13 steps to writing a perfect blog post

Blogs can cover a wide range of topics, but when written professionally, they can have an impact on decisions, enterprises, and so on.

There are numerous reasons why people blog and many of them have to do with providing value to the readers or site visitors.

Your readers visit multiple blogs every day; your blog should provide exceptional content, as well as the right information the readers require quickly and easily, as many will simply click away to another blog and never return if your content is not relevant or valuable to them.

To that aim, bloggers must create blog articles that are accurate, informative, and thoroughly researched; they must produce exceptional blog posts.

In this post, I have outlined the steps to producing a great blog post.

1. Blog focus or niche

To succeed in blogging, you need to provide your readers with quality content.

You will achieve this by gaining mastery in your chosen niche and establishing yourself as an authority in your field.

Your readers do not visit your blog in hopes of finding interesting content, they visit in search of specific information, about what you write about.

To keep viewers coming back to your blog, you need to continually intimate them with your content.

Don’t try to write about everything on the internet, instead, pick a niche and remain focused on it.

When you niche down, readers know exactly what they’re getting into every time they visit your blog.

2. Communication and tone

The endpoint of posts is communication, from you or your brand to your readers.

You are writing to convince them to take up and act or do something.

Whether your aim for blogging is to impart knowledge, provide solutions, or entertain your readers, you should write in a conversational manner, referring to your readers as though they were physically present, with the use of the second-person tense “you”.

This instigates your readers to engage with your posts.

Your tone, determined by your niche, should communicate your aim appropriately to your readers.

The ability to provoke a response and encourage interaction with your posts is held in the highest regard by all readers.

3. Correct post structure

A blog post usually starts with a catchy and attractive introduction, followed by the body of the post and to sum up, the conclusion.

It is advised you follow this when writing your posts.

No one is going to take the time to read a post without a well-thought-out structure as the disorderliness tasks the brain unnecessarily.

The right structure makes your posts readable, skimmable, and shareable.

Choose the correct structure for your posts – it is more an audio post, a video, a gallery, or a standard post?

These have been designed to make obvious the most important part of your post so, ensure to choose the right option, especially if you’re using WordPress for your blog.

Make use of bullet lists when necessary, italicize or bolden words you intend to emphasize, include quotes in quotation marks, etc.

4. Post titles

Post titles are the first feature of posts that attract readers, they must be descriptive of your posts, include relevant keywords, and must be detailed, catchy, and optimized for search engines.

There are a number of title analyzers you can explore to review your post titles, a good tool is the Yoast WordPress plugin.

Others include the CoSchedule Chrome extension, etc.

5. Headings and subheadings

Blog posts should be detailed, concise, and easy to go through, as many readers often skip through posts before reading them in detail.

You should make skimmy through posts easy!

This you can do by grouping your contents into headings and subheadings.

An example is how we group the different parts of this post into headings.

We recommend you use HTML HEADINGS to achieve this effect, and not just increase post title sizes or make them bold.

6. Images

1. Featured image

This is the image that appears on all of your blog posts and is shared on social media alongside your post titles when your posts are shared.

It represents what the post is about, and it is recommended that you add one to each of your posts.

2. Relevant images

Images, as a visual form of information, are believed to convey information faster and more effectively than words, so you should include them in your posts.

Look for and include images that are pertinent to your post’s topic.

After uploading your photographs to your site, make sure to include the following meta-data with each of them:

• Alt (alternative) text: This is a text that informs search engines and visually impaired users about the contents of an image, and it is also displayed on a webpage if the image fails to load. When viewing web pages, screen readers select and read this text aloud. The Alt text helps the image appear and rank in the Google search engine.
• Title: This is the name of your image. Like alt text, it lets users and search engines know what’s in the picture. Unlike alt text, the image title is not displayed when the image is missing or not loaded properly. Instead, it is displayed when the user hovers their mouse over the image.
• Caption: This is the text that is visible to visitors on the webpage, as opposed to Alt text, which is hidden and can only be read aloud to someone using assistive technology.
• Description: This provides a further and rather detailed description of an image, usually a longer and more explicit detail than the Alt text. Bloggers can even include links in the description, thus this field can carry as much information as they like. All of this information is displayed on the media attachment page if the site supports this feature and the blogger makes their image clickable.

7. Other relevant content items

Only words do not make a great blog post, for most niches out there so, include other types of content as well.

Input relevant images to buttress your points, videos, and audio too.

Insert a table when necessary, charts too.

These grasp the attention of readers and keep it on your posts.

They are also easier contents to consume compared to words.

These other forms of content introduce a dynamic trend to your posts making them interesting for your readers to read.

8. Internal links

As a blogger, you want your readers to read more of your content hence, they should move from post to post, exploring your blog.

This can be achieved by linking your posts to other posts on your blog – internal links.

When you have a number of posts around your niche topic, you can always link them together, from recent posts to older posts and vice versa.

It also helps your blog SEO, as search engines find it easy to crawl your blog – from post to post.

9. Post categories and tags

It is good blogging practice to group all your blog posts into categories.

These help to organize your blog content, grouping related posts together for easy content navigation.

Also helps with the SEO of your site as well as guidance to readers to know more about your posts.

10. Related posts

It’s good blogging practice to include a related posts section at the end of your posts usually posts in the same category as the current article so, should the reader need more information, they can continue with the next related post.

You can observe there is such a section at the end of this post.

11. Call to action

Commonly, blogs request readers to share posts on social media as well as follow the brand as well and subscribe to the brand’s newsletter.

There are however other call-to-action requests one can indicate on a blog post.

Blogging is towards a goal, this is where you direct your interested readers to your brand offers.

You can include a shop link or a carousel of your brand products, links to get tickets to your event, etc.

12. Author and timestamp

Depending on your type of blog, whether patterned after your person or your company, you might want your name or your team’s displayed as the author of your posts.

The use of names is preferred as readers can associate the manner of writing and tone with the authors.

Also applicable when you have multiple guest authors.

To reference newer posts compared to older ones, timestamps come into play – posts published to date, modified or updated date and time.

Aside from introducing order on your blog, search engines use timestamps in their results to display the latest content.

13. Post length

A blog post should be as long as it needs to be, that is as long as it takes to express and communicate your idea.

Some posts would do just fine with under 1000 words, while others would require longer.

A good number of times, it is determined by how much you want to expand on your topic.

Ensure you cover ideas indicated in your post topic, however, as your readers one way or the other would be looking forward to the contents in your post title.

When writing long posts, also ensure to keep them interesting, engaging, relevant, and informative, not riddled with irrelevant content.

In the end, as long as you offer quality and relevant information in a readable and engaging manner consistently to your readers, your blog will do just fine.