Blogging is way more than just typing a couple of words and hitting publish. To be a productive writer, you must take into account many situations. You must get an idea of who your target audience is, how long your post should be and some more considerations. May we reiterate that this is well before you even jot down a letter?
A blogger is essentially a marketing person, advice giver, guru and more, all rolled up into one. Here are the main pieces to the blogging puzzle.
1. Put Yourself in Your Readers’ Shoes
Once you have crafted the perfect post, or at least the post you think is perfect, read over it as if you were the audience. I personally recommend reading the post aloud. It may feel awkward in the beginning to hear your own writing, however once you get used to it, you’ll find it a great technique. This also means identifying spots in the post where the idea could be more elaborated. For example, if the article is a how to, there may be points where you may know a certain term or idea but the average user may not. Elaboration is the key.
2. Get Them Through Title and Keywords
Title and keywords are like the accessories of a good article. Think to yourself, would you rather read an article that gives off the whole point of reading it or that entices you to want to read more than the title. The title is what draws the audience to your article in the first place. In addition, keywords are sort of a behind the scenes title. These are the words that the audience uses to find the article. Make sure to keep keywords specific, few, and high quality. A bunch of broad keywords will actually cause the search engine to not pick it up. Keywords doesn’t cause search engine priority; views and popularity does.
3. Call to Action
The only job readers have isn’t just to read. A successful article is one that leads your readers to do more. At the end of the article, you can do something as simple as asking them to comment or you can ask them to check out your website on social media and around the Internet. Another wise tactic is to point them to a related article that they may find interesting. As a result, you’ll not only get more views, but dedicated viewers.
4. Picture Perfect
The icing on the cake of a perfect article is a nice, high quality photo. You don’t have to post an album on each article, however a clear and related photo is a nice way of finishing off an article. There are tons of photos available on Google, however some aren’t available for use by others. If you are worried whether you can use a photo or not, you can always take advantage of stock photos. They may cost you a little, but you’ll not only get a better quality selection, you won’t have to worry about copyright issues either.
5. Timing the Release
Unlike movie releases, you don’t have to worry whether your publishing calendar clashes with that of some big bloggers. Just ensure that you publish yours at the right time.
The date and time of when your article is published can affect who sees it. The goal of an article is to get a good hold on views first off. This will keep your article public to receive more views later on. If the article falls by the waste side in the beginning, then it would be as if we weren’t giving the article a chance at it’s full potential.
While it differs between websites, the best times are in the beginning of the week. The first few days of the workweek give you the best view potential. Anything after Wednesday isn’t really the best potential. Holidays and the evening are usually not good times either.
If you follow the tips above, you may find yourself with a productive, popular and profitable article.
What other tips do you find are essential to a good blog post?
Thanks for the great advice. I definitely agree with the call to action part. It involves the reader more and actually makes your blog active, rather than a static blog.
Yes, this post is helpful..
can u answer my few question.. I have n im regularly posting informative stuffs on my blog.. But still its pageviews are b/w 20-30 per day… Are do-follow n backlings hlps in increasing trafiic?
Nice tips. i hope all of your tips will be helpful.
I love the list, especially the picture perfect tip. So many of our users just skim the blog until they see an interesting picture and then they read the article.
The interesting thing about these lists is that many of them sound self-explanatory at first glance, but you really have to think about these things while writing/prepping your blog posts.
thanks for the useful suggestion, but what timing would you suggest for publishing a blog by a new blogger, as every thing that you mentioned, I already followed these apart from the timing thing.
Excellent list. It’s important to put yourself in the readers’ shoes, and I think this list summarizes the important factors of a good blog post well. If I’m suck, I can consult back to this list for guidance 🙂 HQ photos are definitely important. I find that using your own work can be advantageous as well, if you’re in the position to do so.
One method that bloggers can use is to anticipate a big worldwide event and write about it. For example, if the Lord of the Rings creators suddenly decided to create a new movie to the series, being the first to write about it will get you a lot of reading time and traffic. You should be a great researcher and a clairvoyant to pull this one off though =) Thanks for the wonderful post!
I agree that reading your post out loud is a great tactic. My top point from above is the “call to action”. This is very important if you want your blog to be effective and engage your audience to do something once they finish reading your post (not just leave). Personally, I like when my audience is motivated to collaborate with me by creating more value for other readers, this is often through submitting their own original content to be featured on my blog or website.
I never thought that timing can be so important to Blogging but now that i think about it it really helps segment the target audience based on internet usage time.
I think selecting high quality keyword is very good idea when search engine hate a bunch of keywords without meaning, but, determining the exact is quite hard 🙁