Writing blog posts that people actually read is one of the most valuable skills you need to have being a blogger and a marketer. Unfortunately, most of the people get it totally wrong and fret about it.

They know that no one is reading the blog posts they write, but sadly they don’t do anything about it.

Seems relatable? Huh?

I’ve been blogging from a long time, and over the time I’ve learnt and observed many things. You need to adopt them in your blog posts to make them insanely readable.

In this blog post, I’m gonna describe the exact writing process and strategies I follow to write my blog posts.

Writing any blog post involves 5 steps:

1. Research
2. Planning
3. Creating
4. Editing
5. Promotion

Listen.

No matter, how good you are at writing articles, if you’ve got this writing process wrong, I’m sorry to say this, your writing style sucks.

If you say otherwise, it’s just a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Let’s dig in the blog post.

SECTION 1

How to research for a blog post?

This is the very first thing you need to do before writing any blog post.

Wait.

It’s not only about content research. There are three types of research that you need to do.

1. Topic research

2. Audience research

3. Content research

Topic research for your blog posts

Great winning topic ideas won’t come out of your head most of the time. First , you need to know what  to blog about.

To get the great topic idea– you need to make use of certain tools, your intuition, and also validate it.

If you are part of any active FB group, where your target audience dwell, you can make a poll that says – what should be my next blog post about?

You can also make use of the tool BuzzSumo.

With this tool, you need to enter your niche keyword. In the above example, I entered “Paleo”. BuzzSumo will return all the web articles related to the topic that went viral on social media sites.

This means the audience of social media sites are already loving the content. If you create similar content, there are chances that it also gains traction.

This strategy works great if you focus mainly on social media traffic.

You can also make use of Ahrefs’ “top pages” feature while researching your competitor website. It returns all of your competitor’s pages that are getting good organic traffic from Google.

Or you can also search for the best pages of a site with more backlinks. In this way, you can be pretty sure that if you publish an epic article on a similar topic you too get more backlinks.

You can also do keyword research, relating to the niche you are blogging in. You can use tools like AnswerThePublic or Suggestomatic.

For keyword research, I highly suggest you using SEMrush. It is a great tool for competitor keyword research, as it has the largest keyword database on the internet.

Akshay recommends: How to Choose a Blogging Niche? (Don’t Regret Later!)

Audience research – Define target audience

You need to create an ideal reader avatar. You need to determine who is the ideal reader of your blog, and list down the following things.

• Demographics of the prospect readers
• Psychographics of the readers
• Pain problems of the prospect users
• Audience expectations from your blog post

You can determine the answers to the above questions by making use of your Analytics reports, Facebook Audience Insights tool, heatmaps on related posts, email newsletters you sent to your visitors, or by asking the audience about their challenges in the form of a survey, polls, or gamification.

This area is not the topic of the post, so I’m not going to stretch it further.

But, all I want to say is that knowing what kind of people read your content and what do they expect even before writing the blog post is important.

How to research content for your blog?

After finalizing the topic that you need to blog about, you need to start researching the content that you need to include in the blog post.

While doing content research, you need to keep in mind the reader persona you researched in the previous step.

Before researching the meat of the content, you need to determine what to include in the content and what questions to answer.

You need to make a big list of questions that you need to answer.

But how to find questions?

You need to make use the tool called AnswerThePublic.

In this example, let us consider that you’re writing a blog post on “Local SEO”. Just type the term in the tool.

This tool will display all possible questions that people ask when it comes to local SEO in Google. With this tool, you’ll get a clear idea about what the length and breadth of the content you need to include.

You can also make use of the tool called Suggestomatic.

You just need to enter the “asterisk” (*) symbol where you’d like the tool to fill in the blank and suggest the keywords that people search in Google.

Now, copy all the keywords and questions you’ve researched.

Head over to any of the bulk keyword volume checking tools like SearchVolume or KeywordsEverywhere, and enter in the keywords.

With this, you’ll get to know how many people are searching for answers to some questions related to your topic.

