I’m often asked my thoughts on what I feel makes great blog – my answer normally resolves around it being helpful, insspiring, opinionated, clever, funny etc etc etc. The acual content and what you write about is one thing, but you need to have the bones of a blog post to apply the meat to. This blog post identifies five key components your blog posts should always have. The earth-shattering content is up to you.
Imagery
Imagery can be used to illustrate your point, catch the eye or just make people feel somthing. It’s also a key factor in breaking up your posts and moving them away from screeds. You must also think about how imagery within your blog out with actual blog post – when you add a blog post to social networks such as LinkedIn or G+, it will pull an image through alongside a snippet – you want to stand out. The image at the top of this post will be the one I choose for this purpose as it rams home the subject of the post. Don’t overdo it on the imagery front – too many will make your post hard to digest and can be a pain in the butt for those reading your post on a modile device
Style
You need to establish a style for your writing that is consistent across your posts. If people had to describe my writing style, they may use words such as causual, friendly and at times a little bit cheeky. I’ve not really strived to write like this, it just kind of works for me, and I’ve had some nice compliments about it over the years, so I maintain it. Your style and tone should be suitable for your audience and if you are a business, brand etc, consistent with your other communications, think about what you want to convey – a style that conveys authority will differ to one that showa creativity for example.
Formatting
This is simple stuff, but many people forget to add basic formatting to their blog posts. Use sub-headings to break the post up into logical sections – the majourity of people scan a blog post, and subheadings are like a marker for the eye. In this post, my headings are very obviously attributed to the copy that follows, but you can also use them to get a key point across, or to pull out a key phase from the following copy. Always look to make life easy for your readers.
Links
No, not from an SEO point of view, In fact, I’d urge you not to get too caught-up in thinking about SEO, when writing – create stuff that the people that matter to your business etc want to read, and the SEO benefit will follow. There are still key things to do to ensure that your blog content has the opportunity to rank for search, and this post from Yoast covers those well, especially if you use WordPress. The reason I mention links here is that they are a great way of helping your reader out! You can use them to further explain a point you’ve made, add someone else’s opinion to the mix, clear up a piece of jargon or simply just offer more content related to your subject. Again, don’t overdo it, and make sure you’ve read the content you link people to and that it’s from an authoritative source.
Call to Action
With my marketing hat on, I’d always suggest you have a low level of CTAs within your blog content that aim to drive people to take a relevant action, such as filling in a contect form, visiting other relevant areas of your site or even making a purchase. While this is a good idea when caarried out in a very controlled fashion (never make the CTAs the crux of your (blog post), the ket CTA I suggest you implement is a simple question at the end of your blog post. It’s always nice to try and spark some conversation, or perhaps get feedback on your post within the comments section and I’ve found that asking people to do so tends to work. Sometimes us humans need direction!
There you folks, five points for crafting blog posts that you should bear in mind
Reblogged from http://velocitydigital.co.uk
Tags: content marketing, digital marketing
