When someone starts a blog, be it on WordPress, Blogger, TypePad or any other type, they mostly want to share information. Nowadays, starting a blog is as easy as A,B,C, literally; A - Visiting the blogging site, like WordPress, Blogger B - Signing up and C - Selecting your blog name/title. After creating your blog, you now want to start creating posts. A post is basically the information you wish share with your readers, many bloggers also like to add in images and videos.
Put Yourself in the Reader's Shoes
This article will look at the secrets of writing great posts for your blog. As I always say, behind every successful blogger is good content, repeatedly written. As an introduction to great blog post writing, here's an everyday tip;put yourself in the reader's shoes. Think of yourself as a member of your target audience. Then ask yourself," what would I want to read?" If you write exactly that, you can never go wrong. I'd love to say that this is my first tip, but that won't do the point justice. Let us call it the Golden Rule of Great Blogging - Put Yourself in the Reader's Shoes.
1. Original Content
While all these tips are important, if I were to say there is one of more importance, it is this: Write original posts. I would not really call it illegal, but in the world of blog, duplicating content is as close to the dark side as you can get. That does not mean that you can not write something from another blog in your post; maybe share with your readers something you read somewhere. To share someone's content, you can just ask the writer of the content. When posting something from another site, make sure you name the writer and link back to their blog, both to be polite and to appreciate the source. Don't copy everything, you can quote a section and give your opinion.
When I say duplicating content is as close to illegal as you can get, am not kidding. Search engines (hint:Google), will sooner or later find where you got your content and that you copy-pasted it onto a post. What Google does is really simple, they just take their magic eraser and remove your post from the top of their SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). How will they know that I was the one that copied and not the other way round? They will, trust me. It's not worth loosing your blog reputation for.
2. Brand your Blog; Choose a Genre/Topic
It really is not a must for you to write about a single topic, but it sure does help. Not only does it help the reader to know what to expect from you, it also helps search engine and content related sites and other bloggers in categorizing your content in there links. Most importantly, it can make you a sort-of expert at a that topic. You can even choose a genre you are not yet awesome at and grow in expertise as you posts more and more material. Over time, when a reader thinks about a certain topic, it is your blog that pops into their minds.
3. Make it Interactive: Through What You Write
In every single decent post ever written, readers that have read the whole post have had a thought or two about it. Try to think about the last time you read through a blog post and what you immediately thought about after reading it. You may have thought "the most enjoyable read ever" or "okay, well that was a waste of my 4 minutes" or "wow, I didn't know this" but just didn't feel like typing down a comment. Now imagine that that was your blog, and that all those reactions just went unnoticed.
When writing your post, try to be controversial, to a point. Try to make the reader think "I must respond to this", just don't overdo it. Remember: the reader can always just close the tab. After giving the reader something to react to (it can even be an excellently written post), make sure there is a simple way for them to respond. Nowadays there are many easy to use commenting systems for blogs, make sure you select a good one. You can even put a simple Like button below the post.
4. Not too Short, Not too Long - Just Enough
Some bloggers write way too little information and others just overdo it. Personally, I sometimes get carried away in a line of thought and end up writing more of an article than a blog post. This can, at times, really bore your readers and at other times it is exactly what the reader wants. If you are writing a review, it's better to write too much information but when sharing a tip, the reader mostly wants you to get to the point. Remember what you are writing about and the Golden Rule of Great Blogging: Put Yourself in the Reader's Shoes.
5. Grammar
This is basically common sense, but am just saying it anyway. Make sure your posts are grammatically correct. A well written post not only gains the respect and favor of the reader, but also makes the blog SEO-friendly (check backlinks: This is one of the best ways to improve your PageRank (a good thing). Backlinks are links that from other websites that point to your blog. There are a lot of ways of getting backlinks, including buying or cheating. You do not have to resort to that. There are many other cool ways to get awesome backlinks and I am going to share some. The first and greatest is EzineArticles; this is the best and fastest way to get a respected backlink to your blog. Just write an article and add a link back to your blog. Like this article has a link, at the bottom, back to my site. Another way of getting backlinks is joining StumbleUpon, Digg, basically the whole lot of bookmarking sites, and after every post, bookmarking it in all of them. You can also post comments to other blogs and just be lucky enough to get one with do-follow comments. Another way of getting quality backlinks is through writing a guest post. Just find a big blog you like, similar to yours and email for a chance to guest-write. Then just like in EzineArticles, backlink back to your site. Using Appropriate Heading tags: In many blogs, a lot of people write about important topics in a single post but forget to show the search engine what is important and what is really just another sentence. Google about , or tags on the blog platform you are using and how you can efficiently use them to show relevant parts of your post. These are mostly SEO tips for when writing a post. When it comes to Search Engine Optimization, you are are good are you are updated. Regularly check for new SEO tips and tricks, but remember to keep it honest.Read further about blogging and blogging tools on my blog, and you can also check out Matt Cutts' blog for SEO tips directly from Google. Matt Cutts is an awesome Google guy (works there) whose posts can help you separate SEO fact from fiction.
How to Write a Great Post - Successful Blogging
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