6 Essential Parts for the Perfect Blog Post

Are you ready to start writing content? Or maybe you want to instruct someone on how to write perfect piece of content? Either way, you’re going to need to know how to write a great blog post.

Not just a great blog, though – the perfect blog. The more perfect blogs posts you have on your website, the more likely you are to receive the following benefits:

• Visibility
• Sharability
• Brand Trust
• Credibility
• SEO
• Website Traffic
• Influencer & Leadership status

These are just a few of the benefits of what a great blog posts can do for you, not to mention business growth and more clients and sales overtime. The more you produce, the more benefits you’ll receive.

In this post, we’ve got all the components covered for you to start creating your arsenal of perfect blogs. Take the advice, hone your craft and watch the traffic come rolling in.

Part One – Making the Perfect Headline

Think about the last blog post you clicked on – this one. Why did you decide to click on this blog and not another one? What about it made you want to click it and keep reading?

It was likely the title. First of all, it has a very strong purpose and point. “How to make a blog post that’s perfect”; that’s something that most people in the business world would want to know more about.

On the surface, it’s pretty easy to tell why this headline is good, but there are a few secret tricks being put to work within its simplicity.

• First, readers pay a lot of attention to the first three words and the last three words in any blog title. In this example “6 Essential Parts” and “Perfect Blog Post” both amp up the purpose and simply explain it.
• Second, there are a couple of very strong descriptors at work. “Essential” describes how much you truly need to read this content. “Perfect” helps describe “Blog Post,” and that’s something that’s highly coveted – the perfect blog.

Small tips like this can help draw people into reading what you have to say, making it part of building the perfect post.

Another tip is to apply this formula to your blog titles: Number + Adjective + Target Keyword + Rationale + Promise. This might seem a little complicated, but here’s how you put it into action: “6 Exciting Ways to Help Find Your Target Audience for Better Marketing Strategies.”

If you think that’s a mouthful, you’re right. A good title is 50-60 characters and keeps the message succinct. Try out “6 Social Media Marketing Tips for Small Business Owners” instead. It follows the formula but keeps to the promise of quick, easy and eye-catching.

Part Two – Your Opening

For the opening of your blog, you have two options. First is to tell a story that draws someone in to read the rest of your content.

This kind of technique is used a lot in fiction writing. If you’ve ever taken a creative writing class, you’ll know that the first sentence of a book is the most important. Compare the sentences:

• The dog sat upon the stoop, staring tiredly.
• She had died before, but there was something different about this incident.

Which one is better? The first is a little boring, and it doesn’t give you a reason to continue reading the story. The second, however, remarks about something unusual, something intriguing. You can easily put this kind of thought into your blog posts.

Blog writing is essentially an art of building up information. When you start off a blog title with the statement “This is the Only App You’ll Ever Need for Business,” you don’t want to leave your audience hanging. They don’t want to read 300 words still scratching their heads. What app? They need to know!

However, no one wants to click on a blog and see the question answered bluntly and that’s it. If you wanted to stick to brevity, you’d only need to write one word – but what’s the point of that? Instead of simply stating the app, you need to build it up a little, then announce the app, then explain why they need that app so much.

Look at this sample opener for a blog about this made up app you need so badly:

“I recently found a solution to a common problem most entrepreneurs face: I don’t have one single app to organize all my files for sharing and creation. Google Drive works for sharing content, but I have to have separate apps to create it all, so it clutters up my phone. I found a great article about FileYes, but here’s the thing. I still wasn’t convinced it was something that was going to work for me.”

The ending shows there’s still uncertainty and leaves room for more explanation. This is how you open a blog in a way that gets someone to keep reading, even though you’ve technically already given them the information they need and want.

Part Three – The Bulk of the Post

Now that you’ve opened up your blog, you have to figure out how to get people to read the rest of what you wrote. Here’s a secret – no matter what you do, they likely won’t. Most people will have already closed this post by now because die to a short attention span, and that long copy blogs like this are difficult for most to digest, but work well to keep readers coming back when they want to learn.

The reality of blog writing is that most readers skip the bulk text, read the headings and some text they think might interest them, then they leave. If you’ve made it to this point in the blog, you’re one of the rare ones.

The way you try and fix this problem is through dynamic text formation. Content writing is 50% about quality content, and then 50% about how to make it attractive to the audience so they actually read what you have to say.

Here are a few quick ways to break up your text to make it more dynamic. Dynamic text is any form of text that breaks the mold of being in a paragraph form:

• Lists
• Charts
• Bullet points
• Subheadings
• Quotes
• Visuals
• Broken up text

This information keeps your brain active, and is also easier to process. No one wants to read a wall of text in their spare time if they don’t have to. Dynamic text is how you fool someone into reading 1500 words by using visual tricks to make the job seem easier to their mind.

