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How to Write a Blog Post Outline (11 Easy Steps)

Amazing blog posts don't just happen on their own. 

It takes considerable skills to be able to put together a blog post that flows seamlessly from one idea to the next, carrying the reader all the way to the end of the post without losing engagement. 

If you want to be able to write posts like that, it's important to learn how to create effective blog post outlines. 

In this post, you will learn how to plan your posts, conduct research, and create a blog post outline that will help you improve your writing and enhance your readers’ experience. 

Alright, let's get to it.

What Is a Blog Outline?

A blog post outline is simply a plan that you create ahead of time so that you know the general idea of what you want to write about. 

It is the roadmap, skeleton, foundation, or structure (take your pick) of the post you want to write. 

Traditional outlines have a pattern: 

• First Point
• Sub-topic
  • Sub-sub-topic

• Second Point
• Sub-topic
  • Sub-sub-topic

• Next Point...
• Etc.

But, the good news is that you don’t have to adhere to this strict approach when outlining your posts. 

In fact, right now, you simply have to understand the basic concept behind effective blog outlines, and you’ll be able to apply a more flexible version to your own blogging. 

Different writers do blog outlining in different ways. As you grow your writing skills, you will be able to take outlining beyond mere planning and transform it into a conscious commitment to developing your ideas logically and persuasively. 

How Does Outlining Help You?

No matter how you define it, an outline will help you avoid the most pervasive problem faced by bloggers everywhere: poor flow. 

I'm sure you've seen some of these posts online, where the content jumps from one idea to another, and then circles back to the first idea for a few seconds before jumping back to the third, and so on.

Some writers swear by ‘writing in the moment,’ while others argue that the only way to produce high-quality posts is to plan and outline them beforehand. 

Creating a blog post outline will help you inform or create a more structured outcome from your writing. 

In fact, the more planning you do, the less likely you are to go off the deep end, and the more effective your final result will be.

By creating a fully-fleshed outline, you avoid all kinds of problems and make it more likely that your post will be engaging and to the point. 

Here is a quick summary of the benefits of creating an outline: 

• An outline helps you train your thought process and organize your ideas
• A detailed blog post outline makes your writing flow easier
• Creating blog outlines helps you avoid writer’s block
• Outlines help you write blog posts faster and save you tons of time
• With a well-crafted outline, you will be able to create a logical and cohesive content
• Outlining your content also helps you avoid missing key questions that your readers might have

But most importantly, a great outline makes it impossible for you to go astray with your writing - something that even the most experienced writers sometimes fall prey to.

Here are the steps to take in crafting a great outline for your next blog post:

Step #1: Decide on the Key Takeaway

Your first step is to determine the main takeaway of your post. 

Who is your target audience? 

You need to know the ideal reader for your post in order to be able to provide relevant information. 

Determine the specific demographic profile of your target reader. 

For instance, are you writing for 40-year-old women from New York who love skiing the slopes? Or are you writing for 50-year-old men who are looking for more effective ways to handle their finances? 

• What do your readers like? 
• What gets them fired up? 
• Do you know their values? 
• What is important to them? 

These are all questions you have to answer if you are going to be able to create content that is relevant and caters to your readers’ intent when searching online. 

Once you have this information, you're going to have a clearer picture of the key message you want your readers to be able to take away from your blog post. 

You will have a better understanding of the exact problem you're trying to solve with your content. 

Write down that one important message that clearly outlines how your blog post will benefit your target reader. 

This decision on your thesis will also help dictate what form your blog post will take. 

There are a variety of ways in which you can present your solution to your readers, including: 

• How-to Articles
• Tutorials
• Checklists
• Ultimate Guides
• Review Posts
• Roundup Posts
• List Posts or Listicles
• Comparison Posts
• Interviews
• Opinion Posts
• Expert Advice
• ...and so on.

Each of these different blog post templates conveys information to your readers in a slightly different way. 

It's important to decide on a blog post format that will get your message across effectively and make it easy for your target readers to consume your content. 

For instance, if you are writing a review post, your aim is to help readers determine if a particular product is worth purchasing or using. 

If, on the other hand, you are writing a tutorial post, then your goal is to show your audience a step-by-step process that they can follow to take action towards a specific goal.

Once you've narrowed down your post's main take away, and chosen the format for your blog post, it's time to move on to the next step.

Step #2: Come Up With a Working Title

This is a very important step. You need to have a clear understanding of exactly what you are going to write before you even begin outlining your post. 

A working title will guide you and help you focus on exactly what your blog is about as you go about writing your outline. 

When it comes to picking a great working title, you need to make it specific. 

For instance, instead of using a working title like "Social Media Lead Generation," you might use instead, "How to Use Images to Generate Leads on Facebook." 

Spend a bit of time on this. Do your best to make your working title as specific as you can, but don't get too nitpicky. 

You can always refine the title later. 

Your goal at this stage is to create a working title that will give you a clear idea of what your entire blog post is all about. 

It should be something that tells the readers what the post is about and makes them eager to read your post to find out more. 

Important Note: Some writers recommend that you write your post first, and then create a title afterward to try and embrace all the madness! 

I believe it's better to come up with a working title first, and then let it guide you as you write your post. 

You'll be able to optimize your title and make it sound catchy once you're done with your blog post.

Check out this post on our blog to find examples of headline formulas to help you quickly come up with enticing titles for your blog posts.

Step #3: Write Down All the Questions You Need to Answer

Now, it's time for a brain dump. Make a list of all the questions that your blog post will have to answer. 

What are the things that your readers want to get from your article? 

You don't have to focus only on the main sections of your blog post, but you can also list related things that your readers might want to know as they read through your post. 

At this point, don't worry about the organization. Simply let your ideas and thoughts flow naturally. 

Using the previous example, if your working title was "How to Use Images to Generate Leads on Facebook," you would probably want your readers to know things like: 

• What sets great images apart on Facebook
• Where to find images to use legally 
• How to create images on their own
• Optimal image sizes for Facebook
• ...and so on.

If you are having trouble coming up with questions, use the following tips to help you find out what you readers are asking:

Use SEMrush

A tool like SEMrush will help you find questions in your niche. Simply enter the topic of your blog post and apply the ‘questions’ filter to see only the questions that are being asked on that topic.

Use Google search

Prefix your seed keywords with words like ‘what,’ ‘why,’ ‘who,’ and ‘how’ in order to get plenty of good ideas for questions that your audience is asking. 

You can also check Google’s ‘related searches’ to get more ideas.

Browse Niche-Relevant Forums

Go through Quora or any other forums that are related to the topic of your blog post to see the most common questions members have.

A good rule of thumb is to come up with at least one question for every 100 words of your post. 

So, if you are writing a 2,000-word post, you may want to come up with a list of 20 or more questions.

It's alright if you don't have all the answers to the questions you suspect your readers will have. You will be able to conduct research a little later on in the process. 

For now, simply put yourself in your readers’ shoes and add as many questions as you can to help support your main points. 

Also, don't worry that you might have too many questions. Simply jot them all down and the ones you don't use now, you will be able to save for future topics.

Once you have every question that you can think of answering in order to address the key takeaway of your blog post, it's time to move on to the next step.

Step #4: Do Your Research 

A major secret of most professional bloggers is that they don't actually know everything. 

Oftentimes, bloggers have to sit down to write about a topic that they know absolutely nothing about. 

That's why it's important to hone your research skills so that you can produce high-quality, informative, and factually correct information that will please both your readers in the search engines.

If you are relying on third-party information for your blog post, choose authoritative sources like: 

• Government websites
• Official associations
• Heavily cited studies
• Research papers
• Preeminent industry experts
• ...and so on. 

Here are some popular research sources to help you find reliable information to finesse your blog post outline: 

(Image Source: NeilPatel.com)

Step #5: Check Your Facts

It goes without saying that you should do your best to ensure that you’re not feeding your audience misleading information. 

Nothing kills a blogger's reputation, credibility, and authority faster than publishing incorrect facts. 

So make sure that you do proper research during the outlining process. Always do your due diligence and check your facts.

It is best to approach every source with the skepticism of a journalist. 

Question everything and don't publish anything unless you’re positive the information is solid. 

If you use a site like Wikipedia as a source, keep in mind that the website is not infallible. It's been known to let erroneous facts slip past editors. 

Also, when citing information, even from reliable sources, do your best to look for the true source of the information and avoid citing the middleman. 

Step #6: Arrange the Major Themes and Sections

At this point, you have your major theme, and all your questions lined up. 

Now, it's time to get technical on the most effective way to organize the idea mess you have just created so you can translate all that information into real output when outlining your blog post. 

This is a simple process of placing each of the ideas into overarching sections. 

Think of this process like sorting laundry where each thought belongs in its own pile.

First, narrow down your list to the most impactful questions you absolutely have to address in your article.  

Then, arrange them into three or four major themes and sections in your blog post outline. This can be more or less, depending on the length of your post. 

Once you have arranged the major themes and sections, it will give you a macro-level view and make it easy to work on your document.

Step #7: Order Your Post’s Hierarchy

Your post should have a clear hierarchy, which means that sub-points must be nested within the main points. 

Start With the Main Header

Your first header (H1) should be the post title. Only use one H1 header per post and do your best to include your main keyword within the H1 title. 

For example, "blog post outline" is the target keyword for the post you are reading, so we included it in the title "My Copy of How to Write a Blog Post Outline (11 Easy Steps)".

Then, Fill in the Subheaders

Prepare the top-level hierarchy of your blog post by analyzing the research file that you created previously. 

This will help you to easily add the H2 subheadings, as well as the H3s, and H4s, if any. 

Do your best to include your primary and secondary keywords within the H2 titles. But don't obsess over this. If the keywords don't fit naturally, it’s alright to leave them out.

It's usually tempting to get creative when mapping out subheaders. But please don't do that. 

Remember, people typically scan blog posts by looking at the headers. If you make them cryptic, your readers will have to read the content beneath them to understand your headers.  

This can turn readers off. 

Good headings stand on their own without any explanation. So make sure your subheadings convey a clear benefit and that they make sense. 

In other words, each subheading should sound like an actual takeaway. 

Consider rephrasing some of your subheadings so that they properly fit within the context of your blog post.

(Image Source: SlideShare.net)

As in the example above, you should have a few major themes from your brainstorming session, and plenty of bullets that fall under each one of those themes.

You may find that some main themes have lots of bullets, while others don't have any, but definitely call for it.

Do your best to make sure that each section is balanced, but don't worry if you need to say more on one section than the other.

Just make sure your content has a natural progression and flows logically from the first point to the last while educating and engaging your readers along the way.

Now, you have the main skeletal structure of your blog post outline, with all the main headings and subheadings, and sub-subheadings.

Step #8: Add Detail to the Subheadings

Now that you have everything sorted out coherently, it's time to add detail to your subheadings.

The more detail you add at this stage, the easier the rest of the writing process will be.

When adding details to your subheadings, first write everything you know. Let your thoughts flow and try not to distract yourself by stopping to do more research.

Just get as much information as you can down, and you’ll be able to come back and fill in the gaps later.

Here are some tips to follow while filling in the details:

• Mark the places to add screenshots, images, infographics, videos, etc.
• Mark the sections that need additional research (e.g., statistics, quotes, facts, etc.)
• Include any additional questions that come up about what your readers might want to know

By the end of this step, you should have a completely filled blog post outline that is at least a quarter of your actual article's length.

For instance, if you are writing a 2,000-word post, your outline should be roughly 500 words.

Pro Tip: One of the things I find extremely helpful when setting up a blog outline is to use links, snippets, and notes in various places on the blog outline, and then worry about writing at the very end after all my research is done. This helps to save time and it makes your writing flow smoother.

Step #9: Insert Relevant Studies, Statistics, and Additional Sources

Once you have fleshed out your outline, it's time to go back and conduct some more research to help you add more relevant subsections and to support the overarching points in your post.

In essence, you are doing this research to beef up your blog post, and ensure that it provides more value than everything else that's already out there on the Internet.

Your goal in conducting this research is to firm up your points, so keep the following in mind as you go through the research process:

• What are the top articles or experts saying about this topic?
• Is there research or evidence from studies to back up my claims?
• Do I have any personal experiences to share or examples that can help illustrate my points?

You need to find relevant studies, data, and various additional sources or links to examples.

When you find them, simply add them beneath the relevant sections so that when you start writing, it's all organized properly.

For instance, if you want to cite a statistical study in the introduction, that's where you paste the relevant link.

If you make any claims in your post, you have to back them up with real research to add authority to your content.

So, anytime you make a claim, paste in the link to the material that you're referencing so that you can properly cite them as you are writing your post.

This is a very effective time-saving tactic.

If you're having trouble knowing when to add additional research or sources, simply think of it this way:

This not only gives more authority and credibility to your blog posts, but it also lets your readers know that your content is well researched and verifiable.

After researching at this stage, you may find the need to add more points to the outline.

Even as you continue working to refine your outline, you may still find that certain points do not seem as relevant, or that new points come up.

Keep making notes, and you’ll be able to put it all together in the next step.

Step #10: Revise and Trim Your Outline

This step involves cleaning up your blog post outline. You need to remove and/or reorganize details in each of the sections as necessary to ensure that your post flows smoothly.

If any details come to you that you don't want to forget, add them in. If the article doesn't flow smoothly enough, consider reordering the structure.

To check topical alignment, read through your entire blog post outline to see if all of the content is aligned or relevant to the main topic. On a micro-scale, you might want to check if the content within each of the heading groups is relevant in its scope.

Editing your outline doesn’t have to be a complex process, but it's important to assign adequate time to this part because once you start creating an outline, it can be easy to lose track and wind up too much into the weeds.

If you notice any irrelevant content, consider moving it to another group or even removing it completely (hard as it might be).

Once you’re happy that every section of the post flows logically and seamlessly guides the reader to the subsequent sections, it's time to move on to the actual writing of your blog post.

Step #11: Write Your Blog Post

Once you've tightened up your outline, leaving only the most relevant information, the hard part is done, and writing it will be a breeze.

All you need to do now is to start filling in the outline.

With your detailed outline in place, you will be truly amazed to see the speed with which you will now be able to write your blog posts.

The more research you do at the onset and the more information you fill in your outline, the easier and quicker writing the rest of the content will be.

It's beyond the scope of this article to go into the details of how to write a blog post, but there's an excellent post on our blog that you can check out to help you write high-quality posts that will outperform your competitors and get you high rankings in Google's first page.

Conclusion

You now have everything you need to write a fully-fledged outline for your blog post.

Follow the steps in this article to help you craft well-organized masterpieces that will rank high in the search engines and drive a steady flow of engaged readers to your blog.

