formulas while writing headlines
As we found out earlier about how important it is to have a good headline, here are some tips for writing good headlines. You just need to replace the text on square brackets with the text of your own.
Some good headline writing templates:
How to [Achieve a Desired Outcome]
- How to add menu in WordPress? 3 Useful Methods You Must Know!
[Number] Proven [Action/Ways] to [Achieve Desired Result]
- 10 Tested Ways to bring visitor traffic to your Website
[Number or How to] Simple/Easy Ways to [Achieve Desired Outcome] [Challenge]
- 9 Easy Ways to Secure your WordPress from Attackers
[Number] Reasons You’re [Not Achieving Desired Outcome]
- 11 Reasons You’re missing out on loyal customers
These are not the only techniques you have, there are many. You will find a lot of such techniques as you progress through writing article after article and then find what works best for your blog.
Writing a Killer Intro
After finalizing your article topic you need to start writing your article. But wait, there is also a technique for that. Having an intro that tells the reader what to expect in the article and why he should keep on reading.
The intro hooks your reader and tells them they are at the right place and convince them to keep reading, your intro decides whether the visitor will stay and completely read the article or will just move to another one.
So, to write a good intro you can make use of the PAS Formula. PAS stands for Problem Agitate Solve. Here’s how it works:
- Problem – Identify the problem and make the user aware of it.
- Are you looking for a Good Quiz Plugin and struggling to find one?
- Agitate – Speak more on the problem by digging into the pain.
- There are many quiz plugins out there but either they are expensive or lack customization.
- Solve – Promise a solution and make them stay on your blog
- So today, we’re going to find out how you can build and customize your quizzes using the free quiz and survey master WordPress plugin.
This is how you can use PAS Formula to write killer intros.
Writing Easy to Digest Content
After finalizing the topic and writing a good introduction. You are all set to write a full-fledged article.
Here are some of the points that you need to keep in mind while writing the body of your content. Also, remember the best thing to make your content digestible is to keep your thoughts clear and short.
Tips to improve your content readability:
- Make use of Headings and Sub-headinds
Your article should be presentable and easy to read, and for that, you must make use of sub-headings and separate bigger paragraphs into consumable sections. Your article must have a single H1 tag and many H2s, H3s, H4s. These sub-headings must be hierarchically presented to make them more readable.
- Avoid long paragraphs
No, one wants to read long paragraphs as they look awful and disturb/scare many readers. Smaller paragraphs are easy to read and help to spread out the article. You can have paragraphs that are of 3-4 lines and not more than that.
- Make use of lists
Lists/Points send out clear information to the user as they don’t have to struggle and find the important points. Numbered lists can also help to make readable steps that can guide users.
- Add images/infographics
You can add images, infographics, or videos to clear a point and explain your readers better. Images are the best way to send out clear information graphically as people like to see more and read less. The text on an image is read first by the user than the text mentioned in a paragraph.
- Make use of transition words and phrases
You don’t want to bore readers and keep them with you while you change sentences or jump on a different topic. This is where transitional words cab help. Words like “As you know”, “Likewise”, “For example”, “However” hold the visitors’ attention and keeps them interested.
Final SEO Checks
After writing your first draft before you go ahead and publish your article, here are some final checks that you must follow:
Make sure you have included Focus Keyword in:
- Meta Title (Post Title)
- Meta Description(Excerpt)
- URL (URL Slug)
- Beginning of your content (First Para)
- In your Content
- Subheadings
- Image Alt-Attributes(Alt. Text)
These are some of the on-page SEO techniques that help you optimize your article. Following are some more checks that can also be worked upon.
Good To Have:
- Interlinking (Decreases your bounce rate and Improves SEO)
- At Least One External Link
- Content Length – 650 words minimum
Also, it would be better to install an SEO Plugin like RankMath or YoastSEO to improvise on On-page and Technical SEO as your blog progresses.
Conclusion
This is all you need to follow as a beginner and help grow the number of articles. Once your article count crosses 50 and your blog gets a decent amount of traffic you can think of improving on SEO by adding backlinks to other well-performing articles.
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