Blogging: What started as a fun way to share our lives and adventures with close friends and family in the 2000s has now morphed into a content marketing juggernaut.
This article will show you how we at Brafton work to maintain our successful blog and give you some tips to create your own high-quality content.
1. Effective Blog Design
A successful blog post is more than just words. Here are some blog design elements to consider:
Scanability and Structure:
You could be the best wordsmith in the world — James Joyce, Maya Angelou and Jennie from Blackpink all rolled into one — but if your blog post is just an expansive block of text, nobody is going to read it. (Which, to be fair, is probably the same reason you’ve never read “Finnegans Wake.”)
Blog structure is very important; short, digestible passages invite the readers to keep going. Punctuation is your friend as it breaks up the text and allows the reader to take a breath. Clearly defined headers and sections enable people to scan your blog to find the information they seek.
Visual Aspects (e.g. Images, Video, Infographics):
You know what makes gleaning information easier than even a perfectly scannable blog? A visual aid.
Adding relevant charts, graphs, images or a video can emphasize the important information and keep the reader’s interest. At Brafton, we often include custom infographics in our blogs.
Branding
You can communicate branding subtly, such as by using your brand’s colors or style guide. There are also less subtle branding tactics, such as incorporating your slogan into the call to action (CTA) at the end of your blog.
Page Load Times
The impatience of the average person might astonish you. When we search for information online, we’re all pretty impatient, and most of us won’t even wait 10 seconds for a page to load. If you make your potential readers wait, they might just leave.
Blog Sitemap
A blog that connects to the rest of your website is helpful. Link to your other blog posts and/or to product or service pages. An easy-to-read sitemap also makes navigation easier and encourages visitors to spend more time on your site. More importantly, your sitemap and carefully chosen internal links may give your site an SEO boost.
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2. The User Experience
How users feel during and after engaging with your blog is key. Positive thoughts and emotions will keep them coming back for more. Here are some blog outline tips for creating a more enjoyable user experience:
Introductions and Conclusions
Any time you can grab someone’s attention with an introduction, the better. Including wit, humor or an interesting fact is effective. You can also just dive straight into your topic so as not to waste the reader’s time. For instance, I couldn’t think of anything clever for this blog’s introduction, so I kept it short, but other writers can seemingly always write captivating introductions.
For conclusions, it’s best to be clear and to-the-point. An effective conclusion sums up what you want the reader to take away from the blog and spurs them into action.
Lists and Links
There’s a reason the listicle surged in popularity 10–15 years ago; people like lists. How-to lists are easy to follow and helpful for gaining actionable insights. People instinctively want to complete lists, too.
Hyperlinking to related posts, landing pages or contact information pages helps readers get to where they want to go fast.
Relevance and Relatability
Always consider the blog topic and your audience when writing. The content should always relate to your business and it must offer relevant information to readers, or they won’t read it.
Digestible Word Counts
This seems simple; all you have to do is keep your blog short. However, many content writers will tell you they spend a significant amount of their time editing to get under a word count. More pertinently, perhaps, search engines often prefer longer articles, so for search engine optimization (SEO) your blog can’t be too short.
Voice and Language
The tone you use for your blog is another branding opportunity. Developing and adhering to a brand voice is valuable because it sticks in the minds of readers. It’s also important to use appropriate language. For a blog on marketing, we can be playful and funny. When dealing with more formal or sensitive topics, it’s wise to use different language.
Value
Good blogs are interesting, on-brand and informative. You don’t want your readers finishing your blog having not learned anything.
Call to Action
A CTA isn’t necessary for all blogs, but many businesses benefit from urging their readers to contact them or start their journey.
3. Search Engine Optimization
Blogs that do well on Google perform for a reason.
And that reason is SEO. Here’s what to know:
Keywords
These are the search terms that relate to your industry or topic. Using these terms often — but judiciously — makes your blogs rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). Platforms such as Ahrefs and Semrush can help you figure out the best keywords to use for your blogs.
Title Tag and Meta Description
These short tags might be, pound-for-pound, the most important for SEO. Use your main keyword in both your title and meta tag and keep them short, between 55 and 155 characters, respectively.
External Links
We’ve already discussed how internal links can help, but external ones also provide benefits. Linking to credible external sources can add authority to your content and make search engines trust you more.
Backlinks
When external sites link to you, that’s called backlinking. If you establish your brand as a thought leader that provides valuable insights, more sites will link to you, boosting your authority.
Readable URL Structure
It might seem a small thing, but simple URLs convey credibility. Funnily enough, readers don’t trust pages with urls like “brafton.com/blog/want-to-write-a-good-blog-here-are-#16-ways#auth/query?#sconvid=1967.”
4. Useful Tools and Trends
There are tools and platforms available to help you write engaging, popular blog content. However, Planet Blog spins fast and trends can change quickly. Here are some tools and practices that are useful today:
Artificial intelligence (AI)
No, don’t get AI to write all your content. That’s a good way to lose the trust of your audience. That doesn’t mean, though, that AI can’t play a role in successful blogging. On the contrary, AI is pretty good at helping with content creation and ideation or writing a compelling headline. There are also AI-powered editing tools, such as Grammarly and ProWritingAid, that can improve your writing.
Analytics
There are numerous AI-powered tools that can help with analytics. These include Ahrefs, Google Analytics, Semrush and Moz. You can use these to make your blogs rank higher and increase your authority.
In-House Tools
A content calendar allows you to plan what to write and when to publish. Reporting schedules help keep everyone on task.
Google Search Essentials
This tool helps you keep up with Google’s technical requirements, spam policies and best practices.
5. Best Practices for Blogging
Now you have the information you need to create a compelling blog that ranks high on search engines. But knowing how something is done and knowing how to do it are two different things. For instance, I know how airplanes achieve lift and fly through the air. However, if you asked me to build a 244-seat, narrow-body airliner, you’re going to be pretty disappointed with the end result.
Here are some tips you can use to help you create a blog that will be a soaring success:
Go in With a Plan
Improvisational skills are great to have, but you can’t assume you’ll figure something out when that blank page is staring back at you. A thought-out content strategy will help guide you from topic ideation through to your CTA.
Define Your Audience
A successful blogger always knows their audience. If you write to introduce your business to novices to your industry, then it will be great for beginners. However, seasoned vets of your field won’t find value in it. If you want to appear authoritative to those who are already knowledgeable about your topics, you’ll need to include valuable content and not spend time defining basic terms.
Be Consistent
This blog is about business blogs, but if we look at the first blogs from 20 years ago, we can find inspiration. How many of those successful bloggers started out with maybe a dozen readers? But they kept at it, published consistently, and they amassed an audience. Now, with SEO as sophisticated as it is, the value of being consistent has only increased.
Promote Yourself
Don’t be bashful about promoting your blog; the more eyes you get, the better. Blog promotion is key to success. If you promote your blog on social media, on your email newsletters and prominently on your site, you’ll get more readers.
Get Your Voice Out There, Blogging Rockstar
While we couldn’t possibly include everything there is to know about blogging in a single blog post, you now have a solid foundation for getting started. If you need to dive deeper into any of these topics, jump onto the Brafton Blog for additional guidance — or get in touch with our team to discuss your needs. (That’s what a good CTA looks like, by the way.)