In 2022, the total number of blogs worldwide checked in at 600 million. That’s a lot of blogs. But then, how many of these blogs do you think people actually read?
Creating a blog and making it all nice and pretty isn’t that difficult. However, writing a killer post and gathering a huge audience is pretty tough.
If you are starting out as a blogger, then you probably have a long way to go before you can start creating engaging and effective posts.
In this article, we are going to be sharing some tips with you that can help you along the process and get you to reach that goal more easily.
7 Tips to Write an Effective Blog Post for a Blog
Here are the 7 tips that you can follow to create engaging and effective posts for your blog.
1. Be Thorough with Your Research
Before you start writing the post, always conduct proper and thorough research. The amount of research you do shows up clearly in the content that you write.
A well-researched blog post can be usually identified with these characteristics:
- Relevant and cited statistics
- Definite statements and zero conjecturing
- Quoted studies relevant to the topic
- Support for each and every argument with logic as well as authoritative literature
When you start doing your research, you should keep a notepad constantly with you at your side. Every time you come across an interesting fact or figure, make a note of it and then use it in your content whenever the opportunity presents itself.
Whatever point you think about including in your post, you should do your research and look for material that you can use to back it up.
Let’s look at an example here. Examples can be great in clearing up concepts.
Suppose two people are writing a post on the use of the internet in the whole world.
Person A writes his sentences as follows:
The internet got pretty popular from 2000 to 2022. Many people around the world are probably using it now.
Now this sounds, looks and feels terrible. No one wants to read stuff like that in a blog post.
On the other hand, Person B writes his sentences as follows:
According to a study by Broadbandsearch.net, the total usage of internet increased by 1,355% from 2000 to 2022. According to the same study, the total number of internet users across the world are approximately 5.25 billion.
This looks a lot better. The readers will not only like to read and trust this type of information, but they will further cite it if they want to mention the same statistics elsewhere.
However, while doing research and citing sources is good and all, there are two things that you have to be careful of during this process.
- You should take care to only cite reliable websites and platforms. Spammy and unreliable websites should be avoided.
- Don’t go overboard with the stats and cited facts. Mention them sparingly otherwise the content can start looking ugly and overdone.
Checkout: Best keyword research tools (including free options)
2. Create and Follow an Outline
After you are done with your research, you need to create an outline for the post that you intend on writing.
There are essentially two benefits of creating and following an outline.
Firstly, when you create an outline, you can make it into a table of contents and upload it along with the blog post. This will help your readers in easily understand the content of the post.
If there is a specific part or section that your readers want to peruse, they can easily skip to it using the table of contents.
While we won’t go into a lot of details from this aspect, we’ll just mention that making it easy for your readers to go through your blog post, in whichever way possible, can be great for your website’s SEO.
Reader-friendly content can increase the user dwell time and reduce the bounce rate.
Moving on, the other benefit that you can enjoy by creating an outline and following it is that you won’t stray away from the main topic.
If you don’t create an outline and follow it properly, then you could start branching out when writing your post. You could end up mentioning unnecessary details, which could be arduous and difficult for your audience to digest.
Similarly, when creating the outline, you can also decide the exact number of words that you want each heading to have. This will save you from worrying about completing the word count later on.
3. Break Your Content Up into Headings and Subheadings
After the above steps are done, you have to move on to actually writing the blog post.
One of the most important tips to keep in mind when writing a blog post is to keep it easy to scan and skim.
This you can do by adding a suitable number of headings, sub-headings and bullet points in the content. You can do this by putting the following in your content:
- H2 style headings
- H3 style section headings
- H4 style sub-headings
- Ordered and unordered lists
Headings, sub-headings and bullet points essentially help in organizing your content. By merely taking a cursory glance at the headings and sub-headings, your readers will be able to get an accurate idea of what the content is about.
Plus, even if we ignore this aspect, we can appreciate the importance of having a proper number of headings, sub-headings and bullets in your blog post by considering what would happen if you do not use them.
If there are no heading styles or bullets used in your post, it will just be a giant wall of text. It will look terrible to the readers and it won’t be able to gather an audience at all.
Even your regular and dedicated readers may get repelled after looking at such a post. If you want to picture what a blog post would look like without any sort of heading or sub-heading in it, just take an example of this one that you are reading right now.
