The Beginners Guide to Writing Exceptional Content For Your Blog

24 Sep, 2013

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“Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works.” —Virginia Woolf

The first thing that attracts readers to good content for your blog is the apt choice and contrast of the words used. Knowing how to communicate effectively through writing is essential for anybody who wants to progress in today’s competitive business environment. Crucial decisions made by your leads and customers may depend on the written words on your website and in your emails.

Irrespective of the topic of your content, you can take your reader on an alluring journey that starts with a crescendo of anticipation and ends with a satisfying conclusion.

Don’t worry; we’re not going all “Shakespearean” here, as that doesn’t work in this era of search engine supremacy. Keeping in mind that the crucial elements of good writing are valuable information and original content; let’s see how you can get rid of the fear of writing.

First things first, if you currently don’t have a blog or aren’t happy with what you have, there are many options for blog platforms on the market. I currently recommend either a basic wordpress blog with a paid SEO plugin like SEOPressor.

Here’s a simple recipe for writing your articles:

Introduction: Tell readers what you’re going to talk about in the article.

Body: Tell them what you wanted to tell them.

Summary: Tell them again what you told them and show them how what you’ve told them can have an impact on them.

But before you venture into writing content for your blog, it’s important to define your writing. Who are you writing for and how are you going to write?

In short, what writing style have you decided to adopt?

CHOOSE YOUR WRITING STYLE

This is arguably the most important step in creating great content for your blog, as it’s your voice that helps draw your readers in and keep them.

Just because you have important business information to communicate, doesn’t mean you can’t say that in an attractive manner. A writer can be funny, a writer can be controversial, a writer can be weirdly different – but make sure you don’t come off as stodgy.

Feel free to express your view. Just because your view may no go down well with people, is no reason to stay quiet. Your voice and your opinion give your content character. Nobody is ever going to agree with everything you say so just be yourself.

SOME BASICS TO KEEP IN MIND WHEN WRITING CONTENT FOR YOUR BLOG

Make your posts seem as if you’re speaking to the audience directly and not like a summary of a book you’ve just read. If you have different audiences, then address each set through different posts.

Great blog posts are anywhere between 500-1000 words or a few more. Don’t make them lengthier unless it’s a tutorial. Tutorials can go even up to 5,000 words based on the need. For example, you will find a WordPress tutorial here which is around 1,900 words. If you have more to say, break it into two parts.

Don’t use huge blocks of text. Separate content up into sections and use bullet points where necessary.

Write something interesting and something that expresses a complete thought. It should be a piece that people wouldn’t mind sharing with others.

Don’t talk too much about yourself. It’s good to give your opinion and give examples of what or how you do things, but self-praise is taboo.

Have an interesting title, but make sure the body of the content fulfils the promise in the title.

Write good content and use good keywords for SEO purposes. The titles should be keyword rich, but not flooded with keywords.

Don’t worry too much! As long as you have good information to offer, you’ll have readers coming back.

DECIDE ON THE TYPE OF CONTENT FOR YOUR BLOG

Once you have the basic text ready, it can be transformed into any of the different types. There are some content types that do better than others.

Narrative posts – They have emotional elements like stories, case studies etc. (My favorite)

Sectioned posts – They use a series of sub headings.

Tips – People LOVE tips. “5 tips to creating dirt simple great blog posts.“

“How to” posts – How something is done. Ex: How to create great blog posts for your WordPress blog.

FAQ’s – These are very easy to write. Just find out the questions people are asking in your niche and answer them. These can be keyword rich and bring a lot of traffic to your website. You don’t need much research to create FAQ’s.

Reviews – A book, software, movie or something else can be reviewed. If you like something, write an honest review. People like honesty and reviews that give both the positives and negatives.

Now that you have your blog post ready, there are a few more simple but important points to take into consideration.

CREATE A GREAT HEADLINE

Even the best piece of content for your blog can go unnoticed if you don’t invite the reader with your headline. After spending hours on research and creating a beautiful piece that you know your readers are going to enjoy, it’s a real shame if they don’t get a chance to read your post.

Here’s the data based on outbrain.com which is a content recommendation platform. Following these tips for headlines is said to have increased click-through rates.

An 8-9 word title works best. It has been seen that the click-through rate is higher than average for such titles.

For some reason, research showed that headlines with odd numbers get a higher click-through rate than titles with even numbers. In fact, this is new to me too and I need to check my own posts to see if this is true.

A colon or hyphen in the title works well.

You can use interesting questions in titles because people find titles that end with a question-mark interesting.

As I’ve said before in many of my posts, people are attracted to images and photos. Use them in your content. They work better than logos. Use them, but make sure they’re relevant to your blog post.

CONTENT FOR YOUR BLOG: PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

Writing great blog posts becomes a breeze when it comes from the heart, when your intention is to provide true value to your readers.

So as you focus on creating content for your blog, focus on:

The basic format of an introduction, body, and summarize everything in the conclusion.

Maintain your own writing style.
Follow the basics of writing at all times.
Use the type of content best suited for the information you wish to convey.
Create exceptional and attractive headlines that draw people.

When you follow these principles when creating your great blog posts or articles, you’ll be taking into consideration human psychology, which calls attention to you writing. And that’s what you need to get anything done online – attention.

Do I hear you say, “Easier said than done?”

You must understand that now content has moved into the hands of real people who look for unique and original information. This definitely makes life far easier for content creators like you and me, who have the right intention.

As far as optimization goes, write your blog post and use keywords naturally and you should be fine.

Go Ahead And Create Exceptional Content For Your Blog

Finally, have the confidence to put your thoughts and knowledge into words. Many famous authors have suffered smackdowns from publishers before going on to become famous.

William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” had to face 20 rejections by publishers and one of them was caustic and called it “an absurd and uninteresting fantasy which was rubbish and dull.”

Mr. Faulkner’s book “Sanctuary” was rejected with the message: “Good God, I can’t publish this!”

In fact, this even prompted Frank Sinatra to say, “The best revenge is massive success.”

Want to write great content for your blog starting today?

Do you think this helps you overcome your content writing troubles? Do you have any powerful content creation strategies you’ve had success with? Leave me a comment and let me know what you think makes great content for your blog.