Whether you’re an experienced blogger or someone who’s just getting into blogging, writing an effective blog post is a skill you’re going to want to master.
Once you’ve learned how to start a blog, the next step is to actually write a blog post.
There’s a lot of vague information out there about how to write a blog post. When I was first starting my blog, I didn’t find this to be too helpful when I just starting from scratch.
I’m here to dive deep into the details and share everything I’ve learned so far. That way, if you’re just starting out, you can see how I structure and write all of my posts.
1. Know what you’re writing about
The first step to writing a post is to determine what you’re going to write about and what the purpose of the post is. Ask yourself, is the purpose of your post to share an experience? Give advice? Teach? list ideas and inspire someone?
Once you determine this, it’ll greatly help you determine the best layout for your post. Then you can determine how you want to structure your post.
2. Make your post easy to read
When people come to your blog and read your post, they don’t want to be confused, lost, or bombarded with information.
No one wants to stare at a bunch of words on a page and not know where to begin. Naturally, people will skim through your posts looking for bolded words and key points, so make them easier to find.
You don’t want your readers to be frustrated because they can’t find what they’re looking for.
Your goal is to keep your readers satisfied and coming back for more.
Here are a few things you can do to help split up your posts:
Add headings and subheadings
I like to think of headings and subheadings as a way to give readers a preview of your post. This tells them exactly what they’re going to find and where they can find it.
It makes the post more visually appealing and easier on the reader’s eyes.
Your post becomes much less overwhelming to read when all the small words are split up by big, bold headings throughout the page.
I recommend splitting up every new topic your writing about with a heading. One strategy that I like to use in a lot of my posts is to number my topics and turn those numbers into my headings.
Then, each sub-topic within those bigger topics you can turn into a subheading.
Avoid large blocks of text
The goal is to make your post as readable as possible. To do this, I like to separate all my paragraphs. I make sure there are no large blocks of text in any of my posts.
I usually shoot to keep three sentences or less together. If there are more, I split them up.
This helps separate the information and makes it much easier to look through.
3. Incorporate personal stories
If you’re looking to grow your blog, I think it’s an extremely effective strategy to include personal stories in your writing.
However, it can be tricky to balance writing find a balance between writing too much about yourself and just enough.
Most of the time people on the internet aren’t interested in reading too much about someone they don’t know. Because of this, I think it’s best to use careful strategies when incorporating writing about yourself.
Connect personal stories to your topic
Connecting personal stories to your topic means that there is an overall bigger topic of your writing with personal stories added for application and extra details.
Meaning you’re entire post isn’t about one personal story. Rather, you can apply what you’re writing to a personal story.
For example, if I’m writing a sub-section about making a workout schedule, I might share my current workout schedule, how I like it, and how it’s working for me. The main purpose of this section would be describing how to make a workout schedule, with my personal experience added for details.
I find this is a great way to really connect with your audience and show how what you’re writing is applicable to everyday life.
It also generates a connection by helping to establish that I’m a real person writing this, you’re not just reading information from a computer.
4. Write a good title
The title is the first part of your post that people will see. It’s the determining factor in whether someone decides to click on your link or to scroll past it.
Because of this, you want to write titles that aren’t too long, include a lot of keywords, and that indicate the readers can apply the information in your post to their own lives.
For example, let’s say you went camping this past weekend and want to write about the things you did during your trip. This can be a great idea, a lot of people go camping and would most likely find value and inspiration in your post.
However, it may be tempting to title the post something like “What I did when I went camping this weekend”.
Like I said before, most people reading your posts don’t know you personally, so they most likely won’t want to read about what some random person did over the weekend.
Apply your post to your readers’ lives
Instead, you can change up the title so that it becomes more applicable to your audience. For example, you could title the post something like “5 things to do on a weekend camping trip” or “How to keep your camping trip fun and interesting”.
See the difference? The latter options sound like you’re giving your audience much more value, rather than just talking about yourself. This makes people much more likely to click on and read your posts.
5. Add images and videos
Especially in today’s day and age, we know that so many people are interested in the visual aspect of things on the internet.
So many people are used to the fast paced world of TikTok and Instagram reels where they consume new information every thirty seconds. Because of this, our attention spans are decreasing tremendously.
Us bloggers have to become more creative if we want to hold someone’s attention for longer. The best way to do this is by creating content that is more visually appealing.
One way that I like to make my posts more interesting is to add in images or videos. As of now, I personally prefer to add images to my posts. I don’t think videos would be as relevant to my content.
How many images should you add
I like to add as many images to my post as possible; the pictures are my favorite part! I think they make it much more appealing to look at and really help to tie the whole appearance together.
However, more images aren’t actually better. If you have too many pictures on one page, they can make your blog glitchy and slow it down. In today’s fast paced world, there’s nothing more frustrating to a reader than a site that won’t load.
I like to shoot for at least 3 images per post, but depending on the length of my post I usually wouldn’t do more than 5.
Where I find my images
I’m no photographer, so I’m here to admit that I’m not photographing all the pictures that are on my site. Instead, I search up copyright free, watermark free images on Google.
My go-to website for images right now is Pexels. They have high quality images, they’re watermark free, copyright free, and they have a large selection. I’m sure there are better options out there, but so far Pexels is my favorite.
As my blog grows, I’ll most likely look to start purchasing images or subscribing to image site. This way I can have a bigger selection of high quality images. For now, since my blog is still in the process of growing, I think I’m better off using free, stock images.
6. Incorporate SEO strategies
SEO, or search engine optimization, is what will help you land higher on Google’s search engine. This means your post will show up at the top of the page when someone makes a search.
There are a lot of different strategies that help boost SEO. Some of the basics that I like to incorporate into every post are things I’ve already talked about: write a good title, incorporate images, and split up your text to make your post more readable.
However, there is one other major SEO strategy that I like to incorporate into my posts.
Adding hyperlinks.
Hyperlinks can be either internal links, links to different parts of your own website, or external links, links that lead to an entirely different website.
When linking to your website, you’ll want to try and incorporate the description of your other post (the one your linking to) into your writing. Then, you can highlight these words and turn them into a link. When the reader clicks on the link, they’ll be taken directly to that post.
If you need an example, you can scroll up and see that I did this at the top of my page when I linked to my post on how to start a blog.
Hyperlinks help Google establish the validity of your website and give it major points for ranking in the search engine.
Linking to other site (external links)
When you’re linking to other websites that aren’t your own, you want to make sure the posts you’re linking to are relevant to what you’re writing.
Additionally, while making sure it’s relevant, you don’t want to send your readers away to a competitor site, that may be more mature and seem “better” than yours. See where this could go wrong? You have a reader so you want to keep them. Not send them to another site with the same information as yours.
Start writing!
Now that you have all this new information on how to write a post, you can start writing!
Don’t expect yourself to be a pro writing at the beginning. It takes a lot of time and practice to improve your skills. But, before you know it you’ll get the hang of things and find out what works for you.
Remember, write about something you enjoy and can talk about forever, your passion will show through in your writing and your readers will love it.