What’s your process for writing blog post outlines? Let us know in the comments below!

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by Steve Rajeckas

Is ProBlogger Legit?

Introduction

Do you need to hire freelance writers and are wondering if ProBlogger is legit? If so, you’ve come to the right place. 

Problogger is a legitimate writer-focused site that helps bloggers grow their blogs and connects freelance writers with clients from across the world. The job board offers a higher caliber of professional writers compared to most other job boards and freelance marketplaces currently available.

Read on to find out everything you need to know about ProBlogger, including how it works, and how you can get the most out of this job posting site. 

About ProBlogger

ProBlogger.com, (not to be confused with BloggingPro.com) is a website that was created by Darren Rowse in 2004 with the aim to help bloggers learn about the different aspects of content marketing so they can monetize and grow their blogs. 

The site has a high Google page rank, and it receives a healthy number of daily visitors. According to a report from EasyCounter.com, Problogger.net is a fully trustworthy domain with mostly positive visitor reviews.

(Image Source: EasyCounter.com)

The site was founded by Darren Rowse, a blogging guru who, for years, has been teaching bloggers of all skill levels different ways to make money from their blogs. 

He also helps freelancers hone their writing skills, which creates the perfect environment to allow the job board to draw an audience of knowledgeable and skilled writers. 

Over the years, ProBlogger has grown to become one of the best-known platforms in the writing community. 

The job board section of the site was created to provide bloggers with remote writing opportunities, and it is the perfect place for businesses to connect with professional writers and content marketers looking for gigs. 

ProBlogger is unique among the freelance writer platforms because it is not a closed platform with defined services, like other sites. Instead, it’s a one-stop-shop for businesses and bloggers looking to work together to create great content. 

Who Is ProBlogger For? 

ProBlogger attracts serious bloggers and freelance writers who want to make more money online. 

This makes it the perfect place for businesses looking to outsource their content writing to knowledgeable professionals who have the necessary experience to provide well-researched, expertly-written, and fully optimized content. 

ProBlogger Freelancer Categories Include: 

• Blogging Services
• Landing Page Copywriting
• Article Writing
• Web Design and Development
• Marketing and Promotion
• Ebook Ghostwriting
• Editing and Proofreading
• And much more. 

In addition to highly qualified freelance writers, ProBlogger’s job board also features various other marketing professionals, including copyeditors, content managers, marketing managers, and more. 

If you want to outsource your content creation, whether for your blog, social media, technical, or SEO - ProBlogger will connect you with talented professionals who will provide you with exceptional work. 

How Does ProBlogger Work?

The blogging-specific job board is free for writers and other freelancers, but businesses must pay $70 to post a job.

The job ad will be displayed on the website for 15 Days, and ProBlogger also promotes the advert to their massive Twitter following in order to increase the chances of businesses connecting with the ideal writing professional. 

(Image Source: ProBlogger.com)

There is also a handy ‘Premium Candidate listing’ feature that allows writers to create profiles on the website in order to showcase their skills to potential clients. 

This makes it a lot easier for businesses to find the right freelancer with the skills to provide them with exceptional content. 

ProBlogger Pricing

• A standard listing costs $70 and your job ad will be visible for 15 days. 
• A featured listing costs $140 and your ad is featured on the site for 15 days. 

A featured listing gets you a spot on the front page. In addition to upgrading to a featured listing, businesses can also choose to purchase one of the membership packages offered by ProBlogger for discounted listing prices: 

• $300-package: Includes five standard job listings for 14 days (at a 20% discount on the $500 package) plus access to 10 candidate contacts. 
• $360-package: Includes three featured ads visible for 14 days plus access to 15 candidate contacts.
• $500-package: Includes ten standard ad packages visible for 14 days, plus access to 20 candidate contacts with resumes access included.

(Image Source: Problogger.com)

ProBlogger Customer Support 

Since this is a listings-only website, all hiring takes place off-platform. 

ProBlogger’s role is simply to connect businesses with the right candidates, and their part ends when the listing goes live on the website. 

Advertisers can reach out via Dan’s social media pages or through the website’s contact page in case of a problem with the ad listing. 

According to reports online from users, response times vary, but most users are generally happy with the customer service provided by ProBlogger. 

ProBlogger Usability 

The entire site, including the job board section and the employer dashboard, is extremely easy to navigate. 

It has a design that is user-friendly and clutter-free. 

Whether you’re a writer looking for new gigs, a blogger searching for knowledge on how to run your business, or an employer looking to hire talented writers, you will be able to easily find the information that you’re searching for on ProBlogger.

ProBlogger Pros 

• Free for writers and other freelancers making it the go-to place for experienced professionals. 
• The website gives businesses the opportunity to connect with talented freelancers across the world. 
• The site has a reach of over 300,000 subscribers, which makes it easy to connect with ideal candidates.
• ProBlogger has a simple interface with one convenient dashboard for employers to manage everything in one place.

ProBlogger Cons

• Membership packages are a little pricey, particularly for small businesses and enterprises with low budgets. 
• When businesses post jobs, they can get hundreds of applications from qualified freelancers, which can make it hard to sort through all of them to find the best ones.
• There’s a limited scope of categories. Since the site is designed primarily for writers and content creators, it typically doesn’t attract web developers, graphic designers, testers, app creators, social media marketers, etc. 

This means that if you are searching for these types of professionals, you may have a hard time finding the right candidates as few professionals qualified in these areas frequent the site.

Reviews From Clients

“The ProBlogger Job Board has helped accelerate the growth of my marketing websites. The quality of applicants, especially copywriters is higher than on other sources, such as Upwork.” 

- Mauricio from Cloudwards.net

“The job applications I got from ProBlogger were consistently higher quality than the ones from Craigslist. The applicants had more experience and were better qualified. At the end of the process, 6 of the 7 bloggers I hired came from the ProBlogger Job Board.”

- Graywolf

Reviews From Writers

“ProBlogger Jobs is a small but perfectly formed website for freelance writing gigs, which we’ve reviewed in more detail here. The fact that the board charges advertisers means that scammy ads are kept to a minimum. Jobs here appear in their tens rather than their hundreds, but it’s worth a regular check for gigs that are a good fit. I’ve personally both advertised here and picked up client work.”

- Ben Taylor – Homeworkingclub.com

The Bottom Line: Is ProBlogger Legit?

ProBlogger is legit. There are no indications anywhere online to show that the site is a scam or that they conduct business unfairly. 

ProBlogger serves a dual purpose of hiring and marketing, which makes it an amazing resource for both bloggers seeking information and online work, and businesses who want to outsource their content creation to skilled and experienced freelance professionals. 

It’s no wonder that the website has grown to become one of the most popular job sites online. 

If you are a business looking to hire writers, ProBlogger is a legit site that will help you get great applications from talented writers from across the world. 

Have you used ProBlogger to find writers for your business? If so, share your experience in the comments below!

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by Steve Rajeckas

How to Write a Blog Post Faster (11 Actionable Tips)

Every marketer knows that content marketing - specifically blogging - works really well in helping you achieve your business objectives. 

Consider these statistics:  

• Businesses that blog generate 55% more visitors than those without a blog on their website. 
• Blogs help companies generate up to 126% more leads.
• Blogging gets you 434% more pages indexed in search engines - which means more opportunities for your customers to find you online. 

If you want to get benefits like these that come from effective content marketing, you need to be able to produce high-quality content on a consistent basis. 

And that’s where most people fail. 

Blogging is an effective and affordable way to generate traffic and leads. 

But…

According to a recent B2B marketing study, 51% of marketers stated that their number one challenge was finding the time to create enough content to build momentum and make an impact on their business goals. 

Image Source: Slideshare.net

So, clearly, there’s a big problem here, and many people are searching for the solution to help them create and publish more content on a consistent basis without sacrificing quality. 

After all, the more content you produce, the more marketing success you’ll find. And the more people you can reach with your content, the more your business will grow.

This blog post has all the information you need to help you write a blog post faster!

In it, you will learn 11 actionable tips for bloggers and business owners who struggle to create epic content quickly. 

By implementing these tips, you will become a content creation machine with the ability to increase your influence and impact online, as well as your income.  

Ready to get started? 

Let’s go!

Step #1: Lay the Groundwork

The first thing you must understand is that the whole process of creating a blog post often takes a lot longer than just the time you spend on writing. 

There are many different phases of content creation, such as idea generation, creating the outline, doing the research, writing the draft, filling it out, then revising and proofing your work. 

This means that from the seed of a blog post idea to the time when you finally hit "Publish," you might spend anywhere from several hours to several days or even weeks!

Many bloggers overlook the process of planning. 

But with all these different content creation steps to consider, it’s important to lay the groundwork or to have a plan in place if you want to be able to produce high-quality content faster (and less stressfully). 

So, how do you lay the groundwork? 

Build Up Your Idea Bank

A lot of bloggers find it extremely difficult to plan their posts and write them in one sitting. It’s a good idea to do your post planning exercise separately. 

Think ahead and save ideas from everywhere, such as: 

• Desktop RSS feeds for your particular topics
• Google Alerts for important news in your industry
• Email subject lines that expose you to lots of possible topics for your blog posts

Create an Editorial Calendar

One of the biggest time-wasters for bloggers is that last-minute scramble to find blog ideas. Get organized and create an editorial calendar. 

You’ll find it a lot easier keeping track of your blog content and it will also allow you to be more strategic about your content creation. 

You can use a notebook, sticky notes, a text doc, or a tool like WP Editorial calendar to easily plan your posts and move ideas around. 

Alternatively, you can download this free editorial calendar from Curata.

Separate Research From Writing 

Research is fun (for most people). You get to spend time reading some of the top blogs, browsing Wikipedia, and clicking from one video to another. 

But then, hours go by, and you’ve written nothing! 

That’s why it’s never a good idea to do both at the same time. 

Research your post and make notes before you sit down to do your actual writing, and you’ll find that both processes go a lot faster and smoother. 

When it’s time to write, close your browser and do nothing else but write. 

If there’s a fact that needs checking, make a note of it with an asterisk or an "X" and carry on writing. You’ll check the point as soon as you’re done with your first draft. 

Doing your homework in this way will save you a lot of time down the line. It will also help you develop great blogging habits, which, in turn, will make your writing process smoother and easier. 

Step #2: Gather the Necessary Tools

Long before you actually sit down to write your blog post, make sure you’ve got everything you need. 

Listed below are some of the blogging tools that are designed to make your content creation process faster and better. 

Templates

There are just a few basic blog post types that you can write, including: 

• How-to posts
• List posts
• Profile posts
• Review posts
• Interview posts
• News/Newsjacking posts

Create a template for the specific types of posts that you use on your blog and you’ll be able to fill it with content much faster than you would when writing a post from scratch. 

The template doesn’t have to be complex. In fact, it can be as simple as the one in the image below. 

Just create one that works for you and you’ll be able to save tons of time on each post you write. 

Source: GetSpokal.com

Word Processing Apps

There are many different tools you can use to compose your posts, like Word, Google Docs, and WordPress. 

But some word processing apps, like Scrivener, offer amazing features to help you get your work done faster and with fewer distractions.

Pomodoro App

Ever heard of Parkinson’s Law? It states that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. 

To avoid having any of the content creation phases expanding and taking over everything, use a Pomodoro app to place time boundaries around each of them, and ensure that your post gets finished on time.

Grammarly

This tool will help you take the guesswork out of writing great posts. It helps you catch grammar and spelling errors, as well as improve the quality and readability of your text. 

Copyscape

With this free plagiarism checker, you will be able to detect duplicate content so that you only publish 100% original content.  

Evernote

This is one of the best note-taking apps you’ll find right now. Evernote will help you capture, organize, and prioritize your ideas, projects, and checklists so that nothing falls through the cracks. 

Voice Typing Tools

Use a voice-to-text tool like Dragon Naturally Speaking (or a free alternative) to help you write faster. 

All you have to do is dictate your points, and the software will spell out your words with amazing accuracy. 

Each of these tools (or similar alternatives) will help you get your blogging done faster and easier. And the best part is that the majority of them are free. 

Step #3: Craft a Compelling Title

Although this seems like a no-brainer, it can be a massive sticking point to your progress. 

Thinking of attractive titles can take time (which is why you’re supposed to have a growing list of ideas always on hand…)

If you don’t already have a monster list of topics jotted down somewhere, you can use the following topic ideation tips: 

• Try the content idea generator from Portent
• Browse through your email subject lines to get ideas from your industry
• Look through blog comments within your niche to find what questions people are asking and what they want to know.

If you can’t come up with a great title, don’t worry. 

Sometimes it helps to just have a working title and then proceed to write the post. Even a rough, preliminary title will help you stay focused on your purpose for your blog post. 

Remember, your post’s title is the promise that you’re making to your readers. 

Focus on keeping that promise within the content body and other title ideas will occur to you as you write. 

You can quickly make a note of them and then take the time to choose the best one when you’re done writing your post. 

Step #4: Create an Outline

Time to write your outline. And yes, it does come before the research if you want to write blog posts faster. 

This is a quick outline that is designed to help you generate ideas quickly and create placeholder text for the general structure of your post. 

The outline will also help you pinpoint places where you need to add a bit more research - whether for double-checking your facts or fleshing out your ideas with specifics like statistics, screenshots, expert quotes, examples, etc. 

As you’re creating your outline, break your post into several different sections, including the introduction, body, and conclusion. 

Depending on the type of post you’re writing (and if you’re using a template), this part shouldn’t be too hard to complete. 

• Write down single words or themes for each of the sections of your post. 
• Include major subtopics and as much detail as you can think of off the top of your head.
• For list posts, write down the different list items as bullet points and then expand on them.  
• If you’re writing a lengthy post, remember to include additional sections after each section to help you transition to the next. 

This part shouldn’t take you longer than 10-20 minutes. 

And, it will save you from having that horrible experience of realizing that you’ve written a thousand words that your readers won’t find interesting or engaging.  

Don’t worry if your outline is filled with spelling mistakes and bad grammar. It doesn’t even have to have complete sentences. 

All that matters is that it flows logically from one idea to the next and that it offers you a clear picture of exactly how you’ll go about delivering on your headline’s promise. 

Don’t overthink this part - it basically involves making simple notes but in a logical order—nothing scary or complex about it. 

Step #5: Do Your Research

When doing research, do only as much as you need to, and no more. 

It’s easy to get lost for hours down the YouTube rabbit hole or to end up playing Candy Crush on Facebook when you’re supposed to be reading up on "How to Write a Blog Post Faster." 

The question is, how do you conduct quality research quickly? 

There are many sources of research that will help you create high-value, data-driven blog posts that will please both readers and search engines. 