Once you’ve researched enough, pick 3-5 keywords which you are willing to target in your blog post, and Google them.

Read the top 5 ranking posts for each of these keywords. Notice the quality of their content and things they have covered. The key here is to determine what the top ranking posts have in common when it comes to content coverage and they are signaling relevancy to the keyword intent.

Read a lot, and make use of Evernote web clipper, to capture the ideas and inspirations directly to your Evernote note. The capturing of ideas is very important so that you can refer them when writing your blog post.

You can also make use of the tools like Liner, if you want to carry it a step forward.

But, Evernote web clipper is suitable in most of the cases while capturing ideas for your next blog post.

If you are blogging in  fitness, health or medical field, you need to make use of Google Scholar to bookmark some research articles you need to include in your article to back up some of your claims.

You can also click “Create alert” if Google wants to alert you regarding any new research paper published for your keyword so that you can add the new researches to your blog post in the form of updation.

You can also consider Google searching, for pulling up relevant research studies to your topic and writing data-driven posts.

SECTION 2

Planning and outlining the blog content

Once you have a list of all the possible questions that people are searching in the topic and also the things you need to include in the form of research, its time to organize the researched data, prepare and plan the post.

You’ve captured the research data in form of Evernote, bookmarks, and also may be downloaded images in the previous step.

Now, it’s time to organize the data.

For organizing the data, and creating a meaningful outline out of it, you can use outlining apps like Dynalist (I prefer) or Workflowy.

I was using Dynalist, but now as I’ve switched my whole workspace to Notion (personal plan), I’m doing the outlining process in Notion itself by not using a separate app for that.

However, for this post, I’m showing you my Dynalist outline as it is a free tool and made specially for outlining.

These kinds of outline tools allow you to do unlimited levels of indentation and add in the details under each of the sub-topics and gives you idea on what to write in a blog.

You need to also reorder the structure of your blog post, so that there is a logical relationship between each of the topics covered.

Your outline should be very in-depth, so that, you don’t need to juggle between the browser tabs while writing the blog post.

Akshay recommends: How to Outline a Blog Post: The Last Guide You’ll Need + Template

SECTION 3

Creation of blog content

Now, this is the most important part.

After researching about what things to include in the blog post, it’s time to get on to the creative side of the workflow.

While creating the content, you need to remember the AIDA principle. It is a copywriting principle, and AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.

As you can see, the first one is Attention. You need to grab the attention of the audience for them to consider your promotion.

In the later stages, you need to make them develop interest about your content, desire to take action, and finally, persuade them to take an action.

While reading the below subsections, keep the AIDA principle in mind.

How to write good blog headlines?

Headlines are the determining factor of whether your blog posts get read or not.

According to a research by CampaignLive, only “Eight out of ten people only read the headline”. Why? The majority of the headlines won’t grab the attention at the first glance.

The attention of human beings is less than that of a goldfish, earlier it was same as that of a goldfish (thanks to the internet!).

For any person, to even consider reading your blog post, attention is the primary thing. And, prospect readers look at the headline to determine whether to pay attention to your article or not.

The headline should build rapport and cause emotions (like curiosity, love, fear) in the minds of the audience. Because emotions are the one which causes people to take action.

Analyze the headlines of top ranking pages.

Here are some keywords that they are using to spark curiosity or emotion.

1. Scam or not? (curiosity + fear emotion).
2. Shocking revelation (curiosity + fear emotion).
3. The Brutally Honest Review.
4. The Good, Bad, and Ugly.
5. XXX vs YYY – You Don’t Want To Pick The Loser.
6. XXX vs YYY – The Surprising Truth.
7. Top XXX under $$$ – #3 is Just Awesome.

Make sure you come up with at least 5 – 10 headlines before considering the final one. When you have a huge list of headlines at your disposal, you can mix and match the words in it to create an ultimate headline, which otherwise would be not possible to craft.

Try your best to include emotions and curiosity in it.

Remember, CURIOSITY = CLICKS.

