7 Key Steps to Writing a Successful Blog

Writing a good quality blog/article isn’t as simple as picking up a pen or creating a Word document with fingers poised over the keyboard. You need to consider a style and tone that is easy to read, informative engaging, and SEO friendly. Typically, you’ll be writing to encourage a reader to buy a product, subscribe to a list, take a test drive, or take some other action that will benefit your business.

Process of Preparing Blog/Article Content

Ø  Planning - Consider your intro, main body of text, and ending. Try and mention your product or service within the first paragraph, as this will help search engines to determine relevancy. Many new bloggers often ignore this important stage, which can affect the quality and the main aim of writing on any given topic.

Ø  Research - this lends gravitas to your subject matter. Even if it’s only for use as a throwaway statement, researching some background information does you no harm. After all, you can easily be caught out – if you don’t do your research, someone else might! If they choose to comment, it undermines your attempted status as an authority figure on your chosen topic.

Ø  Conduct Keyword Research - Keywords play an important role in SEO. Once you settle on a relevant topic to write about, it’s time to conduct keyword research. The keywords you choose should ideally be low in competition, but high in search volume – though it isn’t always possible. For this, you can use the Google Keyword Planner or keyword.io.

Ø  Title - After proper planning and research, it’s time to decide on a relevant title. The title is what will determine further relevancy for search engine “crawlers”, so it’s imperative to factor in your main keywords here. The title may also become part of your URL, so it’s worth giving this some thought.

Ø  Sub headings- After nailing down the headlines / title, start structuring your blog or article with subheadings. In SEO these are called H1 / H2 tags, and help search engines to more easily understand your content.

Ø  Conclusion- there are three elements to this;

·         To recap the main aspects of the post

·         To give a conclusive ending to the main content

·         Incorporate a Call to Action

Ø  Editing - After completing the article/blog post, start the editing and modifying process. This includes adding hyperlinks to other pages within your blog; adding images; and correcting grammatical errors, sentence structure and spelling errors if necessary. Don’t let poor grammar undermine your authority on your chosen subject!

At Five Rivers, we follow this strategy in every instance when creating content. Our copywriting service helps to provide a more authoritative voice to your written content. Call us on 0203 397 7545, or drop us an email to info@fiverivers.net, for a quote.