Here are some sources that you can use to gather data for your blog posts: 

Source: NeilPatel.com

Use the Pomodoro technique to help you do your research quickly before you proceed to write your post. 

Avoid distractions and limit your searches to the specific questions aimed at the details in your post. 

For instance, if I had searched for "write posts faster," I could have taken hours to complete the research for this post. 

That query has over 156,000,000 results - I’d be reading blog posts until next year! 

Instead, I mainly focused on the specific points I needed data on, as well as some of the things that needed double-checking, such as:

• The URLs of tools mentioned in the post
• Quotes from experts
• Images and screenshots
• Statistics on content marketing

And so on. 

Step #6: Write Your Introduction

Now that your research is completed, it’s time to write. 

The beauty of following this multi-phase system for writing blog posts faster is that if you’ve completed the previous steps the right way - especially the content outline - all you have to do now is simply fill in the gaps. 

Important Note: The key to making this work is never to edit while you write. 

Editing and writing at the same time will slow you down significantly, and a lot of time will be wasted during the continual switching of gears when moving from one task to the other. 

So, write first and edit later. 

Image Source: WordPress.com

Now, getting back to the introduction...

I prefer to write my introduction first, but some bloggers like to leave this step for last because they find it easier to summarize the introductory paragraph after writing the entire article. 

However you choose to do it, just make sure that you don’t spend too much time trying to craft the perfect introduction. 

If you follow the best practices listed below, you will be able to come up with an introduction that will hook your reader and make them eager to read the rest of your article: 

• State your topic and explain why it is important to your target readers (Lead-in section).
• Outline how your post is going to help them solve the problem, as it is presented in the topic (Answer section).
• Create a scenario that will hook the reader, pull them in, and make them want to discover more. (Read-on Section). 

Remember, you’re still going to revise and edit the first draft, so don’t worry about it being perfect. 

Just make sure that you include all the important aspects mentioned above and then move on to the content body. 

Step #7: Write the Content Body

For this part, you want to first write a few sentences that will help your readers get from the start to the end of your blog post’s core concept. 

This might take three or four steps or it might take a few more. It depends on the topics you’re explaining in your post. 

This is where subheadings come in. 

Whether you’re writing a list post, how-to post, or any other type of blog post, you need to have subheadings that help the reader move from one point to another effortlessly. 

If you created an outline, now is the time to fill it in with as much detail as possible. 

Don’t overthink this part, either. 

Simply write what you know and focus on answering the main question as fully as you can. 

As someone once said, "Write drunk and edit sober."

This means you should just let the words flow as well as you can, with little regard for any of the fine details. 

If you find yourself worrying about the quality of your blog post, just remember that you’ll get to fix everything as you edit and format it later. 

If there’s any specific section that needs work, highlight it or insert a comment such as: 

• {To Come}
• {Add Link}
• {Do Research}
• {Insert Example}
• {Include Case Study}
• etc. 

These types of placeholders serve the purpose of reminding you later. 

They also keep you from being hung up on whatever it is you want to say and give you permission to carry on writing without stopping.

Later, you’ll be able to come back and finesse the specific parts one by one.  

Step #8: Write Your Conclusion

This step is easy. You already have the information on your page. 

All you need to do now is summarize it and give your readers some encouragement to take the next step (leaving a comment, reading another post, getting started on the advice in the post, etc.)

• Summarize what your post is about
• Restate the problem/solution to invoke emotions
• Inspire readers by showing them how they will benefit from taking action

Make sure your conclusion is interesting. Don’t make it a boring summary of everything you just said in the post. 

Use the conclusion to challenge your readers’ beliefs and thoughts. 

Make them see that what they want not only is possible but that you’ve just given them the solution.  

Show them that they can get from where they are now to where they want to be.

All they have to do is to take action on the advice in your post. 

Some bloggers like to spice things up by reserving the best and most effective tip for the conclusion. 

But you can do whatever works to make your conclusion authentic, reassuring, and inspirational. 

Finally, close with a strong call to action (CTA). 

This can be whatever you want, depending on your goals for your blog post. Ideally, it should be something that helps to further your business goals, such as: 

• Leaving a comment
• Signing up for your blog’s newsletter
• Sharing the post on social media
• Reading another post

Step #9: Edit and Proof

Time to edit and proofread your post. Keep in mind that editing (revising) and proofing are two very different things. 

Editing involves taking that messy first draft and tidying it up to get it ready for your audience. 

Some writers like to leave the editing for later in the day or even the next day when their brain is refreshed. 

This is a good idea because these two tasks are all about performing detailed fine-tuning on your work and you won’t get the best results when you’re drained. 

The more well-rested and attentive you are, the better you’ll be at spotting mistakes. 

But, seeing as this post is all about saving time and writing blog posts faster, the editing will have to come immediately after you finish writing. 

How to Edit Your Post Faster

• Read it aloud or to a friend: This is one of the easiest ways to edit your posts so you can make quick corrections.  
• Read it again: Most of the magic happens during editing, which means the majority of your time is best spent here. 
• Read it a third time!

Once you’re happy with the style, structure, and sense of your posts, it’s time to proofread your work to catch any errors.

How to Proofread Your Post Faster

• Get someone else to proof your work: If possible, have someone else proof your work. You can team up with a fellow blogger and proof each other’s work. 
• Do it yourself: If you have to do it yourself, try to make sure you’re well-rested to avoid being word-blind to your own writing (this is particularly true immediately after writing the post).
• Use proofreading tools: While it’s possible to catch typographical and grammatical errors yourself, it’s easier and more efficient to use tools like Grammarly or the Hemmingway App. 

Editing is more about the "big picture," and proofreading works down to a deeper level of detail. After you’re done with these two processes, you can now format your post and get it ready for publishing. 

Step #10: Format Your Blog Post

It’s important not to format your text as you write, as this will slow you down significantly. 

When it’s time to format your post, there are certain formatting best practices to follow in order to increase your post’s readability levels. 

Listed below are some of the most important ones that can either make or break your post’s performance: 

• Use Small Paragraphs: To make your post readable, make sure that you break up the text into bite-sized paragraphs that will be easy for the reader to consume (you can even add one-word paragraphs to emphasize a point).
• Use Short Sentences: As you go through the text, find any long sentences and break them up into two or more sentences. This makes for an easier reading experience. 
• Use Bullet Points/Numbered Lists: This is perfect for complex topics that need a lot of explanation. You can use bullet points or numbered lists to break the idea down into a format that is easy for readers to understand. 
• Emphasize Important Information: Highlight important information using bold text, italics, or CAPS - but make sure that you do so judiciously. 

Use these tips to make your post easily scannable. Have fun with them, but try not to overdo things. 

And remember, you’re not writing to please your English teacher - she ain’t here! 

You simply want to make sure that you write a great post that gets your message across and keeps your readers engaged. 

Step #11: Add Massive Value

Writing faster means nothing if you’ll just be churning out content that’s "meh."

As a blogger, you know that it’s not enough to simply write a blog post - it has to be packed full of value if you want it to perform well.  

At this stage of your blog creation process, you must focus on adding extra value to your blog post and making it as helpful and engaging as possible. 

How do you do this? By ensuring that you create a multimedia experience for your reader. 

How to Create a Multimedia Experience

• Add visually attractive images
• Use funny memes
• Incorporate videos into your content 
• Include infographics or statistics 
• Add expert quotes 
• Use screenshots to explain a point
• Use “Click to Tweet” for interesting points
• Use a plugin to show related posts
• Offer a content upgrade

...the list goes on!

Of course, you don’t have to use all these in a single post. The types of media you add depend on your topic, industry, and audience. 

Blog posts that offer a multimedia experience are generally more effective for audience engagement and they tend to perform better in the search engines. 

As you’re finalizing your post, ask yourself questions such as: 

• Did the post fulfill the promise in the headline?
• Did you convey the message you wanted to get across?
• Is the reasoning clear for your readers to understand? 
• Did you support all your assertions with data? 

Conclusion 

This may sound like a lot when you’re just getting started with this system for writing blog posts faster. 

But if you stick with it, you’ll get better at it each time you implement these tactics. 

As you continue to practice writing faster, you’ll build a strong habit that will help make most of these techniques second nature to you. 

As that happens, you’ll find that it takes you less and less time to write your posts. 

Now finalize your post, make it live, and then promote it on social media. 

You can use this Blog Post SEO checklist to help ensure that your post gets the attention it deserves - after all, what’s the point of learning how to write blog posts faster if no one will get to read them? 

Which of the tips in this article appeals to you the most? Let me know in the comments below!

---

by Steve Rajeckas

How to Write a Blog Post: 11 Steps [Complete Guide for 2020]

This is a step-by-step guide on how to write effective blog posts for your audience and customers. 

In it, we will cover everything you need to know to write powerful blog posts in record time. 

In fact, I am going to give you the specific formula that you can use to craft compelling, persuasive, and share-worthy blog posts for your own blog.

Here's a breakdown of what we're going to cover:

1. Planning your blog post
2. Conducting research from reliable sources
3. Creating an effective content outline 
4. The five steps to writing great content
5. Proofreading and editing your post
6. Optimizing your blog post for readers and SEO

...and much more.

I’ll also provide you with additional tips and tricks to help you craft high-quality content that is persuasive and engaging, even if this is your first time blogging. 

Ready? Let’s dive right in. 

I’ll start with an important question:

How Is This Guide Different?

There are many online tutorials that are designed to teach you how to write good blog posts. They show you all the mechanics of blogging, what you need to do, and what you shouldn't do. 

By reading through these tutorials, you can learn how to write a perfectly serviceable post for your blog. 

In fact, you might even be able to write a piece that earns you a few adoring fans. 

But, if you're someone who dreams bigger and wants to know how to craft the perfect blog post to cut through the noise and win legions of fans, you need something that is a lot better than those run-of-the-mill tutorials.

You need the ultimate guide.

This is the ultimate step-by-step guide where I share tips that are used by many professional freelance writers who are well known for creating spellbinding blog posts that attract the attention of thousands of people. 

You will also learn the best ways to polish and refine your posts once you're done writing them.

The secrets you will learn in this post are ones that many bloggers across the world would eagerly part with real money to learn. 

The best part? It won't cost you anything (apart from a few minutes' time investment).

I'll start right at the very beginning: 

What Makes a Great Blog Post?

To write a great blog post, you first need to know exactly what a blog post is and the purpose it serves.

A blog post is a piece of content that allows you to publish your thoughts, insights, and stories about any topic. 

People and businesses from all walks of life run blogs to share industry findings, product information, analysis, criticisms, instructions, and more. 

Blog posts offer a wide range of benefits, such as:

• Boosting website traffic and attracting qualified leads
• Increasing brand awareness and consumer trust
• Boosting your business’s credibility
• Increasing your conversions and revenue
• Establishing you as a thought leader in your industry

(Image Source: Hubspot.com)

These are just some of the advantages that come with publishing well-crafted posts on your blog. 

But, keep in mind that only well-researched and well-written posts will net you these types of benefits. 

If you're blogging for the sake of publishing whatever pops into your head, or if you don’t have any process in place for creating engaging and persuasive posts, you'll find it hard to get good results from your efforts.

The good news is that if you follow all the steps covered in this post, you can begin enhancing your own blog as soon as today!

What Makes a Good Blog Post?

A good blog post needs to be interesting and educational. It must be packed full of valuable information that is organized in a logical and easy-to-follow structure. 

Your blog post should also answer a question that your reader has, or help them resolve challenges that they are experiencing. 

You need to be able to do all of this interestingly and engagingly. You can write the most informative post ever written on a subject, but if it's dry, hard to read, and void of any personality, you're going to have a hard time keeping the reader on the page.

Before you start writing your post, you need to ask yourself things such as:

• Why would someone want to read this whole blog post? 
• What would make the reader want to come back for more?

It's not enough to be able to answer their questions. You also have to provide them with actionable solutions while keeping them engaged. 

For example, you need an introduction that will hook the reader and entice them to keep reading your post. Without that, many readers will bounce right back to the search results page, which will hurt your article's ability to rank at the top of Google.

You also need to use examples that will keep readers interested in whatever you have to say.

We’ll touch a little more on that in later sections. Right now, let’s get started with the seven key steps to writing a great blog post.

How to Write a Blog Post: 7 Essential Steps

Writing an awesome blog post involves the following steps:

1. Planning your blog post
2. Doing the research
3. Creating an outline
4. The actual writing
5. Editing and proofreading
6. Optimizing your post for readers
7. Optimizing for search engines

Step #1: Plan Your Blog Post

This is the planning phase, where you lay the foundation for writing a great blog post. 

This stage is critical - particularly if you don't want to fall prey to procrastination. 

The foundation phase involves ideation, which is the bedrock that your post will be built on. 

If you’re going to write an awesome blog post, you first need to choose a topic that your audience will find interesting. 

I'm assuming that you already know the popular topics with your audience, but if you don't, this section will help you come up with topics that will resonate the most with your readers.

Start by Getting to Know Your Audience

Who are you writing this blog post for? You need to figure that out before you even think about writing it.

Here are a few questions to help you figure out who your target audience is and the type of content they want to read about:

• Who is going to read your post? Get granular with the answers - come up with an average age, gender, occupation, etc. This will help you define your target audience.
  
• What kind of information is your target reader searching for? Do they want step-by-step guides on how to perform tasks within your industry? Are they looking for high-level thought pieces on where your industry is heading? Consider this before you begin.
  
• What are their major pain points? If there are certain problems that many people in your industry struggle with, writing a helpful blog post about those problems will likely be well-received.
  

If you're not sure exactly who you are writing your blog post for, this is the first step you need to focus on. 

You should not try to guess what your audience wants or needs, but rather make a data-driven decision by doing the necessary research to find out which topic is unlikely to generate interest with them. 

If this sounds complicated, don't worry - it really isn't.

First, create a master spreadsheet that you will use as your idea bank. 

Now do some research to find lots of ideas to fill out your spreadsheet.

Here are a few easy ways to discover what it is your audience is talking about, and the questions they are looking for answers to:

Use Quora: Quora and other forums are great resources to help you find out what questions the people in your industry are asking. Simply search for relevant keywords associated with your niche.

Use Twitter’s Advanced Search: Type in your keyword, and then select "questions" as your filter. This will show you all the different questions that people in your industry ask on the social platform.

Use SEMRush: This is a paid tool that works extremely well in helping you spy on your business’ competitors (and it lets you steal some of their best ideas).

Use KeywordTool.io: Use this free resource to see the most popular keywords that are being searched by users within your industry.

