How to write a blog post: A beginner’s guide

Blogging is a great way to drive traffic to your website and reach people searching for your business’s products and services. However, there’s a difference between just writing a blog and writing a blog that appeals to your target audience.

A blog that targets and reaches the right audience and delivers the right message reaps more benefits. Furthermore, a blog needs to be SEO-friendly too to rank on search engines.

Whether you’re writing for your business or new to content writing, this guide will help you create an SEO-friendly blog.

Things you need to know when writing a blog post

Blog Writing Checklist 2022

Here are 7 things you need to know before you start writing a blog.

Know your target audience

The first thing you need to do when you're putting together your blog post is to know who you're writing for.

Give yourself a few minutes to think about this: Who are your readers? What do they want? What are their problems? What do they need? Asking these questions will give you an overview of your audience - what their interests, needs and problems are and it will be easier for you to decide on the topic and keywords for your blog. This helps you create content that appeals to them as well as helps them find your content when they're searching online.

The better you understand your audience, the more likely they'll find value in what you have to say.

Perform keyword research

SEO-friendly blogs are one of the best ways to increase traffic, as well as find more customers. When it comes to SEO, keywords are king.

Keywords are the queries that your target audience is searching for. Using specific keywords makes it easy for your audience to find your content and helps search engines to show your content to the right people.

The process of keyword research can be tedious and difficult, but luckily there are tools available that make it a lot easier. Here are some of our favourite free keyword research tools:

• Google Keyword Planner

• Ubersuggest

• Keyword Surfer

• AnswerThePublic

Write a catchy title

A blog title explains to the user what the blog is about and the search engine too.

If you’re searching for free keyword research tools, which blog title would you choose out of the two below:

• Top 5 Free Keyword Research Tools in 2022, or

• How to find keywords?

The first one, right? Yes, the first blog title is apt because:

• It clearly explains what the blog is about

• It has the main keyword, i.e., free keyword research tools.

From a user perspective, a blog title should be relevant, precise and clear.

From a search engine perspective, the blog title should include the blog’s main keywords. It helps search engines to show the blog to the relevant audience.

Create a blog outline

Different people write content differently. Some write the blog title first and then make a blog outline, while some people write in the flow without a blog outline. However, making a blog outline helps in structuring and deciding the flow of the blog.

An organised and well-thought blog structure encourages readers to read and share the post. It also helps writers to organize their ideas and save time writing.

Add images

Statistics show that the human brain processes visuals 60,000 times better than text.

Processing of images by human brain

I iterated the same thing in two ways. I wrote a sentence and put the same sentence in an image. Which one did you read first?

Well, the image, right? Now you know why adding images to your blog is important.

Just adding images isn’t enough to get noticed by search engines. An SEO-friendly image should have two things:

• Caption, which explains to the user what the image is about

• ALT text, which explains to the search engine what the image is about

Add internal links to the blog

You don’t want your readers to read only one blog post. Right?

That’s why it is important to link other blog posts or website pages in your blog.

Internal linking helps in:

• Pointing users to more content on your website

• Increasing the time users spend on your website

• Crawling and indexing of pages

Now that you know the importance of internal linking, here are some best practices to follow when adding internal links to your blog:

• Don’t stuff your blog with links. It is ideal to include 2-4 links in a 1000 words blog.

• Keep the text as natural as possible.

• The text linked should be precise. You can use words like read more, here, etc.

Add a call-to-action (CTA)

Are you publishing a blog only to inform and educate?

Ask yourself this question. The answer is no. In addition to educating, the purpose of writing a blog post is to let users know and explore your brand and what you have for them, i.e., your products or services.

The call-to-action (CTA) is what will fulfil that purpose. A call-to-action or CTA is a prompt for a user to take the desired action. It could be anything from subscribing to your newsletter, exploring a product or service offered by you, purchasing a product or service, etc.

Now the question is how many CTAs should a blog post have? While there can be multiple CTAs in a blog post, always include one CTA at the end of the blog post. After all, you don’t want users to leave the page immediately after they read the blog.

Start writing today

Here’s what you really should take away from this. Blogging is a skill that you can practice and get better at. The sooner you start, the more time you’ll have to improve, and the bigger impact you can make on your audience in the long run. All you need is a positive attitude, some grit and determination, and soon, you’ll be zipping through blog posts like it’s your day job.

Are you looking to start with social media marketing?

Enrol for our ‘Social Media Bootcamp’ course here.

P.S. - Follow us on Instagram for social media marketing tips, updates and more!