For more detailed advice on each of these dynamic forms, simply look below:

• Lists are great for getting lots of traffic. The Internet is in L-O-V-E with lists. There’s something easily digestible about a list and it’s perfect for giving information in a simple way that makes sense.
• Charts should be a go-to for more technical articles, but you may run into the problem that there isn’t a chart that shows off the information you want. It can also be hard to make them if you don’t have the right tools. Use one if you can, but look for other forms of dynamic text if you can’t find what you’re looking for.
• Bullet points work wonders – you’re reading a bullet list right now, aren’t you? These highlight the most important points you want to make in your writing, or they can easily list off information you want to emphasize.
• Subheadings give the reader a bite-sized version of your article. One habit content readers fall into is reading the title of a blog, then reading the subheadings to get the gist of the content. This is especially true of list articles. If you want to make your blog perfect, make your subheadings pop.
• Quotes are how you build credibility. You don’t have to include a quote, but it is great to showcase that someone is agreeing with you. Find a related article and pull some quotes. Credit the source and you’re good to go.
• Visuals are important for building a visually appealing article, but you’ll read more about that in the next section.
• Broken up text is how you make your overall article more digestible to readers. Instead of huge paragraphs of information, make your paragraphs smaller and easier to read so you keep your reader’s attention.

Use all of these dynamic forms of text to make your article more attractive. By doing so, you’ll definitely have keep your readership rate as high as possible.

Part Four – Visuals

Speaking of dynamic, visuals make for very dynamic text. Pictures, infographics, graphs and charts give your text a lot of edge – and this is what makes someone pay attention to your writing. It might be ironic that pictures are what get people to read, but that’s the reality of content writing.

There are definitely statistics that back up how much more sharable and dynamic content becomes when you add images, but you can’t add just any images. Here are some quick tips for adding images to your content:

• Choose images that are relevant. Non-relevant, sensational images are akin to clickbait, and that doesn’t make you credible.
• Always use HQ images which have a decent resolution but too heavy to weigh down your website and page load time.
• You can spend money on good stock photos, but free HQ photo sites exist. Pixabay is a great one.
• Before you write your blog, do a Google search for similar blogs. See what pictures they’re using. If you happen to use a picture that recent, relevant blogs do, find another one.

Pictures are also great for backlinking. Backlinking is great for SEO. If you want better SEO rankings, use images – and use quite a few. The more you link out to other websites the more people will link back to you.

An introductory image is great, and that’s the bare minimum. Perfect blog articles, though, use images throughout the piece. The rule of thumb for image inclusion is to use one per every 350 words, though this can be excessive for longer pieces. Try and sprinkle in relevant images that work for you where you see fit to start with. This article is 2500 words and has 3 images.

Part Five – Your Call to Action

To close your article, you need to give someone a reason to engage. While it’s great that someone reads your content just to stay informed, you want more than that. You want conversation, you want acknowledgement, you want comments, you want conversion. Unless you write something incorrect or inflammatory, you may have to prod your audience to get them to engage.

You can do that by adding a call to action, or CTA. If you aren’t familiar with this term, it’s used to describe what gets someone to provoke an immediate response, usually using an imperative verb such as “call now”, “find out more” or “visit a store today” It’s not enough that someone retweets an ad; they also need to engage with the ad in some way. They do that through a CTA, like signing up for an email subscription newsletter.

Blog CTAs usually go at the bottom of the blog, and you’ll see one at the tail end of this post as well. Sometimes the message can be as crystal clear as a direct question, like “so what do you guys think about this new information?” or “how do you feel about the latest Google update?” Other times it can be more subtle, like a sly link included in the last paragraph that leads you to click-through.

Your call to action should have a very direct purpose, no matter what method you use. Ask yourself how you want to engage with your audience. Through a discussion? A signup? A share? Once you figure that out, it’s much easier to get a CTA going.

Part Six – The Extras

A perfect blog post is something you can create by using the above information, but what you still need to add the finishing touches.

1. Links

Throughout this blog, you’ll notice that there are links scattered throughout. These link to sources or related blogs on content writing and blog posting. Why are they there? For a few reasons.

One is that these links add to our credibility. We don’t want to just toss you some info without having to back it up, so there is a link included to show where the information originated from.

Another reason is that including links to blog content increases their SEO value. Include about two to three links per 500 words. You can add more if necessary, especially if you have a lot of information you need to cite and source.

2. Tone

The tone of your blog post is something that can vary wildly depending on the audience you’re trying to reach as well as the purpose of your blog. Imagine that you’re a YouTube celebrity with a personal blog. Your blog’s tone is likely more friendly, familiar and humorous. You may talk about off-color or sensitive subjects you feel comfortable enough to share with your followers.

Now imagine you’re a business blog that’s targeting bankers in their 40s and 50s. You likely won’t be linking memes and talking about what you did last weekend if you’re trying to create a credible business blog. The tone will be more formal and straightforward with a business message to give.

Look at your audience in order to figure out what your tone is. Based on your audience, you may want to rewrite some of your content to better suit them.

3. Editing

It’s always important to edit your work after it’s done. Look for misspellings and grammatical inconsistencies. If possible, get someone else to look it over. There’s nothing more embarrassing than posting a supposedly-professional blog with a horrible typo right smack in the middle of it.

If you’re going to edit your own work, take a simple editing test online. How well did you fare? Do you need to sharpen up your editing skills? You can also use tools like Grammarly to help you write better copy.

Now that you have everything it takes to make a perfect blog post, the only task left is to go forth and write. I hope you learned something new that can make your current blog posts better. If you’re a new writer, why not show off a blog post you make using this advice? Remember that these are all the tools you need to put a great blog post together, but a good writer is really what puts the their blog posts on top.

Feel free to connect with me here if you have any questions or feel like you want some help with your current blog or Social Media. I look forward to chatting with you.

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