Other places to find what your audience is talking about or asking include:

• Facebook groups
• Niche forums 
• Amazon book reviews (particularly the negative ones)
• The comments section of popular blogs in your industry

Basically, anywhere your readers are online, you’re sure to find a long list of topics that they are discussing. As you’re getting to know your audience, ask yourself the following questions:

• Which topics do they discuss the most?
• What questions are they asking?
• What do they generally need help with? 
• What kind of objections do they commonly have?

Make a note of all these topics and any other ideas they help you generate.

By the end of this exercise, you should have an arsenal of data that you can transform into tons of custom blog topics. 

Once you've built an idea bank, it's time to identify the topic of your blog post. Simply pick one from the list that interests you the most. 

For instance, your chosen topic might be "writing a blog post." It doesn’t have to be super-specific. At this point, all you need is a general idea of what you’ll be writing about. 

And now that you have your topic, the next step is to decide on the type of post you're going to write.

Decide on the Type of Post You Will Write

There are many different types of posts that you can write for your blog. 

Here are some of the most popular blog formats:

The list-based blog post: This type of post has content in a list format: “10 Ways to Optimize Your Blog Post”

The how-to blog post: This blog post shows readers how to do something: “How to Write an Awesome Introduction”

The pillar page blog post: This is a big, meaty blog post filled with useful, actionable, and engaging content: “How to Write a Blog Post: The Complete Guide for 2020”

The ‘what is’ blog post: This type of post answers a question or concern that readers have: “What Mobile-First Website Design?”

The infographic blog post: Infographic blog posts don’t have a lot of written content, but they do work very well to drive traffic to your site: “Infographic: 10 Mesmerizing WordPress Statistics”

The newsjacking blog post: This is a timely post designed to arrest your readers' attention. It basically involves using the life of any current news story to help boost your blog.

Of course, there are many other types of posts you can choose from. And you’ll discover more and more of them as you grow as a blogger.

Each of these types of posts serves a different purpose in helping you catch the attention of your target audience and customers. 

Once you’ve chosen one to start with, it’s time to pick a title for your blog post.

Come Up With a Working Title

Now that you have the topic of your post and know what type of post you are going to be writing, it's time to come up with a working title. 

In fact, it's a good idea to come up with a few different working titles. The different iterations of approaching the topic will help you focus your writing. 

For instance, say you have a blog about home renovations. You may decide to narrow the topic of your first blog post to:

• Tools for fixing blocked gutters; or
• Common causes of blocked gutters; or even 
• How to fix blocked gutters. 

Your final title may well be very different from any of these, but having a working title like the ones above will guide your blog post so you can begin writing. 

Step #2: Do Your Research

The process of researching your blog post can be simple or complex, depending on the type of post you’re writing. 

Search Google for different articles on your topic. Choose the top-ranking ones and read through them to find interesting points and ideas for your own post. 

As you read and the other your research, make a note of the ideas that you get. Don’t copy anyone’s work, but use the information you find to inform your own post.

Fill out your research document with as much helpful information as you can.

Your reading should be the input and writing of your output. 

The goal here is to produce a value-packed, data-driven blog post. 

Neil Patel, one of the most well-known bloggers in the digital marketing sphere, has an interesting approach to writing blog posts. 

He says that a blog post is like carving a sculpture. 

All you need to do is chisel away all the unnecessary material in your research document to give life to your blog post.

When gathering your data, always make sure that you use reliable sources. Here are some of the most commonly used types of supporting data and information sources:

Reliable Sources of Information

1. Images and infographics:

• Google Image Search
• Pinterest.com
• Visual.ly
• Daily infographic.com
• Coolinfographics.com

2. Videos:

• YouTube
• Vimeo
• Google Video Search

3. Statistics and Facts:

• FactBrowser.com
• FactMonster.com
• StatisticBrain.com
• Google Search

4. Scientific Studies

• ScienceDirect.com
• ScienceResearch.com
• Google Scholar

5. Presentations: 

• Prezi.com
• SlideShare.net
• PPTSearchEngine.net

Once you've done your research, it's always best to let it sit for a while. 

Most professional writers find that their ideas become more refined if left to marinate overnight. 

They gain more clarity on the topic, and the direction of their blog post becomes concrete in their mind.

Step #3: Create an Outline for Your Blog Post

Your next step is to create an outline to make it easier for you to write your blog post. 

You already have your ideas down. Now it’s time to arrange them in some type of structure.

Fleshing out your outline before you move on to writing the main content will help you nail your points down. 

At this stage, you don't have to worry about things being super clear or concrete. Just think of the outline as a sort of "base" for your post.

How to Create a Blog Post Outline

The process involves planning out the broad topic that you want to cover, and then adding in the subtopics for the different sections. 

Each section should have a name or title. Keep things simple. The clearer your outline is, the better your blog post will flow. 

Creating an outline doesn't have to be a complex process. In fact, the more simplified your outline is, the more conviction your blog post will have. 

Here is an example of what the outline for your blog post might look like:

Your outline will help create an effective visual hierarchy of importance. 

Headers, of course, are at the top, and they’re only used once in each post. Next, are subheaders, which are ranked higher in importance than sub-sub-headers. 

By creating and following a clear outline like this one, you're giving your post a great "bone structure." 

This, in turn, will allow you to infuse the blog post with solid information, creative style, and compelling resources.

The important thing here is to ensure that the content is properly organized so that your readers flow effortlessly from one section to the next without getting confused or disoriented as to how they got there. 

So basically:

• You take one big topic and break it up into different sections.
• Each of the sections is separated into sub-sections and sub-sub-sections.
• You then go into deeper detail within these sub-sections, thereby making the content a lot easier to read.

And that’s your outline done!

Is an Outline Really Necessary? 

Many people often wonder if taking the time to write a post outline is really worth it. 

The answer to that is a resounding YES. 

Here are some reasons why: 

An outline can make writing easier for new bloggers.

For many new bloggers, writing an article can be a daunting prospect. They sit down to write and find that the words simply won't come. 

They struggle to come up with something to say from the very beginning, and at times like these, having a structure like the one above will go a long way toward getting rid of writing blocks.

An outline makes it easy to arrange large amounts of information.

Depending on the size of your blog post, you may find that you are faced with an inordinate amount of information. 

By organizing everything into a clear outline, you make it so that readers are not intimidated by the article's length. 

This type of organization can take different forms, such as sections, tips, lists, etc. 

You will have to decide what is most appropriate depending on the type of post that you are writing - but it all comes together in the outline. 

Start Writing Your Post

The following steps involve the actual writing of the content. 

Now that you have your outline ready, it's time to fill in the blanks. 

Your outline will be your guide as it has all the main points of your article. All you have to do now is fill in the details. 

As you follow the steps, first, write about the information you already know. Then, if you need to conduct additional research to get more information, images, quotes, examples, and other data to back up the points you made. 

Remember to provide proper attribution whenever you incorporate external sources. 

If you find yourself having trouble putting sentences together, you are not alone. A lot of bloggers find it challenging to find their "flow." 

Luckily, there are a lot of tools that you can use to help you not only improve your writing but also write your blog posts faster.

Here are some of the tools you can use:

Power Thesaurus: If you’re stuck on a word, this crowdsourced tool will provide you with a variety of alternative word options from a worldwide community of writers.

ZenPen: If you are having trouble maintaining your focus, check out ZenPen, a distraction-free writing tool that creates a minimalist "writing zone" to help you write faster.

Cliché Finder: If you’re worried your writing might come off a bit cheesy, then use this handy tool to identify any instances where you could be a little more specific.

This post is chock-full of exceptional writing advice and goes into a lot more detail on more tools that you can use to improve your writing skills. 

Now that you’ve got your tools all lined up, here are the steps to follow when writing your main content: 

Step #4: Craft a Heavy-Hitting Headline

Do you see the evolution from the topic, to the working title, and then to the final title? 

Your working title doesn't have to be a final title (it can be - if it’s good enough). Its main purpose is to provide you with enough information to focus your blog post in a more specific way than the generic, overwhelming topic. 

Now is the time to come up with a heavy-hitting hook that will draw readers and make them want to read your blog post. 

Humans are shallow (sorry, but it’s true). We tend to judge books by their covers - and blog posts by their titles. 

This is why it's crucial for your article’s success that you have a headline that will make people want to click on and read your post. 

Both people and search engines love a strong headline. 

The more people you compel to read your post, the higher Google will rank it in the search results. 

Just keep in mind the following best practices when crafting great headlines:

Be as specific as possible: 

Avoid lackluster and ambiguous words, such as "great," "awesome," and "amazing." But do use numbers in your headlines, readers love that. 

For example: “3 Proven Ways to Grow Your Business by 306% in 30 Days”

Tease, but don't reveal the total solution: 

No one will need to continue reading your post if you reveal everything within the headline. 

But remember, there's a fine line between a headline infused with curiosity and desperate clickbait.

Put your main keywords near the front:

This is beneficial for both SEO and discoverability. 

For instance, if your main keyword is "cats," then a headline like, "Cats: A Complete A-Z Guide" would most likely perform better than "An A-Z Guide to Cats." 

Keep your headline short:

Your blog post headlines should be under 65 characters. 

Search engines tend to truncate headlines if they are too long. This adds the dreaded "…" to the end of the headline in the search results. 

Deliver a concise headline so you can get your full message across to searchers.

Use brackets [ ] in your headline:

Call out important content formats, such as infographics, videos, Slideshare, or any other cool piece of content that you have embedded in your post. 

Make sure all your readers know about it by using brackets [ ] to highlight content in your headlines. 

Here are some examples:

• How to Optimize Your Blog Post for Search [Checklist]
• How Many Keywords Should You Use in Your Blog Posts? [FAQs] 
• [Infographic] The 5 Essential Elements of a Great Blog Post

Invoke emotional response: 

Your headline needs to appeal to the senses and invoke emotional responses if you want people to read your article. 

Harvard studies show that people make decisions based on emotions. Only later, the appeal to logic to justify the decisions they made.

You can use a tool like an EMV headline analyzer to help you find your headline’s emotional marketing value. 

Another helpful tool is IsItWP's headline analyzer, which provides tips on ways to improve your headlines.

Here are some examples of great headline formulas that have been shown to work effectively in all industries. 

Use them to get your inspirational juices flowing:

• Formula: [Number] of Ways To [Desired Outcome]
• “17 Ways to Rank on Google’s First Page”

The Breaking News Headline

• Formula: [Story] + [Effect]
• “New Amazon Commission Cuts Deal Affiliates a Heavy Blow”

The Burning Question Headline

• Formula: [Pose a Provocative Question]
• “Is Blogging Still Worth It in Today’s Content-Saturated World?”

The How-To Headline

• Formula: How To [Method] To [Get Desired Outcome] In [Timeframe]
• “How to Use Emotion to Double Your Blog Traffic in Just 7 Days”

The Fun Juxtaposition Headline

• Formula: [Present Two Conflicting Positions or Ideas]
• “How to Be Profitable in a World of Losing Stock Traders”

The Ultimate Guide Headline

• Formula: The [Complete or Ultimate] Guide To [Specific Transformation]
• “The Ultimate Guide to Search Engine Marketing”

The ‘Evil Villain’ Headline

• Formula: [Evil Villain] That [Specific Misdeed]
• “The 3 Types of Digital Marketing Agencies That Are Robbing You Blind”

The Name Dropper Headline

• Formula: [Famous Person] [Advice, Tips, Method] For [Getting the Desired Result]
• “JK Rowling’s 10 Tips for Becoming a Spectacularly Good Writer”

Address Resident Emotions Headline

• Formula: [Appeal to a Fear or Any Other Strong Emotion]
• “An Open Letter to Bloggers Struggling to Build an Audience”

Leading With ‘Why’ Headline

• Formula: [Why] [Specific Thing] [Outcome/Adjective]
• “Why Being a Well-Rounded Employee Is Overrated”

The Mistakes/Warnings Headline

• Formula: [Number] Mistakes People Make [Specific Action]
• “12 Fatal Social Media Marketing Mistakes”

When writing headlines for your blog posts, there are two main approaches that you can take: 

You can either come up with the final headline prior to writing the actual post and then use the headline to help you structure your outline;

You can also craft the blog post first (using the working title) and then see which title works best once you're done.

Personally, I do not stick to a rigid strategy when creating my headlines. 

Sometimes I come up with a great headline right at the beginning and then stick with it. For other posts, it takes a lot more work to come up with the ideal headline. 

I know it seems like we’ve spent an inordinate amount of time on the subject of headlines. 

And the process of coming up with great post headlines may seem like hard work at first, but, with practice, it will become second nature. 

Before long, you will be able to quickly craft headlines that grab your audience's attention and compel them to click through and read the rest of your blog post.

Step #5: Write a Magnetic Opening

Provided your readers stick around to see what your blog post headline is all about (which they will if you followed the tips and formulas outlined above), you'll need to entice them to keep reading with an inviting, entertaining, and compelling lede that is full of promise. 

Your introduction needs to be captivating and compelling. 

But even more than that, it needs to satisfy user intent. 

Otherwise, it won't matter how eloquent your words are or how powerful your prose – readers will click back if they feel that your post isn't exactly what they are looking for. 

So, what is user intent? 

User intent is the purpose behind the search. 

If someone Google's "how to lose belly fat," they expect to find articles within the search results that will help them to lose weight. 

If they click on a headline that reads "5 simple tips to lose belly fat fast", and the article begins with a story about something totally unrelated, like a Chuck Norris anecdote, or something, there is a very good chance that they will leave.

They will quickly click the back button and never read any more of your post - which is actually filled with fat loss wisdom. 

When those visitors leave, they are essentially telling Google that your post wasn't relevant to their search.

This will result in the search engine lowering your post’s rank in the results pages.

So, how do you write a great introduction that will serve as an effective gateway to the rest of your blog post?

Follow the rules below to help you write hypnotic blog post openings:

Grab the reader's attention: 

You can do this in a number of ways, such as telling a joke, story, being empathetic, or gripping the reader with interesting facts or statistics. 

Just ensure that you stay relevant to the main purpose of the post. 

Establish what the post will cover:

Make sure you clearly explain the purpose of the post and how it's going to address the reader’s problem or answer their question. 

This will give the readers a good reason to carry on reading, and it offers a connection to how you're going to help them improve that particular aspect of their lives. 

Keep the first sentence short and snappy:

Studies have shown that short sentences increase content readability by up to 58%. With increased readability comes longer dwell times - and this translates to higher rankings in Google.

Restate the problem that the reader is experiencing: 

Show the reader that you understand exactly what they are struggling with to clarify that you can provide the solutions.

Use mini-stories and personal anecdotes:

These can work wonders to boost your authenticity and credibility factors. Humans are storytellers by nature, and there’s nothing like a good story to keep readers engaged.