BuzzSumo conducted a research by analyzing 100 Million Headlines. Here are the key takeaways for you from the research.

A headline should contain one or more of the following.

1. A focus on why the reader should care
2. Clarity and promise
3. Emotional hooks
4. Provoke curiosity
5. Provide explanations
6. Appeal to a tribe

If you love a more classical advice, let me present you something out of the advertisement classics. David Ogilvy, one of the great copywriters originally developed a headline crafting method called 4u’s.

Try to incorporate any of these 4u’s along with a strong emotion (by using adjectives), in your headline.

1. Useful: Your headline should make people think, “Well, this piece is certainly worth a read, it certainly has information that benefits me”. You should create that sense of usefulness in your headline, they need to feel this at an emotional level.
2. Unique: In what way your blog post is unique? What can people get in your post, that they won’t get anywhere else on the web? Will your post be yet another piece that they encounter daily?
3. Urgent: Creating a sense of urgency in your headline that forces people to click on.
4. Ultra-specific: When you are looking to attract a laser-targeted audience to your site, it’s important for you to be ultra-specific in headlines. Let your readers know what exactly they’re going to get from your post.

You can make use of tools like CoSchedule Headline Analyzer or tools like Linkbait Title Generator to come up with good headline ideas.

If you are eager to split test the headlines in your WordPress posts, and pick the one which gets more clicks, make use Thrive Headline Optimizer. It’s the best plugin I’ve ever come across when it comes to A/B split testing the headlines.

How to write catchy blog introduction?

Okay, people got intrigued by seeing your headline and clicked through it.

Now what?

Unless the introduction of the blog post hooks them, they’ll fly… and they’re gone… maybe forever.

Just imagine you walking down the street, and you stumble across a beautiful woman. Now you need to initiate a conversation with her and persuade her.

What do you do?

You try to find a common ground between you and her, and try to build rapport in the first conversation. You try to make her feel that you are similar to her, with similar likes and interests. This rapport building will be much more effective if you were stalking her on Instagram from a past couple of days.

Similar to this, you need to analyze the demographics and interests of your target audience. In the introduction of the article, you need to build rapport with them keeping their avatar in mind. They need to feel like – “Damn, this man is similar to me and knows exactly what I’m looking for”.

In simple words, the opening of the blog, the introduction is meant to build rapport with your readers, to make them listen to you and value your words.

The best way to build rapport with your audience is through storytelling. The story you’re gonna tell them should drive them more curious, establish a common ground, or aggravate the problem they are facing.

Derek Halpern, from SocialTriggers does a great job of it. In the above example, he has included the curiosity element in his introduction.

Personally, when I’m stuck writing the introduction part of my blog posts, I head over to his website and get the inspiration.

He starts almost every article with a short story of him related to the topic which he’s going to cover. He knows exactly what triggers us, the social beings – stories.

The introduction should be conversational like that of rest of your blog post. It should only contain 1-2 lines every paragraph, and that’s it. Or else, people skip the introduction part.

If they skipped the introduction, you just primed your readers to skip the rest of the blog content as well. If your readers read the introduction without skipping it, the chances of them reading the rest of the blog post will be very high.

The core content of your blog post

After the introduction, you need to expand the blog post outline you created in the content research phase.

You need to write content and expand the outline of your blog post.

How to format your blog posts?

Before writing your content, you need to remember that – “On average, visitors read only 20% of your web page content”, this is backed by research.

Why?

When visiting a webpage people are only searching for a specific part that answers their query. They aren’t really interested in reading the entire article.

These people who read the article superficially, are called skimmers or scanners.

The important thing you should keep in mind while writing the blog is you need to make your content easily digestible for scanners.

For this, you need to properly structure your content. If you are in a niche like mine, where very-in depth researched content is crucial, you need to make use of certain elements in your blog posts.

Listen.

These are all the elements you need to use.

Clear-concise subheads: It helps users to find the piece of information they’re looking for very easily.

Do you know that Google displays the text under a meaningful subheading as a direct answer in the Google Knowledge Graph?

