Thursday, 28 November 2013

Principles of writing a great blog post BY ADEGBOYE ADENIYI

Blog posts that go viral tend to draw more traffic to the blog and this doesn’t just happen by accident. If you want your blog post to attract more readers to your blog, you must understand the principle behind writing a basic blog post.

Understanding the art and science of writing blog posts will make it easy for your post to go viral and be found among the over two billion post that are published every single day.

Science behind writing a great blog post

Your blog post must first be written for humans

Blog post are meant to communicate ideas, shares thoughts or simply to pass knowledge. Therefore a great blog post is written with your audience in mind. In writing your post, you need to answers these questions:

- Who are my audience?

- What do they want to read?

- Where do they hang out both online and offline?

- What are their challenges?

This is where research comes in. After doing your research, you can start writing your posts. After writing it, you need to make sure that your blog post is free of spelling and grammatical errors. You can solve these by always prove reading your post before they go live.

-  Your blog post must also be written for search engines

Your audiences are not the only ones to be considered when writing your blog post. You must also pay great attentions to search engines. This is because, 80 per cent of people will use stumble upon your blog post online. Therefore search engines needs to understand your blog post. This is why you sometimes see blog post that does not fully answer a search query being ranked higher than those that does. When writing for search engines, you want to make sure that your post contains your keyword phrase in the Title tag, Header tag and that your image is relevant and well labeled. This problem can usually be solved if you use SEO plug-in on your blogging platform.

The art of a great blog post

Now that we have understood the science of writing a blog post, let us now analyse the art behind a blog post that get shared and read.

A great blog post should be between 400 words and 1200 words. An analysis being carried out showed that blog post that are longer in words do better on search engines than shorter posts. So write longer relevant post.

Headlines are very important when writing your blog post. Numerous times, we have seen headlines that attracted us to a website, a magazine or even media news, only to be disappointed at the end because the delivery was poor or the headline has nothing to do with the content.

While I am not an advocate of misleading headlines, learning how to craft good headlines will make people open your blog post. The print media do it why not online too.

Blog posts do not have to be in written forms only. While the written letters is still the common method of writing, learning how to transform your post into video, power point presentations , Infographics and other formats will give your blog post a boost, open you to new audience and increase the average time a viewer spends on your blog.

 Blog posts that get read over and over again are post that has been well promoted. In promoting your post, you want to leverage

Owned media: Owned media are your usual platforms like your Facebook page, Twitter handle, LinkedIn page and Google+.

Earned media: Occurs when people who read your blog post loved it and decided to share it with other people. This can easily be done by adding social media plug-in to every blog post. You can also earn your media by simply asking people to share it with their friends.

Paid media: Paid media occur when you pay advertisers to promote your content on their platform. This opens you up to new audience.

If you just starting your own blog, learning to write for both your audience and search engines will make your content easy to discover but only a well promoted blog post will get in front you in front of audience who will eventually turn out to be your regularly readers.

Growing your blog starts with understanding how to leverage each blog post as a means of retaining readers and attracting new audience.

To have a great blog, you have to put all efforts into each post.

Industry leaders do not care how many post you have on your blog, what they care about is the quality of each blog post.

How long do you think a blog post should be? Please drop your comments, questions.

Copyright PUNCH.

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