Make your promise clear to your readers: 

Use emotive language to make it clear to readers how you're going to help solve their problems. 

Include power words in your introduction, such as heartwarming, huge, intense, funniest, gargantuan, etc. to create an emotionally gripping narrative.

Here are a few more examples of power words you can use in your introduction: 

(Image Source: Sumo.com)

Here are some powerful lead formulas that you can use to help you write outstanding intros: 

1. The Impending Danger Lead: Introduce an evil villain and use emotion to grip the readers and hold their attention.
2. The Quote Lead: Use a quote from a recognizable author or influencer within your niche. Make sure it’s relevant to your topic. 
3. The Counterintuitive Lead: In your opening paragraph, present a solution that goes against the grain.
4. The Shock Value Lead: Use an unexpected fact or a jaw-dropping statistic in your lead paragraph to get readers hooked.
5. Pop Quiz Lead: Provide a list of choices and set it up so there can only be a couple of outcomes.
6. The Empath Lead: Focus on letting readers know that they are not alone. You understand exactly how they feel because you have been in their shoes.
7. The Storytelling Lead: Draw readers in with an intriguing tale. This could be a true story or a metaphorical one. It doesn’t matter, so long as it is relevant to your topic. 
8. The “Call Out” Lead: If your readers have bad habits that keep them from achieving their goals, then don’t be afraid to call them out. 
9. The “Get Right To It” Lead: This type of lead is a no-fluff, "I’m not going to waste your time"-type of lead where you establish your article’s premise right away. 

It doesn't really matter which of these you choose to start with. It can be a quote, question, a bold, audacious statement, or whatever else makes sense for your blog post. 

But whatever you choose, make it count because if you don't hook your readers and reel them in immediately, you will lose them - most likely forever. 

Step #6: Pack Value in the Body of Your Content

Naturally, this part is where you will want to invest the majority of your time. The body of your blog post is the meat of the article. 

This is what will back up your post’s main topic or argument. It's important to get this part right; otherwise, you're going to be all over the place and leave readers confused. 

Not all posts will neatly fit into numbered processes or three-point arguments. 

You need to consider exactly what you want to say and how you’re going to say it in a way that your audience will understand it clearly. 

One of the best ways to organize the body of your content is to use a bullet list. You can then write the body using the bullet points as the main sections. 

If you completed your article outline correctly, this part should already be done, and you'll just be filling in the blanks. 

Simply turn the bullet points into subheadings and fill in all the information to back up your argument. 

Think of your blog post as the road, and these bullet points will be the street signs that lead your readers all the way to the end.

Here are some quick tips to help you write dynamic body content:

Be Ridiculously Generous

A lot of bloggers worry that they give too much away within their blog posts. 

After all, the end goal is to get readers to buy their products or sign up for paid coaching calls, and so on. 

They tend to hold back, their advice barely skimming the surface. 

But, the fact is, if you are not generous with readers in your blog posts, chances are they will not receive a good impression of your paid coaching or products. 

So don't hold back. Help them to fully work through their problems. Give them powerful advice and complete solutions within your content. 

If you wow them with your generosity, you make it more likely that they will stick around, become loyal readers - and ultimately, paying customers.

This post you're reading is a good example of what I'm talking about. At 10,000 words, this is basically a textbook on how to write blog posts! 

It's a value-packed resource that readers will want to bookmark and come back to again and again. 

Of course, that's not to say that you can’t still be insanely generous with a thoughtful 1,000-word post, because you absolutely can.

Provide Actionable Advice

Make sure that your readers can easily implement the solutions you provide. 

They should be able to see an immediate result or benefit from the advice you’re giving them. 

This will greatly amplify the perceived value of your content and keep your readers coming back for more.

Hit the Right Emotional Buttons

Emotion is important when writing blog posts, and you need to learn how to hit the right emotional hot buttons. 

However, you should balance it up with ration because readers also need logic. This is particularly true if you promise them a sensational benefit or result.

Infuse Your Writing With Your Personality

Don't be afraid to show your personality. If this is your first time writing a blog post, you may not be sure exactly what type of writing voice you should use. 

Just try to be yourself and write in a conversational tone - as if you’re advising a good friend.

Your unique writing voice may take some time to develop, but luckily, they are some things you can do to make the process go faster:

1. Find Your Personality Power Words

Think of two words to describe your personality. Now brainstorm words or phrases that are associated or synonymous with these two words. 

Use these as your ‘personality power words’ and keep them in mind when you're writing.

2. Create an Imaginary Reader

Something else you can do to accelerate the process of developing your unique writing voice is to create an imaginary reader. 

Give them a name, and then write as if you are having a conversation with just that one person.

If you have already created buyer personas or customer avatars for your blog, simply pick one and address them in your writing. 

Bonus Tip: Yet another great way to help you.writing in your own unique voice is to use a voice to text tool like Dragon Naturally Speaking. 

With this software, you don't need to physically type out your blog posts. Simply dictate your post, and it will spell out your words with remarkable accuracy and speed.

End Your Main Content Powerfully

In the same way that you want your introduction and conclusion to grab readers, you also want the main content body to begin and end powerfully. 

Of course, your entire post should contain great content. 

But, say you're offering seven ways to get a specific result, you might want to use the absolute best tips at the start and the end of your post. 

The first one will serve to capture the attention of your readers, and the last one will leave them with a feeling of satisfaction. 

If, on the other hand, your tips successively decline in value, readers might feel like your blog post is deflating. 

You can be sure that their excitement will deflate along with it. 

What you want is for readers to be left feeling pumped when they arrive at the end of your post.

Step #7: Write a Solid Close

As you grow your writing skills, you will subconsciously develop your own mental protocol for closing your posts. 

Some writers like to end with a positive outlook and inspire their readers to action. 

Others like to ask questions at the conclusion. 

Yet others prefer to share a bonus tip as their final interaction. 

It doesn't matter how you decide to end your posts, as long as you end strong.

Here are some techniques to help you close effectively:

Use Urgency to Give Your Readers a Reason to Act

Highlight the big benefit or your ultimate promise. 

Remind them what they stand to gain if they take immediate action on your advice.

Reemphasize the Main Message of Your Blog Post

Whatever you used in your lead, make sure you close with it. 

For instance, if you shared a funny story or anecdote, make sure you mention that again in your close. 

If you led with a particular emotion - maybe you talked about the specific problem the reader is having - make sure you talk about that again in your close.

Be Motivational and Inspirational

When it comes to getting people to take action, positivity and optimism trump fear every time. 

So be inspiring, be your reader’s cheerleader, and show them that you believe in them.

Use a Conversation Activator at the End

Ask a question that gives your readers a nudge and encourages them to engage and leave a comment on your blog post.

Step #8: Add a Clear Call to Action

Any reader that makes it to the end of your blog post is primed. They wouldn’t have stayed that long if they didn't like your content. 

They like you, and they trust you. Now is the time to tell them what to do next. 

This is an opportunity you should never waste. Insert a clear call to action to the end of every blog post you write. 

Make sure your call to action stands out and is easily distinguishable. 

What is it that you want your readers to do? 

• Leave a comment?
• Read another post on your blog?
• Purchase your product? 
• Share your post on social media? 
• Follow you on Twitter?
• Sign up for your blog newsletter?

Make it VERY CLEAR what you would like them to do. 

If your content is great, most readers will be happy to share it or leave a comment. 

If you have an awesome product with a clear benefit to them, most readers will be eager to purchase it. 

But, to get them to do any of that, you will need to ASK.

Step #9: Proofread and Edit Your Blog Post

Your next step is to edit, proof, and correct any grammar or spelling mistakes in your post. 

Editing your blog post is essential because if your content doesn't provide the searcher with a smooth reading experience, they will lose attention very quickly and bail. 

Errors in grammar are one of the fastest ways to kill a blogger's credibility – and traffic. So you will need to revise your content carefully, and repeat as needed. 

Once you put in your draft, take the time to look it over, and start with fixing any glaring mistakes. 

For instance, it may become clear that section "C" should come before section "B," and if that is the case, go ahead and rearrange the sections so that they make more sense. 

Also, fix any awkward sentence construction and incorrect grammar as you go along. 

Listed below are just a few examples of the most common mistakes people make when writing:

5 Mistakes to Avoid When Blogging and Writing Web Copy

1. You’re vs. Your
2. There vs. Their
3. Its vs. It’s
4. Effect vs. Affect
5. The Dangling Participle

Even I sometimes have to stop and mentally sort some of these out to get them right.

Although a run-on sentence or a stray comma typically won't have a dramatic consequence, some errors will simply make you look dumb, such as this dangling participle example from SmartBlogger. 

Once you’ve given your draft a once-over, the real editing work begins!

When editing your blog post, you have three options available to you:

Option 1: Do-It-Yourself

If you're editing your post yourself, it's a good idea to take a break and step away from the article and then come back to it after a day or so with fresh eyes.

One of the best ways to self edit your blog post is to read it out loud. Doing this will help you see if your writing flows well. 

This is a trick that many writers are taught in workshops. Basically, it means that if a piece sounds awkward when you read it out loud, it's probably going to sound awkward in your reader’s mind. 

Reading the post aloud will also help you catch most of the issues that I’ve listed above. 

In particular, it will help you catch things like:  

• Run-on sentences
• Choppy rhythm
• Contrived sentences
• Wordy bottlenecks
• Industry jargon
• … and much more.

So, check for these things as you read, and if you find yourself having trouble with the flow of a particular sentence, simply re-work it until it sounds right.

Option 2: Ask a Colleague or Friend

Your second option is to have someone else read your post and provide you with feedback.

This is something you might consider if you’re new to blogging and haven’t yet acquired the necessary skills to edit your own writing. 

Asking someone else to check your work is not an admission of weakness, but it shows a commitment to making your writing as strong as possible. 

It's great if you have someone with editing experience that can proofread your work. Go ahead and show them your draft. 

If not, simply ask a colleague or friend to look your piece over. They don't necessarily have to have experience with the subject - the important thing here is that you get an impartial set of eyes to look at your work. 

A third-party is more likely to spot poor flow and logical loopholes that you may not be able to notice on your own. 

Also, they will be able to tell you if you used a lot of industry jargon or complex words that make your post hard to understand.

Here are some things that you might ask them to share their thoughts on: 

• Does your piece flow well?
• Does it make sense structurally? 
• Did you manage to put your points across well?
• Is your position on a controversial topic clear?
• Does the article prompt the reader to challenge any existing beliefs?
• Is the advice you are offering valid and worth following?

Option 3: Use Tools to Help You

There is a quick way to edit your work using tools like Hemingway and Grammarly, which allow you to check your writing for mistakes. 

Just remember, save the editing for after you've written your post. Don't edit yourself as you write as that only slows you down.

In fact, if you’re using this type of software, you may want to turn it off while you’re writing to avoid distractions. 

Editing tools will help you simplify big words or industry jargon, so your writing is easier to consume. 

They will help you write as if you’re speaking to a friend. For instance, instead of saying a word like "feasibility," the tool might suggest using "chance" in its place.  

In addition to correcting spelling and grammar mistakes, you will also be able to analyze your content to see if your readers will be able to easily understand it. 

Tips to Keep in Mind When Editing

Avoid Repetition

As you are editing, make sure to avoid repetition, saying the same words again and again. 

There are a few things that are more jarring to readers than the repetition of words and phrases. 

As you're reading through your blog post draft, look for words or phrases that can be replaced with synonyms.

Get Rid of Crutch Words

All writers have "crutch" words or phrases. These are words that no matter how hard they might try, writers simply can't help, including them in their work. 

Mine is the word "that." 

Find out what yours is and be vigilant to ensure that it does not appear in your content more often than it should.

If It Doesn’t Sound Great, Cut It!

Writing a blog post is hard. But editing it is even harder. 

A lot of new writers mistakenly assume that the process of editing simply involves fixing a few grammatical errors or striking through sentences and words that don't work. 

Yes, grammar and sentence structure are both extremely important, but editing involves so much more. 

It's about seeing your written piece as a whole and making it cohesive – even if it means sacrificing a lot of words that you took hours to write.

So, if something needs to be cut out or adapted at the last minute, do it. 

And Don’t Worry About Being Perfect

It's important to take the time to ensure that you put out only your best work. Whatever you publish in your blog, you should be proud to have your name on it. 

But don’t let that stop you from moving on to the next step. Your work doesn’t have to be 100% perfect. If you’re 80% happy with your post, it’s good enough.

On to the next step!

Step #10: Optimize Your Post for Readers

Your blog post is written and edited. It's time to optimize it so that you give your audience the absolute best reading experience. 

The better optimized your post is, the more engagement and social shares you will get. 

How do you optimize your post for readers? 

By making it as visually appealing as possible. 

Visual presentation matters. As humans, our brains process written information visually and spatially, not just textually. 

No one likes to read an unattractive blog post, no matter how grammatically correct it is. 

Even if you write the best, most fascinating content on the web, your readers will think it’s boring if you don’t break it up into easily digestible chunks. 

That’s why it’s vital to make your post look great by using a variety of formatting techniques and incorporating different types of visual media.

Here’s an example of what NOT to do: 

Now, let’s talk about what you should do: 

Add eye-catching visuals to make your content flow better, so it’s as easy as possible for readers to digest.

The right formatting will also help make your post more engaging. Readers will find themselves being effortlessly transported from one point to another, all the way to the end of your post. 

So if your post looks like a giant wall of text right now, use the following tips to break the content up, make it look great, and improve its flow.

Use Headers and Subheaders

This is the first step in breaking up large blocks of text. 

If you did your content outline correctly, this is already taken care of in your post. You have your headers and subheaders perfectly organized to guide readers through your content.

Now you can take the time to make sure that everything is formatted well and styled consistently. 

Increase Your Font Size and Spacing

Doing this will help make your post a lot easier to read. 

Pick a simple, readable font type, like times, Ariel, or Georgia. If you are using 11 or 12 font, your text is probably already easy to read. 

If you're using eight, nine, or 10, you should probably increase it. 

Some bloggers have also found that increasing the size of the text on their blogs also helps to increase the time readers spend on site.

Shorten Paragraphs

You need to keep your paragraphs short. Huge blocks of text tend to intimidate readers. 

Large paragraphs may be alright in other kinds of content, but blogs are different. They are designed to deliver highly-focused information in a very short space of time. 

So keep your paragraphs short and sweet, no longer than 3 or 4 sentences. Ideally, you want just two to three lines of text. 

Do your best to keep each individual idea isolated to its own short little paragraph.

Break Up Long Sentences

Keep paragraphs short and sentences even shorter. 

Readers get lost in a long sentence, and at the end of it, they find themselves panting with mental exhaustion. 