If your subheading is confusing, vague and does not have clarity in it, you’ll miss out of this benefit.

Using lots of bullets and numbered lists: Readers love glancing the content specially when they are presented with numbered and bullet lists.

You can take this a step further by beautifying the plain HTML lists, using some CSS coding.

ul.tick li {
list-style: none;
}

ul.tick li:before {
content: "\2714\0020" !important; 
color: #0971B2 !important;
font-size: 24px !important;
margin-right: 3px !important;
}

The HTML being:

<ul class=”tick”><li>List Item 1</li></ul>

Adding the above code to your custom CSS enables you to create blue “tick” marks instead of the plain HTML black bullets.

Having ultra-short paragraphs: This is very important due to the fact that your web content should be mobile UX centric.

Even the so-called short paragraphs also end up as a large wall of text on mobile devices. You need to only have one small idea per paragraph.

Having table: Having HTML table in your content has great benefits when it comes to featuring your blog posts in Google Knowledge Graph. You can make use of tables or product comparison tables.

People often assume that tables are only for comparison posts. But tables are effective also in informative blog posts.

You can add a table using WordPress block editor.

Table of content: If your articles are more than 1500 words, table of contents is very essential.

The TOC enables Google to display “Jump to” links in SERPs.

You can also take it a step further by adding the floating table of content in the sidebar.

But I’m not a big fan of having the table of content in the sidebar, at least as of now. So I’ve included a floating button so that people can head back to the table of contents on a click.

It carries a lot of UX advantages when people are reading your lengthy article.

Highlighting texts: You need to make use of bold, italics, underlines, and also content boxes to highlight certain paragraphs or keywords in your content.

Make sure you add bold tags to the keywords, that enable users to accurately pinpoint the information they are looking for, and these also makes your content insanely readable.

You can notice that I’ve also made use of content boxes in this very blog post.

For accomplishing this, you don’t need to make use of page builder plugins or the custom CSS code.

You can add your brand colors to the WordPress palette, and you are good to go.

Blog content coverage

While writing the blog posts, you need to keep two things in mind.

1. Content Depth
2. Content Breadth

Content depth refers to how insightful and in-depth the content is. For example, in the above section, I’ve not only informed you to add content boxes, but also guided you on how to do it with a screenshot.

The content that you write on a topic, should really dive deep into the concept, giving examples, related studies, research, and so on. The shallow 700-word blog posts won’t really cut it.

When you have included enough research in your blog post, Google and also readers trust your content.

Content breadth: It refers to how wide your topic coverage is. When you are blogging on a specific topic, it should answer all the possible questions that people may be looking for when it comes to that topic.

Rather than targeting only one or two keywords in your blog post, you need to go broad enough to target related terms too.

But remember that while broadening the coverage don’t go off-topic. If you feel like a bit off the track, add that new topic to your bucket list and work on it for your next blog posts.

For following these concepts, penning down the detailed outline of the blog post (anchor) is very important as I mentioned in the above section is very important.

The writing style for your blog posts

Your writing style matters a lot.

No matter, how valuable information you’re giving out, if your writing style is not engaging enough to make people say – “WOW”, you simply won’t cut it.

Keep it conversational: You need to write blog posts as if you are hanging out with your readers over a cup of coffee.

Make use of words like “you”, “I”, “your”, “my” and make them feel the real “you”. Only then, you will be able to sell effectively.

Don’t sound robotic, Sophia’s there for a reason.

Practice storytelling: Relate some experiences you had previously in your life or something out of your journal to the blog post topic you’re writing about, and present the short stories in the middle of the content when you feel that the readers likely get bored.

Keep the stories very simple, and relatable to your readers.

Simplicity wins: The goal of content marketing is to attract as many people as possible to read your content.

You need to wear the shoes of your 13-year old and write in a simple tone.

If your content wants to appeal the wide range of audience, if your top of the funnel needs to be wide enough, you need to write as if your readers are kids.

If you feel the information is important, include it in bold text or a content box, don’t repeat yourself.

