So you’ve decided to start your own blog. But all that stands in front of you at the moment is one hurdle after the other. What should you write? How do you choose your topic? At the moment, it is very possible that people who will see your blog post on facebook, twitter, might not click on it. So, what do you do to ensure that your content reaches the right kind of people exactly when they need it? How do you ensure that it is YOUR content that readers prefer when they have a query? How do you maximize the potential of your blog post? More than anything, how do you write the inbound way? Let’s help you with some tips:

Who is Your Audience?

First and foremost, it’s essential for you to identify who you intend to write your blogpost for. Instead of guessing the kind of content that should drive your blog, it’s better if you compile relevant data including an industry research and competitor analysis. Take Sirius Decisions for example. Their aim is to bring actionable intelligence to B2B executives and that reflects in the content they produce. Their blogs cover topics that feature the data from their reports and studies. Also, if you are interested in driving traffic to your posts through your blog or convert those visitors into leads, your blogpost will highly vary from that perspective too. If your target audience is in the awareness stage, you’ll need to write blogs that make them aware of you, and so on. 

Some tools that you can use as a way of making your research less of a task is by making the most of resources such as:

• Quora: A free question and answer website governed by internet users. It is a great way of finding the questions that the people in your industry are asking around for. 
• Twitter Advanced Search: When you type a keyword of your choice in and select the filter “questions”, you can see all the questions relevant to the keyword. 
• SEMRush: Although SEMRush is a paid tool, it works very effectively when you are out there to see what your competitors are up to. 

Are Your Headlines Compelling Enough?

Think about it. Unless there is a headline that really captures your attention, there is no way that you’ll click on it to read more. If that is the case with you, why wouldn’t your users do the same? It’s essential for your blog post to have a compelling headline, thus ensuring a higher chance of your blog post being read or shared or in another way, have a high click-through rate and low bounce rate. 

A way of finding the emotional marketing value of your headline is to run it through a headline analyzer. It’ll give you insights into how likely your users are to click on the headline you have curated for them. And actionable tips on what you can do to improve them. 

Is Your Blog post Formatted Correctly?

In a time when one can barely pay attention to one task for five seconds, reading long paragraphs without breaks can be an excruciating task. It’s imperative to add subheadings and making sure they are SEO optimised, in order to make it easier for people to skim through the content before they decide to actually read it. 

For example, Drift has a strong brand that believes in promoting conversational, personal marketing. Not only do they provide case studies about client success and provide an insight on how they run things, but their blogs are also formatted in a manner that a user can scan through them without hassle. Making a blog more conversational and featuring relevant images can add to the reader feeling closer to you and your ideology. 
 

Pointers, Please! And Images

In line with the previous point, it’s important to remember that patience runs low on the internet. This means that a reader won’t give a blogpost more than a few seconds to decide whether he wants to stay or move on. In that case, just like subheadings, bullet lists become important. Pointers are most effective when:

• They express a clear benefit to the reader
• They are symmetrical.
• They don’t contain lengthy paragraphs

There is no denying that the human brain finds it a lot easier to process visual content than text-based content. Adding relevant images that captivate the mood of the blog becomes an important part of a blog post. Free resources for finding high-quality royalty-free images are abundant and you can easily match an impactful image with your text. 

Is it SEO Optimised?

It’s true that writing just for the sake of SEO never helped any business. In fact, it has proven to be harmful in the long run. However, it’s essential to keep SEO in mind while curating content for your blog. A huge chunk of traffic is driven by Google’s organic search. In that case, it’s important for you to create a post that will be picked up and featured by Google search on their page when a user types a relevant keyword. In case you wish to maximise your SEO ranking, it’s highly recommended that you optimise your blog for SEO using the following steps:

• Adding a proper Meta Title
• Adding the right Meta Description
• Optimising for Focus Keyword
• Interlinking your content

Do You End With a Call-to-Action?

This is the most important step for a blog post. Unless your readers have a clear and direct call-to-action, it’s impossible for you to expect them to do anything more than reading it. For you to increase your conversion rates, you need to engage your readers and ask them to leave a comment, sign up for a newsletter, share your blog post, follow you on social media, or even purchase a product you have to offer. Regardless of what it is, you have to clearly state what it is you wish them to do.

These were the seven tips that we believe will help you enormously as you go on your journey to create an effective blog post. Are you already using some of these tips? How are they working out for you? Let us know in the comments below.