So you should try and keep your sentences as short as you can. 

As one blogger put it, reading a sentence is similar to holding your mental breath. You'll only last so long before passing out. 

With shorter sentences, readers are taking lots of ‘breaths’ – and that helps to keep them interested.

Add Bullet Points

These days people don't really read blog posts. They just scan them to quickly find the most important information before deciding whether to read the rest of the post or not. 

Subheadings help a lot in this regard, but bullet lists are also great for making your content easy to skim. 

So use them to highlight important points and make it easy on your readers' eyes as they work their way down your post. 

Here are some tips to keep in mind when writing bullet points: 

• Express clear benefits: Your bullets should serve as mini-headlines
• Keep bullets symmetrical: Just one or two lines for each should work 
• Avoid clutter: Don’t include entire paragraphs within your bullets

Remember, bullets don’t have to be complete sentences. They can work like headlines, so you can make them short, specific, and punchy. 

Add Images

Images help you explain complex topics more easily. They make your blog post flow better, and they make awesome visual punchlines. 

Also, the human brain processes images much faster than text, which means that you’re likely to get more engagement by adding captivating images to your posts. 

There are plenty of places where you can find high-quality royalty-free images for your posts, including:

• Shutterstock.com
• Pexel.com
• Pixabay.com
• Unsplash.com
• FreeImages.com
• ...and many more. 

Stock images are great when you are starting out, but they are not very personal. 

As you become more experienced in blogging, you will want to avoid using generic images and start taking your own photos or using tools like Canva to create your own unique images. 

In addition to attractive images, you can also use:

• Screenshots
• Graphs
• Infographics 
• GIFs
• Memes

You can even use hand-drawn explanations to get the point across to your readers. Simply take a picture once you’re done, and then upload it to your blog. 

Basically, use anything you can for explaining processes or giving additional information to your readers. 

One thing to keep in mind when using screenshots is to always use a defined border around them, so they don’t look as if they’re just floating in space. 

Also, make sure you keep your image border styles consistent across all your blog posts. 

Choose a Featured Image

Choose one image that you’ll use as a featured image. It should be relevant to your post and visually appealing. 

A featured image is very important because social networks treat posts with images more prominently. 

In fact, it’s been shown that content with relevant images on social media gets up to 94% more views. 

This means that the right image will make all the difference to your success if you plan on promoting your post on social media. 

Include a Video, if Possible

If you can, embed a video in your blog post. 

This doesn’t have to be one that you made, but you can simply choose a video on YouTube that helps explain your topic and makes it easier for your readers to understand your point. 

Including a video in your post comes with a multitude of benefits, such as boosting engagement and increasing the amount of time readers spend on your page.

(Image Source: Sikich.com) 

Each of the elements listed above makes your post more visually appealing. 

They also serve to help you arrange your ideas in a way that helps the reader to easily absorb the information, and keeps them connected. 

Step #11: Optimize Your Blog Post for Search 

You've worked hard to write, edit, and format your blog post. But, all that work will be for nothing if no one ever finds it online. 

Your final step is to optimize your post for SEO. This will help Google find it and serve it to readers searching for the solutions and answers provided in your post. 

In the blogging world, search engine optimization can be tricky. It's important to get it right, But one thing you should never do is to put SEO over your reader’s experience. 

The goal here is for you to find the right balance. 

Below are some of the most important SEO ranking factors that you should optimize your blog post for:

Add a Proper Page Title

The majority of blogging software uses the title of your blog post is the page title. 

Your page title is the most crucial element for on-page SEO. If you followed our blog post writing formula so far, then you already have a title that naturally includes the keyword and/or phrases that your target audience will find interesting. 

If your primary keyword doesn't naturally fit into the title, don't stress too much about it. It's alright to leave it out. 

The same goes for headers - if you can, include your primary and secondary keywords in the headers. 

But always remember to include keywords naturally and keep headlines short and descriptive.

Add a Proper Meta Description

The meta description is the summary that appears below the page title of your post on the search results page. 

It is an important aspect of your blog post that has an impact on the number of people that click through to read your blog post. 

It's always a good idea to write your meta-description soon after writing your blog post. Ideally, start your meta-description with a verb, like "read," "learn," or "discover," and make it 150-160 characters long.

Optimize for Focused Keywords

As previously mentioned, this isn't something that you should obsess over. 

There isn't a magic number to hit when it comes to including keywords. But, most bloggers recommend that you aim for roughly 2% keyword density in your posts. 

A tool like Yoast SEO will help you make your blog post keyword-friendly without impacting the reader’s experience.

Use Related Keyword Variations

Instead of trying to fit your main keyword into places where it doesn't naturally belong, you can use related keywords and phrases instead. 

LSI, or Latent Semantic Indexing keywords, are keywords or phrases that Google and other search engines see as semantically related to your topic. 

For instance, if you’re writing a post about stock trading, LSI keywords might include stock markets, trading strategy, swing trading, trading courses, price chart, fundamental analysis, and so on. 

These types of keywords play a very important factor in helping you improve your blog's search engine optimization. 

For instance, let's say that you’re writing a blog post on "how to write great blog posts." 

Your main keyword might be "writing great posts."

If you're writing a short, 300-word article, then you’ll probably be able to use the keyword once or twice in a natural way. You may even add a couple of variations in there. 

But what if you're writing a 5,000-word mega guide? 

In that case, you'll certainly need to come up with a lot of different keywords that are related to your main one. 

Here are some examples of variations on the keyword phrase “writing great posts”: 

• “how to write a killer post”
• “creating great posts”
• “crafting better posts”
• “tips for writing persuasive content”
• “a formula for an effective blog post”
• “the structure of your post is important”
• … and so on. 

The more content you're writing, the more keyword variety you can use. 

And the more variety, the better your content will perform in the search results. 

Remember, Google doesn't just deliver results based on exact matches to the user's query. It also delivers results based on semantic relation. 

That's why, for the most part, longer blog posts tend to outperform shorter ones as they allow you to leverage the power of LSI (latent semantic indexing) and longtail keywords. 

With a wider spread of keywords, you create a more effective matrix that raises your potential to rank high in search.

Embed Internal Links to Your Other Content

Yet another important SEO factor is to include links to your other content within your blog posts.

If this is your very first post, then, of course, you won't have anything else to link to. 

Instead, you can link to valuable external resources that will provide your readers with additional information on the subject. 

For the next post that you write on your blog, make sure you link it to this one - if it's related. 

All your blog posts should be interlinked. Otherwise, the search engines won't be able to find them if they are just floating in a vacuum.

Choose Anchor Text Carefully

While we're on the subject of internal linking, selecting the anchor text carefully is important. 

Anchor text refers to the words on your post that you use to link to another page. 

Choose keywords related to the page (on your site or other websites) that you want to link to. 

Search engines consider the anchor text when it comes to ranking your post for certain keywords. 

However, if you link to the same page multiple times within a single post, you only have to worry about keywords within the first link. 

This is because search engines rely more on the first link than they do on subsequent anchor text instances.

Link to Valuable External Resources

Within your blog post, you should include some links to other related websites and resources that your readers will find useful. 

This can be extremely helpful for search engine optimization - as well as for your visitors. 

Say you are writing a blog post about “How to include coffee in cooking.” You want to add a bit of information about the different types of coffee, but you don’t have anything about that on your website. 

If there's an external resource that you can link to, it will provide additional value for your readers pertaining to the different types of coffee they can use for your recipe. 

Linking to that external page from within your blog post will help your readers find extra information. Still, you also give Google a signal that you’re linking out to other authority websites within your niche. 

This can help greatly with your rankings.

These are just some of the most important search engine optimization factors that you should pay attention to. 

For more details, you should check out other posts on our blog to help you get your on and off-page optimization on point before you hit publish.

Putting It All Together

Whenever I sit down to write a blog post, I make sure that I follow each of these 11 elements, using them as steps to help me craft great content every time. 

Here's how I usually blog:

• Step 1: I plan my blog post (or pick an idea from my idea bank)
• Step 2: I do my research and check my facts
• Step 3: I create an outline for my blog post and include as much information as possible
• Step 4: I come up with a great title (if I don’t have one already)
• Step 5: I write a compelling introduction to make readers eager for more
• Step 6: I write the body of the content - taking time to include as much value as I can
• Step 7: I write a powerful conclusion that will inspire and motivate my readers to action
• Step 8: I add a clear call to action to the end of my post
• Step 9: I proofread and edit my work (usually the next day when my mind is fresh)
• Step 10: I format my post and add images, graphs, videos, etc. 
• Step 11: I follow my checklist for optimizing the post for search engines

 

Finally, I hit publish!

When all the above steps are done, I hit the publish button secure in the knowledge that I have done everything possible to create a high-quality, well-optimized post that is likely to engage my audience and rank high in the SERPs (search engine results pages). 

You can look at some of the most popular articles on my blog to see how I structured them:

How to Write Better Blog Posts

Do You Need to Be a Good Writer to Blog?

How Many Blog Posts Should Your Site Have Before Going Live?

 

Even if you happen to be a self-proclaimed terrible writer or spent weeks trying to come up with just one post for your blog, this post will help you start producing high-quality posts for your blog on a consistent basis.

If you follow the process outlined here each time you publish on your blog, you will struggle much less to come up with amazing content. 

Although writing in this way may feel a bit stiff at first, with practice, many of these tactics will become muscle memory, and you'll be able to complete them without even thinking about them. 

Eventually, everything will start to feel normal, and the constraints will lead to greater creativity levels. 

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by Steve Rajeckas

How Many Blog Posts to Make Money? Here's the Answer

As a blogger or business owner, you’ve probably wondered how much content you need on your niche website to start making money. 

In this comprehensive guide, we take a look at all the factors that influence the number of blog posts you need to start earning an income from your niche site.

You’ll also discover the ins and outs of niche content creation, and you’ll learn the formula to help you determine the right amount of content to have on your own blog in order to achieve your traffic and conversion goals.

So let’s get right into it, shall we?

How Blog Posts Help You Make Money

A niche website has one important aspect: to focus on a specific keyword or a group of keywords. 

The goal of the site is to present visitors with high-quality, helpful content that addresses their needs and concerns. 

When creating content for a niche site, you need to answer a question or solve a problem that the visitor is having. 

The type of content on these sites is designed to garner an instant sale from the website visitor. 

So it’s important to position yourself right at the end of the sales funnel - between the visitor and the product/service that they need. This will help you maximize conversion rates. 

The more advanced your potential customers are in the sales funnel, the higher the likelihood that you will be able to convert them into buyers. 

(Image Source: IncomeProdigy.com)

But that is easier said than done!

Creating a content strategy to ensure that your site is profitable is an extremely challenging task. 

As an online entrepreneur, you need to harness the power of content to build an effective marketing tool that will boost your bottom line. 

You do that by writing high-quality blog posts that are fully optimized for search. 

Target the Right Keywords

Niche sites target topics based on keywords. It won’t matter how many blog posts you have on your niche site if none of them are optimized with the right keywords. 

For instance, say your niche site is targeting a keyphrase like "swing-trade forex trading courses."

You would need to create high-quality content discussing, reviewing, and/or promoting that particular type of forex trading course.

You could even add your own books and courses, if you had them, in order to keep your visitors happy and help your potential customers find the solutions they came looking for. 

That’s how blog posts help you earn money on your niche site. 

They allow you to connect your visitors with ideal solutions - and you get paid for making the recommendation. 

So, when creating niche site blog posts, it’s important to target a topic based on specific keywords at the end of the sales funnel. 

If you build your site around a targeted topic and deliver outstanding content that helps your visitors find what they seek, you will be a lot closer to making sales and earning affiliate commissions. 

But, that still doesn’t answer the question of how many blog posts you need in order to make money. 

What Is the Minimum Number of Posts You Should Write on Your Blog?

When you create a niche site, it’s normal to wonder how many blog posts you need to get your site off the ground. 

The answer to that question is it depends. 

There’s no golden rule when it comes to how many articles you need to make money. 

It all depends on a variety of factors, such as: 

• Your niche topic
• Type of website
• Monetization strategies
• Business goals

And so on. 

Ultimately, it is difficult for anyone to say how much content any niche site should have without knowing the site’s specific goals. 

For example, how are you monetizing the site?

Most niche sites rely on single income models, such as Google Adsense, Amazon products, or Clickbank products. 

If you’re selling high-ticket affiliate products/services, then you probably won’t need as much traffic as someone who’s relying on Google Adsense to earn an income (provided you have an effective sales funnel in place).

When it comes to the number of posts necessary to start making money from your niche site, the range is pretty large. 

On the one hand, we have one-page websites: 

Some niche site owners have a single page on their websites dedicated to answering a specific search query fully. 

A one-page niche website might be adequate to answer a search query in a super-focused niche if the content is high-quality and in-depth. 

But, Google’s Quality Guidelines are very clear regarding sites with very little content, thin articles, and those that have no original content - so why run the risk of getting penalized?

On the other hand, we have niche sites with dozens, even hundreds of posts:

Some niche sites have large numbers of pages on their blogs. 

If you had a "web hosting reviews" website, for instance, you could potentially fill your site with hundreds of pages on that topic. 

With a primary keyword like "hosting reviews," you could dedicate individual articles to the hundreds of different web hosting services out there and talk about the benefits and drawbacks of each one. 

You could also create posts to compare one against the other, as well as massive roundup review guides to help visitors compare features and prices across many services. 

Then, your site could go into even more depth by discussing the specifics of hosting WordPress sites or covering the advantage of VPS hosting.

The list goes on!

So, can you see how a niche site like this could end up with thousands of pages? 

And with each page, it gains more exposure and its traffic numbers rise. With increased traffic, come more sales and a boost in your business’ bottom line.

So, how many pages are recommended in order to make money?

In essence, you can make money from 100 small niche sites, or just one or two larger ones. It all depends on your specific preferences. 

The strategy is essentially the same with regard to picking your primary keywords.

The key here is to have an adequate number of blog posts to provide your audience with enough information to answer their questions and satisfy their needs. 

As a general rule of thumb, you shouldn’t have less than 30 articles on your niche site if you hope to monetize it and start generating revenue. 

However, the actual amount of content will vary greatly depending on what your overall goals are for your site. 

In my opinion, you’ll probably get a lot more traction with your niche site if you build up your authority and create a strong brand. 

The best way to do that is to frequently post high-quality, SEO-optimized content to your blog. 

The way Google’s algorithm is headed, I’m willing to bet niche sites with decent amounts of content on them will get massive amounts of traffic compared to those with just a few pages. 

You should aim for anywhere between 20 and 50 posts for your niche blog and target long-tail keywords in your industry. 