Suppose we were to start writing this post from the introduction right to this point without any lists, headings and sub-headings.
On a fair note, it would not even have looked like a blog post. It would have looked like a medical or legal document…or something.
4. Be Careful of Content Readability
If we are talking about writing effective blog posts, then there are a few aspects that are more important than the readability of the content.
Without readability, your content will be impotent in attracting and retaining the attention of the vast majority of your readers.
We say ‘vast majority’ because there can be some sort of sophisticated intellectuals in your audience that may just appreciate the fancy words in your content.
While the simplest and easiest way to create easy and readable content is to just be careful during the writing phase, there can be some writers who may compulsively or unintentionally resort to using difficult words and terms in their work.
For such writers, online readability assessment tools can be a great solution.
By using an online readability assessment tool, you can usually find out readability issues in your content such as:
- Excessive use of passive voice
- Long sentences
- Difficult words
- Excessive use of adverbs
And so on.
5. Avoid Plagiarism
If you are a blogger, then you should take it as a set-in-stone rule never to plagiarize content.
Symbolically, we can compare the example of a plagiarizing blogger to a person who stands next to a pump in a gas station and tries out his new lighter. Everything’s just going to blow up. Nothing good’s going to come out of it.
As a blogger, you can focus on creating an awesome website and you can create a really nice design. You can also set up an immaculate SEO strategy. But if you happen to plagiarize content, it’s all going to be worth nothing.
Considering the heavy repercussions that you have to face (which we will discuss right now) if you plagiarize content, it is advisable to use a plagiarism checker to check your content for duplication after every writing session.
Even if you did not have the intention of plagiarizing anything, you should still check in order to make sure that it’s not there.
There are basically two ways in which plagiarism can be harmful to you as a blogger.
- It can wreck your image and reputation.
- It can make your SERP rank plummet.
Recovering your reputation after it has been damaged by plagiarism is well-nigh impossible. People don’t forget stuff.
Even if you were to stop plagiarizing content and issue a public apology or whatnot, the stain on your reputation won’t go away.
A damaged reputation has a direct adverse effect on your readership and popularity among online users.
On the other hand, apart from what plagiarism can do to your reputation, it can also have severe consequences on your SEO ranking. Google can detect plagiarized content, and it penalizes the websites that publish it.
A Google penalty can be very severe or it can be compared to somewhat milder. The severe penalty can involve the complete delisting of your website whereas the lesser penalty can be the reduction of your SERP rank.
6. Add Graphics and Images
Just as not adding an appropriate number of headings and sub-headings can make your content look dull and boring, the same thing happens with graphics and images.
You should add some relevant graphics to your content so that it looks more engaging to your readers.
However, there’s one thing that you should keep in mind.
When we say add graphics to your content, we don’t mean to just add random pictures of random stuff just to put some color in your write-up.
Rather, we mean that you should add such graphics and images that are relevant to the subject matter.
For example, if you are writing a blog post about the internet, don’t just add some pictures of roses there.
Instead, you can add a chart or a table consisting of useful information and statistics that your readers can benefit from.
And, yes, the other thing that you have to be careful about when adding graphics and images to your content is not to go overboard with them.
They should be added sparingly i.e., 1 or 2 in around 1,000 words. Remember, it’s a blog post, not a slideshow.
However, if you are writing a tutorial in which you have to add screenshots repeatedly, then the above does not apply.
7. Proofread and Edit
This is something we advise and emphasize with experience.
As a writer, you should always proofread and edit your content before finalizing it. No matter how confident you are of your linguistic prowess and no matter how many times you’ve created perfect content on the first try in the past, you should never become lax about proofreading and editing.
Proofreading your work is important because if you don’t do it, there are chances that some errors and mistakes could make their way into the final draft.
These types of errors are easily spotted by the readers, and they can diminish your reputation a little, if not a lot.
When proofreading your content, you should dedicate 2 – 3 different sessions to it. If possible, you should also give some gaps between the sessions so that you can forget the content and look at it objectively again.
Conclusion
So, there you have it, bloggers.
Creating effective blog posts is not an easy job and it’s not something that you can master overnight. It takes practice, and there are a lot of different steps that you have to take during the writing process to achieve it.
In this article, we looked at some of the tips that you can follow when writing your posts to make them effective.
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