How to Write a Good Blog Post – Oi I’m talking to you!!!
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Sorry about that, but I needed to get your attention and being downright rude is just one of the ways of doing it. Of course there are other much nicer ways but if you are reading this then it did the trick this time and makes my point. I once saw a sign outside a public house in the UK that said ‘filthy ale and awful food’ everyone welcome. You just know that at some point you are going to have to go in and find out what its all about and whether the sign is true or just a very clever marketing ploy.
Well blogging is about clever marketing as well, without marketing your blog in a way that people actually take the time to stop and read it you are never going to convey to them that you actually know what you are talking about or give them the chance to find out that you are actually producing some great content worth reading i.e. you know how to write a good blog post.
Assuming that your main objective is to gain readership for your blog then writing a good blog post is all about 3 things:
- Attracting the attention of passers by
- Keeping the attention of those that actually take time to read a post
- Engaging the reader in some sort of dialogue or interaction
Put another way, your post has to first of all stand out from the crowd enough to motivate people to read it. Once they are engaged the content kicks in and, to put it very simply, it has to be good enough to keep them reading and to get them thinking. The last stage is that you now want them to take action i.e. to bookmark your blog for future reference, to make a comment, subscribe or whatever it is that results in you now having, or at least potentially having, a regular reader.
The starting point for meeting the first of these objectives is to have an attention grabbing title, sounds easy but you can’t forget that not only does it have to be attention grabbing but it is also going to have to serve the purpose of being your primary keyword phrase. So now you have to think not only about it being attention grabbing, but also a popular term that people enter into a search engine inquiry box.
The next critical aspect is an opening sentence or first sentence that keeps the attention and engages your reader with the content of the blog post. Your general presentation and using alternative media can also help keep them engaged, mixing up graphics, video and text in a pleasing manner on a nicely designed blog will help in retaining your reader.
For some people you might actually need to produce a summary of a sort as a precursor to the main content; you could actually liken it to an executive summary. An executive summary is so named because it is the key points of a longer more detailed report, in summary format, which is intended for busy executives who want to know whats going on but don’t necessarily have the time to read the whole report. The point of the summary is that it still has a start, middle and end and that it conveys all of the key points of the post.
The beauty of this approach is that it provides a natural break point for those pressed for time to leave but not until they have at least been informed to a degree where they understand the whole point of the post and can make a decision whether they need to return at a later point to explore the details further or perhaps take a look at some of the other posts on the blog.
This brings me to the last point I am going to make on this particular post, which if I am honest is not my strongest point, and that is asking the reader to engage. Please correct me if I am wrong, but the easiest way of doing this is to simply ask a question. Many people, if asked to answer a question, will do exactly that.
Likewise, providing you have managed to engage them enough, if you ask them to take an action they will. So you could for instance ask them to subscribe to your blog, and as long as you make it easy to do they probably will. Note my little experiment below.
So there you have it, both in a nutshell and in detail, exactly how to write a good blog post. I hope you enjoyed this post and if you did then please take the time to subscribe to this blog and or share it with your friends. Well there’s nothing better than being obvious 🙂
I totally agree. You have to write a catchy line so that users will be attracted and be intrigued with your post. It’s part of a marketing strategy and if done right, you’ll get thousands of traffic to your site.