You can use a keyword research tool like LongtailPro: 

Just don’t blindly throw up articles on random topics that pop into your head. You need a proper strategy for creating content for your niche website. 

How Often Should I Publish?

The answer to that question is simple: Publish frequently!

One reason for this is that it’s very rare and extremely difficult for anyone to build traction if they are infrequently publishing. This is particularly true if you are in a competitive niche. 

Another reason is that you don’t know which of your content pieces will be popular and which ones won’t.  

And since your entire business relies on you getting ranked for important keywords in your niche, it’s vital to give yourself the best chance of getting ranked by producing lots of high-quality content. 

Some SEO’s argue that your publishing schedule has minimal effect on your levels of traffic, but the data proves that your blog publishing frequency matters quite a lot. 

(Image Source: MarketingInsiderGroup.com)

It affects your overall search traffic, as well as the amount of traction you’ll be able to build over the first year. 

In the beginning, you have no content on your site, and Google has nothing to crawl. 

There are no long-tail keywords that your content can rank for, and the search engines have no reason to crawl your website very often. 

If you publish one article each month, by the end of the year, Google has 12 articles to index. 

But, if you publish three times a week, you’d have 156 articles for the search engines to crawl. 

Think of how many long-tail keywords would be in those posts - particularly if you were writing in-depth, informative posts packed with value. 

This gives you a distinct advantage over a niche site that has only a dozen or so blog posts. 

There are also studies that have shown that as soon as blogs have 401 posts published, their traffic numbers double. 

All this makes it clear that when it comes to building a profitable niche site, the more often you publish, the better your chances of creating the momentum that will propel your blog toward your ultimate traffic and sales goals. 

But, the caveat here is that you shouldn’t just pump out articles of low quality. 

You should only publish as frequently as possible while keeping up your quality levels. 

So, what is the perfect blogging frequency? 

There’s no magic number, but the number I would recommend if you’re just starting out is to post at least three times a week. 

You can always scale back once you’ve reached traffic levels that you’re happy with. 

If you want to reach critical mass even sooner, you can opt for a daily blog posting schedule if your time and/or resources allow it. 

It’s certainly doable if you enlist the services of a reliable and affordable blog writing service like ours. 

Advantages of Publishing Frequently

• Offer great value to your readers
• Enhance your authority
• Build brand awareness
• Outpace the competition
• Increase traffic levels
• Rank for more long-tail keywords
• Fresh (New or Updated) content is king

How Long Should Blog Posts Be?

The backbone of any niche website is content - we’ve established that. 

It’s vital to post frequently. But what is the ideal content length? 

Too many niche site owners focus more on the number of blog posts on their site, and not enough on the length of those posts. 

And that’s why they don’t see the traffic and conversion results they’re hoping for. 

According to a study by Backlinko, the average word count for top-ranking pages in Google is around 1,447. 

(Image Source: Backlinko.com)

This isn’t something many bloggers pay attention to when it comes to creating niche content. But they should. 

The quality of your content is what matters the most, of course, but the length of your articles is important, too. 

It matters because most great articles are ones that go deep into the questions or problems readers are having. 

They are the posts that provide detailed solutions in a way that is simple to understand and easy to follow. 

This is also the type of content that is shared the most on social media and linked to by other blogs in the same niche. 

Just keep in mind that just because a blog post has a high word count, it does not necessarily mean that it’s of high quality. 

So, back to the original question: what is the optimal content length? 

It varies - but specialists across different niches agree that longer is better. 

Long-form posts tend to perform better than short ones in the search engines. One reason for this is that longer articles are more likely to contain comprehensive information, as well as many different variations of important long-tail keywords. 

Having said that, readers in different industries prefer different content lengths. 

You need to experiment a bit to find out what works best in your own niche. 

Also, people’s attention spans are getting shorter by the day, so you need to structure your blog posts well in order to maintain their attention.

These content lengths typically work well for niche blog posts: 

• 1,250-word blog posts: These are great for "response posts." They are also long enough to beat the majority of thin 500-word articles that you see being produced in many niches. 

 

• 2,500-word posts: These are perfect for in-depth articles on subtopics in your niche. They are long enough to allow you to dive into a topic to answer a question in detail or solve a specific pain point.

 

• 5,000-word posts: Articles of this length give you the opportunity to provide lots of meaty high-quality content. If you create these types of "pillar" posts for your blog, you can expect them to drive loads of traffic over time. 

 

• 10,000-word posts: These are best for professionally designed ultimate guide-type articles. 

How to Optimize Blog Content

It doesn’t matter how many posts you publish on your blog. If none of them are optimized for search, then all your work is in vain. 

Optimize blog posts with keywords

You need to use SEO tactics to ensure that each piece of content that you publish drives search engine visitors to your niche site. 

If your site is new, it will have a low authority level. You should focus on incorporating keywords that are "low-hanging fruit," that is, long-tail keywords that have less competition. 

Target these in all your blog posts, and you will be a lot more likely to rank for them than the high-competition ones. 

By including relevant keywords in your blog posts, you will improve your SEO ranking and drive huge amounts of traffic to your niche blog. 

That’s why keyword research is one of the most important things to focus on when creating content for a niche site. 

In addition to the keyword tool mentioned above, LongTailPro, there are a lot of other free and paid tools you can use to make keyword research a breeze, including Google Adwords Keyword Tool, Keysearch, and SEMRush. 

Once you’ve found the keywords to target, you can then insert them into your text. 

It’s important to balance the keyword distribution in your blog content. Don’t stuff the keyword, but do your best to incorporate it into the following key places: 

• The title of your blog post
• The headings and subheadings
• The content body
• The image file names
• The title tags and meta descriptions

Make sure that you integrate keywords seamlessly into your text so that the reading experience is enjoyable for your audience. 

To avoid overusing the keyword, aim for a 2% keyword density. A tool like Yoast SEO will help you adhere to this density. 

Hit a large range of keywords and topics, create tons of high-quality, well-researched, and in-depth content, and you’ll soon be ranking for many important terms within your niche. 

Optimize Posts With Internal Links

Internal linking is often underestimated by niche site owners. But, it’s a powerful SEO tool that you can leverage to get the most out of your blog posts. 

Linking internally means that one page or post is linked to another on the same website. 

By linking all your blog pages, you ensure that no page is left undiscovered when Google crawlers visit your website to search for new or updated content. 

The search engine follows links from known pages on a website map to find new pages, which means that in order for your page to be seen, it must be linked to at least one other page on your site. 

So, no matter how many blog posts you publish each week, always take the time to ensure that each of them is linked internally to other posts on related topics to boost your SEO. 

Different Types of Content for a Niche Site

You already know that the right amount of content on your niche site can skyrocket your website’s performance. But, what type of content is best to get results fast? 

Here is a list of the different types of niche site content that performs well: 

• Product Reviews: This is the most obvious option for promoting affiliate products on your niche site. Simply write an honest review of the product/service based on your own experience and describe how it works. 

 

• Product Comparisons: Offer your readers information on multiple products at a time by comparing one or more products/services against each other. You can then embed affiliate links into the product descriptions. 

 

• Free Guides: These are great for delivering priceless practical information to your audience. For instance, you could create a "Beginner’s Guide to SEO," offer it for free to your readers and include many links to affiliate products within the content. 

 

• How-to Articles: These are very appealing to readers because they provide a solution to a problem or challenge they’re having. You also win, as an affiliate, because you get to recommend helpful solutions and make a commission if they make a purchase. 

 

• Seasonal Content: This type of content focuses on seasonal trends within your niche. Even though the content is only relevant for a short time, it usually attracts tons of visitors and boosts your affiliate performance. 

 

• Link Roundups: These types of posts are priceless. Not only are they extremely useful for your audience, but they also get you lots of valuable traffic to your blog. Link roundups also save you the time and energy it would take you to look for all those products and services yourself. 

Tips for Creating Gripping Content

The best type of content to create for your niche site is SEO-optimized content that is also user-friendly. 

It should meet the following criteria: 

Informative: You want content that is packed with helpful information that fully answers and satisfies the user’s questions or needs. Provide viable solutions for your audience. After all, you’re not just there to incentivize sales, are you?

Engaging: If you harness the power of content properly, you will be able to keep your audience engaged. Produce high-quality, original, and creative blog posts that will hook your readers, keep their attention, and make them clamor for more. 

Relates to Your Readers: Great content can be a powerful tool that helps you connect with your audience. Just make sure that when you write your blog posts, you prioritize your audience, rather than the search engines, and focus your content strategy on them. 

Content is the king of niche site marketing, and if you produce content that meets the above criteria, you will be able to get amazing results in a relatively short amount of time. 

Examples of Successful Niche Websites

Here are a few examples of what successful niche sites look like. Each of them has loads of content and they use a number of monetization methods. 

1. The Wire Cutter

The Wire Cutter is one of the top niche websites and it has thousands of blog posts.

2. NichePursuits.com

This niche site continues to grow thanks to new blog posts and regular content updates.

3. Making Sense of Cents

What started as a passion blog grew into a successful niche website with tons of posts.

4. Nomadic Matt

This is a very popular blog in the traveling niche with hundreds of blog posts. 

Outsourcing Blog Posts 

I know creating 20-50 niche blog posts sounds like a lot, especially when you’re just starting out. 

You may not have the time, the bandwidth, or the inclination to write so many blog posts yourself. 

In fact, if you’re totally new to blogging, you may feel that you're not that great at it yet. 

One simple solution is to outsource the content creation for your niche site. 

When building your niche site, you can be as thrifty as you like in other areas, such as design and marketing. Oftentimes, you can get away with doing those things yourself, even if you don’t have much experience.

But when it comes to blog writing, there’s no getting around the fact that if you don’t create high-quality content, then you’re just wasting your time because Google won’t rank low-quality posts. 

And that’s where we come in!

We offer affordable content writing services to help you consistently publish high-quality content on your niche blog. 

Our writers will create engaging affiliate content that will resonate with your audience and help you convert them into customers. 

So give us a try, and we’ll get to work creating content to boost your traffic and increase your sales. 

Conclusion 

So there you have it. The answer to the question of how many blog posts you need to make money with your affiliate site. 

Sites with 20-50 pages tend to do well with different monetization methods. Also, longer, more in-depth posts perform better than shorter ones in the search engines. 

These are things you should keep in mind when creating content to grow your niche site.

Do you think adding more blog posts to your niche site could boost your bottom line? Let me know in the comments below. 

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by Steve Rajeckas

How Many Blog Posts Should You Post per Week?

Introduction

There is no single answer to the question of how many posts you should post per week.

The right number of posts depends on various factors and it’s important for you to find the posting frequency that is right for your own blog.

This is a guide to help you determine just that. 

In it, you will discover six steps you can take to decide on the ideal posting schedule, as well as some practical blog posting frequencies to help you achieve your business objectives. 

So let’s get to it.

 

But first,

Why Does Blogging Frequency Matter?

Your blogging frequency matters because content marketing is the lifeblood of any business online, and blogging is the most effective form of content marketing. 

Frequent blogging can help you meet a wide range of business objectives, including: 

• Brand Awareness
• Thought Leadership
• Customer Engagement 
• Website Traffic 
• Lead Nurturing
• Sales
• Customer Retention/Loyalty

...the list goes on! 

The frequency with which you post on your blog will have an impact on how well and how fast you meet your content marketing objectives. 

Here’s how other online marketers and bloggers use blogging to meet their goals:

(Image Source: NeilPatel.com)

Blogging is affordable, sustainable, and allows you to leverage free traffic from the search engines to expand your brand. 

Blogging also helps you attract new customers by answering their questions and providing insights into the challenges they’re facing. 

And having a strong blogging strategy can help support your other marketing strategies, including email marketing and social media marketing. 

With advantages like these, it’s no surprise that marketers are wondering what the best blogging frequency is. 

What Is the Best Blogging Frequency? 

This is every blogger’s million-dollar question. Most want to know if there is a bare minimum or a simple guideline to follow. If you search online, you will discover dozens of different answers. 

Once a month? - Backlinko’s Brian Dean reports that he gets 200K monthly blog visitors by publishing once a month. 

Ten times a day? - On the other end of the spectrum, there are websites like Hubspot that publish posts multiple times a day on their blog. 

So which is the right frequency? Once a month? Multiple times daily? Or is there a perfect number in-between? 

The answer is unfortunately vague: it depends. 

There is a lot of hard data supporting the importance of blogging to marketing. But, there isn’t much on blogging frequency, and that is because there’s no single right answer. 

Every company is different, and every blog has different objectives. Industries, audiences, and sales strategies are different. 

That’s why it’s hard to come up with a simple one-size-fits-all solution. 

Okay. So everyone does it differently. But what does the data say?

Let’s take a look at the cold hard facts: 

Blogging Frequency Data

According to multiple studies conducted across dozens of websites in B2B and B2C (both large and small), 

• Publishing 2-4 times a week offers the highest results in terms of traffic and conversions. 
• As a general rule of thumb, the more frequently you post on your blog, the more traffic you get.
• 11+ posts/month seems to be the magic number that results in noticeable traffic increases for all types of businesses. 
• The number of posts you have already published on your blog makes a massive difference in how many leads you receive (the more posts, the better). 

(Image Source: MarketingInsiderGroup.com)

Having said that, a study from Hubspot showed that B2B companies posting 16 or more times per month received 3.5 times the number of visitors compared to companies that post less than four times a month. 

The results were the same for B2C companies: 

The ones that published 16 or more entries each month enjoyed 4.5 times the number of visitors as those that uploaded between 0 and 4 posts per month. 

Also, once companies publish the 401st post on their blog, they experience a dramatic spike in traffic - typically about twice the amount of traffic going to blogs with 301-400 posts on their website. 

So, taking these numbers into consideration, it’s clear that the best option for most businesses is to post at least 16 times a month (roughly four times each week). 

If you can maintain this posting schedule consistently for six to seven months, you will achieve the 401-blog-post mark. 

At this point, your blog will have reached critical mass and you’ll be able to maximize its value. 

At least, that’s what Hubspot studies say.

(Image Source: Blog.Hubspot.com)

But what’s right for your blog? 

Many small businesses find comfort and success in publishing one to four posts per week, while larger websites can push out daily posts - sometimes multiple posts per day.  

It’s important to align your content goals with your blog publishing frequency. Only you can decide what’s best for your blog. 

To do this, you will have to determine what resources you’ve got for blog content creation. 

Are you the lone writer for your blog? 

It might be hard to maintain a schedule of posting daily if you’re the only one in your marketing team. 

Do you want to reach 401 blog entries as quickly as possible?

If so, then you could set a schedule to post daily, but enlist the help of a blog content writing service. 

