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Blog posts are vital for all kinds of businesses, from entrepreneurs to SME’s and even the biggest brands on the planet, because they boost the company’s online presence, bringing more visitors to their site, as well as helping to build relationships with customers.
More importantly, they answer questions that the company’s target audience is likely to be asking. This provides two major benefits – the first is that most traffic to your website will be people who are interested in what you offer. The second is that if your blog posts are a high enough quality, you will soon become known as an expert within this niche.
As a freelancer or independent contract, you probably already know that having your own site is important because it allows you to showcase your work 24/7 to people in every country in the world while presenting yourself as a professional. Having a blog on your site can further strengthen your marketing and branding efforts by improving SEO, bringing more potential customers to your site via organic links, and establishing your credibility as mentioned above.
So you’ve created your own website using a beginner-friendly website builder, and now you’re ready to start writing blog posts! But how do you make sure that your posts will be effective at driving more traffic to your site, and converting that traffic to actual customers? Keep reading to learn more about the key elements every blog posts should have.
1) Topics
It may seem obvious, but the first step in writing a great blog post is choosing the right topic. Check these tips for finding inspiration online if you’re struggling to know what to write about. Also, be sure to consider your audience – who do you want to read your blog posts?
(Tip: this will likely be very close to your dream customer base.) Then, think about the topics those people will be interested in.
Finally, if SEO is one of your main reasons for writing blog posts, you can conduct SEO research into the most frequently searched keywords relating to your sector and come up with topics based around these.
2) Structure
The structure of your blog post is critical. A well-structured blog post is engaging, professional and easy-to-read. A poorly-structured post, on the other hand, will put your readers off and they’ll be unlikely to finish reading at all. When it comes to structuring a blog post, the rules are fairly similar to those we learnt at school: be sure to have an introduction which sets out the topic, the body of the post, and then a conclusion which summarises the post.
Yes, your teachers were deadly serious when they said you need a beginning, middle and end. Breaking your post up into sub-headings can also help to make your blog easier to read and encourage readers to read until the end, as well as giving Google more information about what you’re talking about, allowing it to bring more appropriate visitors to you.
3) SEO
As we already touched on, one of the key advantages of blog posts is they can help to drive traffic to your site through Google searches. To make sure this works you will need to make sure your posts are optimized for SEO. This is a huge topic in itself, but at a minimum do some research online to learn the basics of SEO, and conduct keyword research to determine the keywords you should include in your post.
Luckily there are a number of free SEO tools available to help you optimize your posts. You can also use SEO tools such as AHRefs to find keywords your competitors are gaining traffic from or to find content topics that are high in demand but low in competition, giving you the highest possible chance to win readers.
4) Brand and Voice
Another important point to keep in mind when writing a blog post is your brand and voice. Even if you are a freelancer rather than a major company, you should still have your own brand: these will be your key attributes as a professional and the main things you want your customers to know about you. This could be themed like reliability, creativity or originality.
All of your marketing and communications should reflect this, including your blog posts. Make sure your posts convey your brand in terms of the voice you use. If your brand is all about professionalism, keep a highly professional tone in your posts. If you want to show you are friendly and progressive, more casual blog posts are appropriate.
5) Have a Great Opening
Although your entire post is important, the first paragraph is critical. In today’s modern age, our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter so you need to make sure you have a stellar opening which will capture your readers’ attention to make sure they keep reading rather than clicking away, closing the tab and moving on to something else. Fail to have a strong, engaging option and it doesn’t really matter what the rest of the blog post says because few people will read it. Try to start your blog post with a question, or a controversial statement, or at the least a sentence which is very relatable.
6) Use Visual Elements
Visual elements such as graphics, charts, and infographics significantly add to a blog post, making it far more engaging and readable. If you are an artist or designer, use this to your advantage by being sure to create and include awesome visual content as part of every blog post. This has never been easier thanks to the great tools for visual storytelling which are available these days.
Author Bio:
[thrive_testimonial name=”” company=”” image=”https://dsim.in/blog/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/sophia.jpg”]Sophie is a professional blogger and writer who specializes in modern design and all things web development. She is passionate about traveling and exploring new places.[/thrive_testimonial]
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