If you’re looking to increase traffic and engagement on your blog, you’ve come to the right place. In this blog post, we will share tips on how to write a successful blog post that will help you achieve your desired results. We’ll cover everything from topic selection to headline optimization, and provide actionable steps that you can start using today!
A blog is a great way to share your thoughts and ideas with the world, but, particularly if you’re using your blog to garner more engagement for your business or brand, you want to ensure that people are actually getting to see all the content you’ve so carefully created. And by following these tips you can increase the chances that people will actually read all the blog posts you put out into the world.
So, let’s start with some blog basics.
Successful Blog Basics
1. Start with a Catchy Headline
Right out of the gate, you want something that will grab your reader’s attention. You want to deliver enough interest that readers stick around to find out more.
Depending on your blog’s topic, your audience, and even the purpose of that particular post, you can add either emotive words, facts or figures, or even a statistic to help your headline effectively reel in those readers.
2. Craft High-Quality Content
Once you have your headline in place, the next step is to actually craft high-quality content. We’ll get to all the tips that will help increase your traffic and boost your engagement a little later in this post. But no matter how many “rules” you follow to make your post structurally appealing and SEO rich, none of these will ever, ever, outrank high-quality content.
You can have eye-catching images, the perfect subheadings, and the most compelling headline, but if your blog is boring, generally lacking value, or just full of recycled information you can find anywhere else, your blog is not heading for success.
So bottom line, your blog posts need to be of high value to your readers, and this means they need to be full of carefully-crafted high-quality content.
3. Write in a Clear, Concise, and Easy-to-Read Style
We said this above, but by far, the most important element of any successful blog post is the content itself. Without compelling, engaging content, you will struggle to attract readers and keep them coming back for more.
But when it comes to successful blog posts, it’s about what you say, but it’s also about how you say it.
If you want your posts to do well once they hit the World Wide Web, they need to be written in a clear and concise style, and, perhaps most importantly, your posts need to be easy to read. We’ll get to the semantics of this in the next point, but for starters, think about how you’re saying all you have to say.
Use language relative to your target audience. Make sure your sentence structure makes reading and understanding easy, and use appropriate transitional words to help with a logical flow of ideas.
Keep your sentences short and concise and you will have locked down crucial steps of creating successful blog posts!
4. Make Use of Headings and Subheadings
Now, let’s dive a little deeper into the style of your blog posts.
Headings and subheadings are invaluable in making your post engaging and easy to read. By using headings you make it easy for readers skim through your article to get an overview of your content before diving in.
This means you need to create posts that are well-formatted and easy on the eyes, with plenty of white space between text paragraphs or bullet points to ensure that it’s not overwhelming for your readers.
Too much text, without any breaks, can be off-putting to many readers, and may cause them to bounce right off your site. But by breaking your content down into easy-to-digest chunks, you can increase the chances of readers sticking around right to the closing paragraphs.
5. Add Visual Interest
Take the above point a step further by adding some visual interest to your posts. Adding images, infographics, or videos can further help to break up the text and makes your posts look even more appealing.
Images are also great for drawing attention to your posts and adding further visual interest. Using high-quality visuals will help boost engagement because your readers will enjoy scrolling through your post, and it can also increase the time they spend on your posts because they’ll be more inclined to stop and look at images.
6. Include a Call-To-Action
A strong call-to-action is another element of a successful blog post. It is the action you want your reader to take after reading your post.
This could be anything from signing up to your newsletter, downloading a freebie, purchasing a product, or subscribing to/following your podcast.
A pro tip is to write your post with your CTA (call-to-action) in mind. This way, you can angle your post to lead your readers to a place where following your call-to-action is the natural response.
You can also engage your readers by asking questions and inviting them to share their thoughts and experiences in the comments. This is great for building relationships with your readers, as well as a really effective way to increase your overall engagement.
(Stick around for our ‘engagement question’ at the end of this post! We’d love to hear from you!)
