23 tips help you to create optimal blog posts every time.
1: Anatomically Correct
A blog post contains several areas that require our attention and care
Eye-catching title
In-text links to landing pages
Sidebar/banner calls to action
Social sharing buttons
Call to action at the bottom
Relevancy—making sure the post is relevant from top to bottom
2: Blogging Platform
By knowing the ins and outs of your blogging platform, you’ll ensure that your posts look as good as they can. Take the time to master the visual editor (or raw HTML, if you prefer) so that you know how to format a post, insert an image and embed a video or podcast.
Whether you’re working in platforms such as WordPress, Tumblr or Posterous, it’s good to stay up to date on the features and new versions.
If you’re not comfortable with the more technical aspects of blogging, try to find someone who can be a resource for you to answer questions as they arise.
WordPress' editor
WordPress' editor where you can toggle between visual and HTML editing functions.
3: Categories
Whether your new blog post is a stand-alone article or part of a series you’re writing, it should fit into your blog categories as well as your overall corporate content strategy. Meaning that you want to stay on topic and have your posts fit into the categories you’ve established.
When you choose your categories, ask yourself, do they make sense, and do they fit into the objectives of my business? Having clearly defined blog categories will help you continue generating meaningful content and topics for your blog.
blog categories
Write posts that fit into your categories.
4: Description
Most search engines will use a maximum of 160 characters for your post description on their results pages. If you don’t create a meta-description (defined as a “…concise summary of your page’s content”), a search engine will often take the first 160 characters it finds on your page instead.
Note too, that when you create a meta-description that is fewer than 160 characters, you’ll see the full description in the search engine. Otherwise it will be cut off.
5: Editorial Calendar
Bloggers find editorial calendars helpful for scheduling and organizing topics for posts. Some people use their calendars to track more elaborate details.
6: Fine-Tune and Revise
Like other forms of writing, a blog post is rarely completed in one draft. Many writers find it helpful to take a post through several revisions and fine-tune the post as you go along. Check grammar, spelling and punctuation, and make certain that all of your links are working.
7: Guidelines for Writing for Search Engines
By following a few tips and best practices, you can increase the chance that your blog post will be found by search engines—by Google in particular.
Hpful writing tips:
Google likes text
Google likes formatting
Google likes freshness
Google likes accessibility
Google likes outbound hyperlinks
Googlebot isn’t psychic, so remember to link your pages
Google likes you to tell it where you are
Google likes experts
8: Headings
Five basic principles about heading structure:
The most important heading on the page should be the H1
There is usually only one H1 on any page
Subheadings should be H2s, sub-subheadings should be H3s, etc.
Each heading should contain valuable keywords; if not, it’s a wasted heading
For longer pieces of content, a heading is what helps a reader skip to the parts that he/she finds interesting headings
Headings should contain valuable keywords.
9: Images
Blog posts are made up of more than words and headings.
Five ways the right photo can increase readership and blog views:
Convey the overall feeling or emotion of your post
Illustrate a metaphor or analogy that is part of your main idea
Evoke surprise or curiosity
Complement your headline
Make your reader smile
10: Journalistic Approach
Bloggers can learn a lot from traditional journalists and the ways that they approach their news stories.
Mickie Kennedy offers five things that bloggers can learn from journalists:
Get your facts straight
Trust has to be earned
Give credit to your sources
The inverted pyramid works (basic overview in first paragraph and then delve into more details in subsequent paragraphs)
Editing and proofreading are essential inverted pyramid
11: Killer SEO and Blog Design
Certain elements on the page will add to a blog’s success:
Search box
RSS feed
Breadcrumbs (helping users navigate),
Flat site architecture by minimizing the number of clicks it takes to reach your content
Images
Keep your best content above the fold
Link to your best content
Don’t overdo links
Watch ad space
Encourage comments
Add sharing buttons
Test the blog for speed
Check your blog in different browsers
Pick a powerhouse blogging platform (e.g., WordPress, Posterous, Tumblr)
12: Lists
Lists have become a very popular type of blog post.
Three types for bloggers to consider: brief, detailed and hybrid lists.
The brief list has little description but can entice readers to bookmark the post to use the list as a resource down the road or to share it across their own networks.
In a detailed list, each bullet is a complete thought and serves as a good way to communicate complex information.