Cut redundancy: No need to present the same information twice in a blog post. There’s a thing called “conclusion” for a reason.

Use power words: Instead of using weak adjectives, and appearing as if you are desperately making them look strong, use power words.

Instead of using words like “ very big” use “gigantic”.

Grammar: Yes, you need to pay careful attention to the typos, grammar errors, punctuation in your content. Of course, I need to admit that I’m not a perfectionist when it comes to grammar being a non-native English speaker.

How to create great images for blog posts?

You need to make use of copyright-free images in your blog posts frequently.

If your post contains zero images, no matter how valuable information it has, people won’t just read it.

You’re not allowed to use the images you find in Google, no matter how attractive it is.

Personally, on my blog here at BloggingX, I make use of premium stock images. This gives us a giant leap to our competitors who most of the times use free images.

But if you don’t have a budget set for purchasing premium images, you can make use of tools like Pixabay or Pexels to find the royalty-free images that you can freely use on your blog without any attribution whatsoever.

You need to also invest your time in creating own graphics that provides a visual treat. You can make use of tools like Canva, Visme (for infographics), and others.

For featured images, you need to stick to either – vector images or the real-life images. If you go to my BloggingX blog page, you can see that all of our featured images are vector based and cartoonish.

Because, we’ve found that vector images garner more clicks on social media for my niche. For vector images I use Freepik. They have a good range of vector images for almost all the keywords you can imagine and comes a cheap price compared to other stock photo sites.

There are other free vector image sources like say Undraw, but the collection there is very limited.

• I use premium stock vector images for all of my graphics.
• I use my brand colors for the featured images (#f44336 and #0971B2)
• I use a consistent font size and family for all of my blog featured images
• I use a consistent size for all of my featured images

According to a research conducted by Nielsen Norman Group, the images that carry information garners more user attention. Users pay more attention to the information-carrying images as opposed to the images that are fluffy and used for decorative purposes.

This is the exact reason why infographics are popular, and big brands are investing top dollars on designing quality infographics. They attract the attention of the web users, and attention is the new commodity.

How to Write Good Blog Post Conclusions?

People remember the beginning and the end, they tend to forget the middle details. Based, on this they remember how you made them feel.

So, having a good hooking introduction and ending with a bang is very important.

In the ending lines i.e. conclusion of your blog post, you need to sum up the things you explained so far in the blog post if it’s an informational post. It should be like a synopsis of the content you covered.

If it’s a product review or a comparison post, you need to mention your verdict about the products and wrap up with the benefits or the downsides.

You can also mention the action-steps for your readers to take the moment they step out of your blog. You need to give them actional tips for them to straightaway implement. You can give actionable worksheets for them to download in the form of content upgrades in turn for their email IDs, and so on.

Actionable steps can also be about recommending them to read related blog posts in the form of related posts.

You can also ask them to share your post on social media and also comment on your blog post. You can notice that I’ve included the widget you can see in the above screenshot at the end of my every post here at BloggingX.

SECTION 4

SEO essentials – In brief

SEO is a very important thing you need to consider for driving targeted traffic to your site.

In this section, I’m gonna only discuss the basics of on-page SEO when it comes to content creation.

These are the things I discuss in the below section:

• Keyword optimization
• LSI keywords
• Internal links
• Topical optimization
• Outbound links

Keyword optimization: Before writing an article, you need to have a target keyword in mind that you need to rank for.

You need to to use the target keyword in the title of the article (H1 of the article), in the URL of the blog post, in the introduction of the blog post, any one of the subheadings (preferably H2), and also in the conclusion of the article.

LSI keywords: Apart from the target keyword, you need to also research for other related keywords a.k.a. Latent semantic index keywords in your articles. This helps in content breadth and also allows you to rank for a whole topic, rather than that of a specific keyword.

Internal linking: You need to internally link your topically relevant blog posts together, and thematically structurize them. With this, Google and also readers will be easily able to find the relationships between the various pieces of content on your blog post.