7. Promote Your Post
The work for greater engagement doesn’t end once you’ve published that carefully crafted, value-saturated post. Now it’s time for some post post strategies!
The best way to do this is to promote your latest blog post on social media and other online platforms. This will help to get the word out there, and should drive traffic back to your blog and get more eyes on your content.
Different audiences respond to different strategies on social media, but if you have a good understanding of your target audience, knowing what they like and what they want to see will come fairly naturally.
But no matter your audience, certain social media strategies will always work. These include (but are not limited to!):
- High-quality, eye-catching images.
- Catchy headlines.
- On brand captions.
- Intriguing blurbs or post excerpts.
- Relevant hashtags.
- Easy-to-follow links to the relevant post.
- Consistency in sharing content!
Besides sharing to social media, an email mailing list is a great place to share all about your new post! If you don’t get have a mailing list, we suggest getting to that pronto!
(After you’ve finished reading this post, of course!)
8. Monitor Your Stats
The above are all the basics you need to write successful blog posts. But, as you either already know or will soon figure out, blog posts that consistently do well cannot be boiled down to a one-size-fits-all approach.
Will all of the tips and strategies we’ve shared help you craft successful posts? Yes! The above are the basis of any successful blog.
But will faithfully including all of the above on your posts mean that they will do well? Yes…and no…
You can dot all your i’s, cross all your t’s, and check all your boxes, but you will still need to work out what works best for your audience. That is why monitoring your blog’s stats is important. Checking out your Google Analytics page, or using a platform that gathers and analyzes this type of data for your blog will help you fine-tune the type of content that hits with your audience.
Now, it is important not to make these numbers the be all and end all, but they are a good indicator of what your audience responds to, which types of posts do well with your audience, and what you should focus on in the future.
You can then implement the appropriate strategies to help boost your blog’s search engine optimization.
The goal of search engine optimization (SEO) is to boost the quality and quantity of traffic to your blog from search engines.
To conclude this post, we have a few tips to help you boost your search engine optimization (SEO) so that each post you put out has high odds of fulfilling its intended purpose.
Related read: 8 Ways to Strengthen Your Niche Authority
SEO Tips and Tactics
- Do keyword research – Keyword research is as it sounds. It’s research you do to find the popular keywords in your niche. But the goal of keyword research is to find those keywords or topics within your niche that your post can rank highly in. (Take a look at this post for top keyword research tools: 5 BEST Keyword Research Tools for SEO [2022 Reviews])
- Add links – Links are another effective way to boost your SEO. These include internal links (links to your blog or website) as well as links to other sites.
- Add a meta description – Your meta description is the text Google displays under your blog post title when it appears in a Google search. Depending on your host and your hosting plan, or the plugins you’ve enabled, you can tweak this to what you want it to say, as opposed to it being your first sentence or two. (But if not, make sure those first two sentences are GOOD!)
- Post regularly – as with most things worth doing in life, consistency is key. Consistently put out high-quality content, and you will eventually build a name for yourself as an authority within your niche.
- Bear word count in mind – while the opinion on this tends to vary, it’s an important nugget to bear in mind. In most circles, there is a general understanding that the ideal length of a blog post intending to rank or do well is between 1500-2500 words. However (and it’s a BIG however!) never compromise word count for quality!
- Remember the layout tips – The tips we listed above regarding the layout of your blog posts are also important when it comes to improving your SEO. Headings and subheadings, smaller paragraphs, and images can all help give your SEO a boost.
To Conclude
The above are all the basics you need to write successful blog posts. But just as Rome was not built in a day, so it can take time (and consistency!) to build a successful blog. But following the above tips will definitely help you build with the right tools and plans in place!
And, above all, have fun with the process and enjoy the learning curves! Yes, when the stats are good it feels good and looks impressive, but when it comes down to it, what makes a blog successful is whether it’s valuable to its audience or not.
Make value your number one goal, consistently serve your audience, and the rest will follow!
What strategies or tips do you find work best for you blog? Share with us in the comments!