The hybrid list combines the elements of short and detailed lists, often with descriptive narratives or explanations in paragraphs between the actual lists.
13: Metrics for Blogging
Five metrics to keep an eye on to know how your blogging is going: visitors, leads, subscribers, inbound links and social media shares.
Measure the performance of your business blog regularly to identify weaknesses in the content you’re producing, what topics your audience truly cares about, and what blogging tactics work for you.
When you find topics and approaches that work particularly well, try to replicate those efforts and be willing to let go of features that aren’t performing well.
14: Names, Titles and Bio
Not only are readers interested in the content in your blog post, they also want to know who wrote the post and their role at your organization.
Sometimes you’ll come across a thoroughly researched and well-written post only to find an attribution of “admin.” Even if the blog is only written by you and you’re the administrator of the blog, be sure to include your name, title and a way for readers to contact you.
15: Original vs. Curated Content
The type of post you write can contain completely original content or can consist of content that you’ve curated.
There’s a misconception among marketers that curated content is lazy and unoriginal, but we think it’s the complete opposite. It takes time and careful evaluation to create quality curated content and the result is oftentimes a very valuable piece of content that helps people seeking information on a given topic to cut through the clutter on the web and save time.
16: Publish and Promote
Think about what you want people to do once they’ve read the post. Promoting a blog post can involve a fair amount of thought and strategy.
17: Questions
What are you going to write about post after post, week after week, year after year? Sometimes thinking about content for your blog can seem daunting.
One particularly effective way to get content ideas for blogging comes from reviewing web analytics for the kinds of questions people type into search engines like Google or Bing that deliver visitors.
What does a community manger do?” and search engines were sending them to one of his posts about that topic. It as an opportunity to explore other related questions about social community managers and providing content in the form of answers.
What questions are your web visitors asking before they arrive on your pages? How can you maximize your content to answer readers’ questions?
18: Research
Well-researched blog posts can differentiate your content from your competitors’. Being known as a go-to source in your industry will help make your blog stand out. Where do you go to research posts?
I find that utilizing a variety of sources helps me gather the information I’m seeking.
Ten social media research strategies:
StumbleUpon
Infographics
Twitter real-time searches
Facebook events
Experts who are using LinkedIn
Uncovering quotes with Delicious
Letting users tell you within the comments section of your blog and others
Creating roundup mega-lists with Delicious and StumbleUpon
Apps on Facebook
Delicious and Google Marketplace
YouTube and the UrbanDictionary
19: Stand Out
When you’ve been blogging in a competitive marketplace for a while, chances are good that you’ll see other bloggers writing on topics similar to yours. It doesn’t mean that you have to stay away from the topic completely; rather you can use it as an opportunity to see what worked and didn’t work in their post and write yours in a way that will help you to stand out in the topic area.
By reading the comments on similar blog posts, you will get a great view of what questions and thoughts people had after reading the post and you can take a slightly different angle by making sure you cover those areas in your article.
20: Title
How important is the title of your blog post? Simply put, very important!
Without a headline or post title that turns a browser into a reader, the rest of your words may as well not even exist. But a headline can do more than simply grab attention. A great headline can also communicate a full message to its intended audience, and it absolutely must lure the reader into your body text.
21: User-Centered Content
Possibly one of the worst mistakes a blog post can make is missing the mark of its readers, forgetting who they are and their needs and interests.
22: Valuable Content
In the perfect blogging world, creating valuable content would be at the top of every blogger’s list for their post objectives.
Step-by-step checklist that reminds us to ask five questions:
Can the user find the content
Can the user read the content
Can the user understand the content
Will the user want to take action
Will the user share the content
Suggestion:
Findable content includes: an H1 tag; at least two H2 tags; metadata including title, descriptors and keywords; links to other related content; alt tags for images.
Readable content includes: an inverted-pyramid writing style, chunking, bullets, numbered lists, following the style guide.
Understandable content includes: an appropriate content type (text, video), indication that you considered the users’ persona, context, respect for the users’ reading level, articulating an old idea in a new way.
Actionable content includes: a call to action, a place to comment, an invitation to share, links to related content, a direct summary of what to do.
Shareable content includes: something to provoke an emotional response, a reason to share, a request to share, an easy way to share, personalization.
23: Word Count
How many words should you have in your blog post? Some blogs have set parameters for optimal length and put a value on whether a post is short or long.
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