So You Think You Can Blog?

When it comes to developing blogs, it’s one extreme or another: they can be simple or a nightmare. Blogs are more than just writing an article. There are topics, platforms, audiences, and categories to consider. Use these five key points to ensure you have a blog worth bragging about, with the added benefits of better search result placement and purposeful, streamlined content. Maximize your post to reach your audience!

1. Select a Topic

Your blog can certainly be about anything you desire. If you want someone else to read it, however, you’ll have to make sure your topic can pique interest. Is it catchy enough to hold the reader’s interest through the title and the first few lines of the blog?

When generating your blog topic, be sure that the audience you want to communicate with actually exists. Choosing narrow topics that only a select few are interested in will limit the number of viewers on your content, which will reflect in your analytics. By choosing a better-established topic, you have a greater chance of amassing a larger audience. The fact that there is already a large number of readers interested in said topic naturally broadens the visibility of your content. 

No one wants to read anything boring, so try to make your topic interesting. Ask yourself these questions when considering topics:

• Is the material easy to absorb?
• Will this topic grab the reader’s attention and keep their eyes glued to the page?
• Is your perspective interesting to enough people?

If you can answer yes to all of these questions, you have probably chosen a great topic.

2. Choose the Right Platform

You’ve now decided what you want to write about, you know who your intended audience is and what they want to read about. But where will they find your material? Selecting the proper platform to distribute your content is key. Whether it’s your blog section in your WordPress site or a LinkedIn article, it eventually comes down to finding the easiest way to get your message to your audience. Invest the time to research the best platform for your topic, know where your audience gains most of their information, and go from there. As simple as this may sound, it’s a very important factor when creating a blog. 

3. Keep It Simple, Silly

Congratulations! You know what you’re writing about and have settled on the proper platform to share your content. Next item to consider: is your blog structured to make it an easy read? Beginning with the title, your content should grab readers, but is the body of the blog formatted in a way that encourages them to continue? When designing your blog post, be creative; don’t have it sound like a college essay, where you write just to bulk up your word count. Break the post up a bit. Use subheadings to separate the topic you are writing about into sections. Use bullet points and lists when you can. 

People typically skim an article before they decide to read it. By adding subheadings and bullets, you give the reader a preview of what they could be reading. Try to make your subheadings appropriate, but also attention-grabbing, if possible, and even bold when you can. 

4. Use Great Images

In addition to making your blog easy to read for your audience, it should also be visually appealing. Make sure a post can visually captivate by inserting captioned photos or thumbnails within the body of the text. Imagery gives the reader a mental break from the wordiness of your content and provides them with visuals of the message you’re trying to convey. Make sure your images are deliberate and on-topic, not random. When choosing the right images for your blog, include images that are high-resolution, where the quality is better. Optimize images for the best page performance. If you’re skilled, you can even create your own images that better fit what you are discussing. For a more in-depth look at adding photos to your blog, check out our piece on adding images to your content.

5. Use a Blog Builder Template

The final step to implement is a Blog Builder template, an easy-to-use tool to help plan the mechanics of your post for better optimization. One of our clients, Sally Stacy of Tailored Talent, a talent solutions firm based in Cincinnati, OH, met with us to discuss her marketing material. We also discussed the best practices for blogging. Using the information gathered from our meeting, Sally developed a checklist for herself and her team to help build blogs without missing anything, and, most importantly, without missing the point!

The idea of a blog builder sounded so cool that we were inspired to create our own, more generic version and share it with our readers! This Blog Builder will help you brainstorm ideas and plot out writing a clearer blog post with better results. It also helps you organize your ideas before you attempt to write your posts. By knowing your audience ahead of time, identifying purposeful keywords, selecting thought-out meta descriptions, and collecting the best outside links to link back to other sources, your content will be more specific. Therefore, it will be more beneficial to your readers. 

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Feel free to use this Blog Builder template, but please do not remove our name or logo. If your business could use agency support with content creation, social media management or developing an overall marketing plan, don’t hesitate to reach out to us!