Whenever you publish new content, head over the relevant old content and include links to the new content to instantly help it index. When you include deep internal links like this, you increase the crawlability of your blog posts.

Topical optimization: The goal of your blog posts is to rank for a whole topic rather than individual keywords.

You need to structure your blog content thematically, so that content under a specific theme are internally linked and close to each other. This topic clustering is also called as silo structure in SEO.

Outbound linking: You should not forget to add outbound links to relevant external resources. This also helps Google to establish the content relevancy. The external resources you link out should preferably be to the high authority sites or those having very good content that is relevant to your blog post.

When you associate your site with other influential sites in your niche you garner great SEO benefits.

These are the essential things you need to know. The SEO is changing a lot recently, and you don’t need to worry about all nitty-gritty things of SEO, provided that the content on your blog is top-notch and very insightful.

SECTION 5

How to edit and proofread your posts?

Listen.

No matter, how researched and good your content is. People will not read it completely if it contains lots of typos and grammatical errors.

You should not do the writing and proofreading simultaneously. Because in these processes, there are two different parts of the brain involved.

When you are writing any blog post – you will be in the psychological state of “flow”, where you don’t have conscious awareness and logical reasoning abilities. It’s a divine emotional state.

Whereas, when doing proofreading, you need to be very rational, logical and super-attentive.

So, if these two processes go hand-in-hand, your content creation creativity will suffer.

Here are some of the tips I follow while proofreading my content:

1. Take a break: If you are both the writer and the proofreader of your content, you need to have a new pair of eyes. Or, you need to take a break after writing, prior starting to proofread. If you start proofreading the content immediately after writing, you tend to autocorrect the mistakes.
2. Read out loud: This is why you need to have a separate cabin for you in the office (haha). When you read out the text loud, you’ll be very attentive and tend to focus and not skip any word in the article.
3. Keep a swipe file: As per the Pareto’s principle, 20% of the mistakes you will commit 80% of the times. You need to keep that 20 % of the mistakes in the form of a swipe file in your computer and go through them while proofreading.
4. Adopt a vigilant mindset: If you analyze the meaning of content deeply while reading, you can’t effectively proofread as brain autocorrects the mistakes. You need to be like a detective and always super-aware.
5. Print out: This advice I follow only sometimes when writing advertisement copy or an evergreen email template. Our brain is hardwired to skim the text that appears on the display. In the case of printed text, the chances of we reading the content in detail will be more.
6. Proofread reverse: I’m not asking you to reverse the proofreading process, on a sentence level. Reverse the proofreading process on a paragraph or a subheading level. This forces your brain to pay attention due to the psychological phenomenon of pattern interrupt. It simply means that, when brain encounters something that’s out of its experience, it forces attention.
7. Use tools: Remember that tools contribute only 20% of your proofreading process. You can make use of tools like Grammarly and Hemmingway app to help you identify the mistakes, typos, structural errors, and also vague sentences.
   
   However, it’s very important to proofread manually as these automated tools are often pretty poor at what they do and still have a long way to go to emulate actual proofreader’s brain.

SECTION 6

How to promote blog posts?

No matter how good your blog post content is, if you fail to promote your blog posts effectively, you efforts will be wasted.

You need to have proper promotional strategies in mind.

Pre-publishing buzz is one of the things that can do to generate some buzz around your content even before you publishing it. By this, you get instant traction to your post by people who’ve been waiting for your content.

Pre publish Buzz

You need to also promote your blog posts aggressively on many platforms, without waiting for Google to trickle in the traffic

Here are some of the places where you can promote your content.

You can copy some useful content inside your blog post and create snackable content for your social media followers or present them as answers on Quora. With this approach, you along with promotion, can provide the value upfront.

What about you?

As you’ve read the blog post completely by now, I urge you to take a sheet of paper and list down all the things you learnt from this blog post and what you need to implement in your next blog posts.

Hope you guys found this blog post on writing great blog posts helpful.

Have you got any tip when it comes to blog post writing? Leave ’em in the comment section below.