The right schedule for you will depend on factors like these that are specific to your business. 

Below, I’ve listed seven steps to help you decide how many blog posts you should post per week.

How to Determine a Blogging Frequency That’s Right for You

Finding your perfect blog posting routine ultimately comes down to what you hope to accomplish with your content strategy. The ideal blogging frequency will differ based on various factors, such as:

• Your schedule
• Your content marketing goals
• Your blog topic
• Ideal blog post length
• The industry you’re in
• Your target audience

And much more. 

Below, we take a look at some of the basics of how to decide on the right frequency to help you meet your blog’s specific goals. 

Step #1: Define Your Content Marketing Goals

Deciding on the ideal blog posting frequency depends on your specific goals. 

For instance, if you’re blogging to increase traffic to your website, it’s a good idea to publish more often in order to give Google and other search engines plenty of opportunities to find your website online and bring targeted visitors to it. 

This is particularly true for websites like affiliate marketing niche sites where the more content you have on your site, the more chances you have of making sales. 

If, on the other hand, your goals include customer engagement, and want to blog about more in-depth topics, then you may want to publish less frequently but produce long-form posts packed full of value for your readers. 

It’s important to keep in mind that content creation is not a goal in itself. 

Rather, it’s a means of achieving your business objectives. 

Even if you decide to post three times a week, if you’re not sure why that particular schedule makes sense, then you still don’t have an effective strategy for your content marketing. 

What Are Your Business Goals? 

• More Traffic?
• Better-Quality Leads?
• Social Media Growth?
• Ranking for Specific Keywords?
• Brand discovery/loyalty?

Once you’ve defined what you want to accomplish with your content, as well as your business’s metrics for success, it’s time to move on to the next step. 

Step #2: Consider Your Resources 

Your next step is to consider the resources at your disposal to find out what’s doable for you. 

Some blogs are able to publish multiple times a day because they have many writers providing the content. 

If you are your blog’s only writer, you will have to work to find the sweet spot between your schedule and what you want to accomplish with your blog. 

No matter how many posts you decide to publish each week, the important thing is to ensure that you do it consistently. 

So, how much can you or your team realistically blog each week? 

You may want to post new content daily, but do you have the time and/or budget to do so? 

If your resources only allow for one post each week, then it’s better for you to stick to that blogging frequency. 

Step #3: Do a Quick Content Audit

How many posts do you have already published on your blog? As previously mentioned, the total number of posts you have has a massive effect on your blog traffic. 

Overall, studies show that more blogs do equal more traffic. 

The key amount is around 400 blog entries. And after you reach that number, your traffic numbers will likely double. 

But even more important than the number of posts you currently have on your blog is the quality of those blog posts. 

If you already have a large repository of high-quality, highly trafficked posts on your blog, then you probably have no need to publish new content daily. 

However, if your content audit shows few posts or less-than-stellar content, then it’s important to focus more on getting your blog to that 401-post tipping point. 

While creating 400+ high-quality posts for your blog may seem like a daunting task, it can be done, as long as you have an effective content creation plan and publish blog content consistently. 

There are ways to help you hit that target, including supplementing with guest posts, and outsourcing your content creation (I’ll show you how a bit later on). 

Having said all this, it’s important to note it’s not always necessary to publish over 400 posts on your blog to get high levels of traffic. 

Some blogs, like Backlinko, have under 100 posts and yet they bring in tons of search traffic from Google and other search engines. 

This is because their blog posts are always kept updated with relevant information. And since Google ranks posts on freshness as well as newness, this helps the blog get more traffic. 

Step #4: Look at What’s Going On in Your Industry

No matter what industry you’re in, blogging is an extremely competitive sport. 

If you decide to create an SEO guide for 2020, guess what? It’s already been done - countless times. 

What this means is that you need to find ways to make your content stand out. And one of the best ways to do that is by adding massive value to your content. For instance, you could:

• Share personal experiences
• Create customer case studies
• Perform original research and use your own statistics

If you’re in a particularly competitive industry, then you’ll probably benefit from publishing less, but with a deeper focus on long-form, data-packed, and well-researched articles that will take you straight to the top of the SERPs (search engine results pages). 

If, on the other hand, competitors in your industry are not publishing lots of content, then you have a massive opportunity, and you need to seize it immediately.

Pump out as much content as you possibly can in the quickest time possible. Make sure that it’s high-quality content and includes both long and short-form posts. 

Do this before everyone else in that industry realizes that they should be doing that, too. 

Find all the relevant keywords in your industry and begin crafting content to incorporate each of them. 

Once you start receiving high levels of traffic from search, you can then scale back on publishing content and begin focusing on producing quality over quantity. 

Step #5: Track Your Traffic Channels

Your main source of blog traffic is another factor that you need to consider when deciding how much you should post each week. 

Search Traffic

If most of your blog traffic is coming from the search engines, you’ll benefit from creating longer, more in-depth, and information-packed pieces. 

Studies show that the majority of the top results on Google’s first page contain at least 2400 words.

(Image Source: NeilPatel.com)

Articles of this length take a little longer to produce, so it may not be doable to post every day or even every other day. 

If most of your traffic comes from search, choose a blogging frequency that gives you ample time to create high-quality, in-depth posts. 

Social Media Traffic

If you get most of your traffic by promoting your blog posts on social media, then it may be worth experimenting with shorter content types as these tend to do better on Facebook, Twitter, and other social platforms.

Creating how-to articles and listicles will help you drive traffic and leads to your blog. Timely content also performs great on social media. 

You can jump on to trending topics and hashtags to get more exposure for your posts. 

If you choose this strategy, you will likely need to post several pieces every week in order to keep audience engagement up. 

Email Marketing Traffic

If you’re getting most of your blog traffic from your email subscribers, you need to measure the types of content that they respond to. 

Subscribers on your list are often the most engaged of all your audience, so find out if they like shorter posts or longer, more in-depth articles. Do they like specific topics? 

Once you find the types of content that they like, play around with your email frequency to find out if there are changes in your subscribers’ response rates. 

This will give you a good idea of how often they want to receive new content from you. 

If your resources allow you to create a strategy for content marketing that encompasses all the above audiences, then absolutely do that.

But, if not, pick one to start with. You can always expand later. 

Step #6: Experiment and Refine Your Frequency 

Now that you’ve decided on a frequency based on the information you’ve gathered regarding your traffic sources and what your audience likes, it’s time to refine it. 

Test your blog posting schedule, and continue testing it until you hit on the sweet spot. 

This is what marketing is about, and you’ll only hit on the perfect blogging frequency by testing to see which one works, tweaking, and testing again. 

For instance, if you’ve been posting sporadically, try posting at least once a week at first. 

Work on increasing that to twice, and then three times a week. It’s alright if you want to post more often than that. 

In fact, if your resources allow it, you can post daily so you can start reaping the benefits even sooner.

(Image Source: ImpactBND.com)

While experimenting with your frequency, check your traffic numbers, and once you see a significant bump in your traffic levels, you’ve found your magic number. 

It’s ultimately up to you how many posts you publish each week, but as the data has shown, posting more frequently will help you raise your traffic and conversions more quickly. 

What Some Experts Say About the Ideal Blogging Frequency

“The ideal blogging frequency doesn’t exist!”

This is the statement from one of the experts at Moz.com. 

Moz certainly does have expertise and tons of experience in content. 

They think that causation and correlation should be considered separately. Otherwise, the data that supports high-frequency posting could be misleading. 

They argue that frequency isn’t as important as these things: 

• Is your content targeting ideal customers? There’s no point in increasing traffic if none of those visitors will ever become buyers.
• Which industry or sector are you in? Manufacturing companies may not have a lot of use for data from brands in retail. 
• Are your goals aligned to your content schedule? Goals that are based on elements like seasonality may be better achieved by publishing less. 
• Are you publishing consistently? No matter what industry you’re in, consistency matters a lot more than frequency (to both Google and your readers). 
• Do you focus more on quality over quantity? Creating one piece of content that is share-worthy is better than posting ten mediocre posts on your blog. 

In my opinion, all these points are valid. 

But, they don’t actually present any evidence against posting to your blog more frequently.

They are just great questions and concerns to think about when considering data.

In the end, you will be able to get the right frequency by testing it out using the six steps listed in this article. 

To help make your job a little easier, I’ve listed some practical blog posting schedules for you to choose from: 

5 Practical Blog Posting Schedules

Here are 5 sample blog posting schedules to help you quickly answer the question of ‘How often should I blog?’ 

I’ve also included the benefits and drawbacks to each, as well as some tips to help you consistently produce high-quality content for whichever frequency you choose. 

1. Several Times a Day

This was a great strategy for starting a blog - a decade ago. 

Blogs like Mashable.com and Problogger.net were started on just such a schedule. 

It’s certainly one way to get your blog to rank high fast, but it may not be ideal for lone bloggers for health reasons:)

If you decide to go this route, you obviously need to spend hours on content creation or hire a team of writers to help you sustain this blog posting schedule long-term. 

To help you create lots of content quickly, you can focus on these types of content: 

• Updates for your industry
• Content curation from various reliable sources
• Short posts with a healthy mix of longer posts
• Accept guest posts on your blog

2. Once a Day 

This posting schedule is great for bloggers who are just starting out. It will help you get traction and expand your reader base quickly. 

Until 2012, it was a fairly common strategy used by many of the top blogs, including CopyBlogger. 

However, when studies came out showing that readers were getting burnt out by too much content creation, many blogs started to scale back on the number of times they published content each week. 

If you want to post every day, make sure to do the following: 

• Plan ahead to avoid scrambling for content to publish every day
• Make sure your blog posts are short and to the point
• Vary your blog post types as much as you can and include different media formats

3. Two-Three Times a Week

This posting schedule is perfect for anyone who wants to shift to a higher posting frequency and experiment with longer posts of over 1,000 words.

It will allow you to start getting more traffic while moving fast toward your blog’s 401-post mark. 

If you choose this blogging frequency, look at the types of content that are currently doing well on your blog. 

Select the most popular topics and do your best to emulate those posts so you can make each post you publish a successful one. 

4. Once a Week 

This is a great publishing schedule for blogs focused on providing high-quality, in-depth content packed full of value. 

You can also adopt this posting schedule if your blog already has over 400 posts. 

This will allow you to focus more on quality over quantity. Even though you’re posting less frequently, you’ll always have something genuinely useful to share. 

These types of posts are also more likely to be linked to and shared by others on social media.

(Image Source: OKDork.com)

5. Once/Twice a Month 

This is ideal for niches where you need to publish massive guides, roundup reviews, reports, and so on. 

Posting this type of content once or twice a month will prevent your blog readers from getting overwhelmed. 

But, with a blogging frequency like this one, you run the risk of getting forgotten by your readers. 

One way to avoid this is to ensure that you create carefully structured, in-depth, and evergreen content that will stay relevant years into the future, and then continually promote that post using various channels like email and social media. 

(Image Source: SingleGrain.com)

Pro Tip #1: Supplement with Guest Posts

If you’re doing everything you can, but you still feel that your blog needs more content, you can supplement your blog articles with guest posts. 

Just remember that this requires a time commitment for you to sift through the articles and possibly edit them to ensure that they meet your guest posting guidelines. 

Pro Tip #2: Outsource Your Content Creation

If you don’t have the time to create and publish content on a regular basis, you can use a blog writing service like ours to help you keep to your posting schedule. 

This way, you get high-quality content written by expert writers to help you achieve your blog content marketing goals. Try us out and free up more of your time so you can work on other important aspects of running your blog. 

The Bottom Line

So, now you know that there’s no magic pill or secret formula when it comes to blog posting frequency. 

We’ve examined the data, and it points to the fact that, for most blogs, more is always better. 

You also have a clear plan to help you determine the right posting frequency for your blog:

1. Define Your Content
2. Consider Your Resources
3. Do a Quick Content Audit
4. Look at What’s Going on in Your Industry
5. Track Your Traffic Channels
6. Experiment and Refine Your Frequency

All that is left to do is to use the information in this article to help you decide what’s best for your own blog. 

Which blogging frequency do you think will work best for you? Let me know in the comments below!

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by Steve Rajeckas

How Many Blog Posts Should Your Site Have Before Going Live? 

One of the most common questions new site owners have is whether they should launch their blog with one post or if they need to build up a mini archive first? 

Ideally, your site should have 10-15 blog posts before going live. This allows Google to index your posts quicker and helps you minimize the time spent in the Google Sandbox probationary period. However, you can launch your site with any number of posts as long as you plan to post consistently. 

This article will reveal to you the different strategies available to you, as well as the ideal blog launch strategy to get the best results. 

Read on to discover exactly how your blog should appear before you show it to your audience. 

How Many Blog Posts Should I Start With?

There’s a lot of nuance that goes into this answer, and it’s important to understand all of the factors that can impact your blog’s ranking ability before deciding how many posts you should have before launching. 

One of these factors is the type of blog launch you choose. 

When you ask successful bloggers who have done it all before, you will get a wide variety of answers when it comes to the “number of blog posts before launch” question. 

Some of them launched their blog with just one post, while others had several posts on their blog before making things public. 

Again, there’s no right or wrong choice, but each one does come with its own advantages and disadvantages. 

Launching With One Blog Post

You can launch your blog with just one post on it to set the tone for what your readers can expect from you in the future. 

Many new website owners do that. They ditch the welcome blog post and go straight into creating epic long-form content designed to solve their readers’ problems and make them stand out in their niche. 

They then proceed to add more content once the blog is live. 

This is a strategy that could work well for you if that first post is a high-quality pillar article that your audience will find extremely valuable. 

Also, you must have a clear plan or a blog posting schedule for adding more content to your blog after you’ve made it public. 

Alternatively… 

You can publish your new blog right away, even if there is only a single (or a handful) of posts on it. 

But don’t market it yet, you only want it online so that Google can see and index those posts. While you’re adding new content, you start to reap the SEO (search engine optimization) benefits early. 

Once your blog gets to the ideal number of posts for launch, then you share it with the public. 

Launching With Several Blog Posts

If you already have a foundation of at least 10-15 awesome blog posts, you can start your blog launch via social media, email marketing, and so on. 

The more articles you have on your blog, the better. After all, you don’t want to invite people to come to check out an empty blog, do you? 

Not only will that make you look unprofessional, but you’ll also miss out on a great opportunity to build up your audience quickly right from the start. 

But, if you have lots of posts already there when you launch, it makes your blog look lived-in, and your readers will get a real taste of what they can expect from you in the future. 

So make sure that you have different types of posts designed to appeal to as many of your target audience as possible prior to launching your blog. 

How to Choose the Best Launch Strategy for Your Blog

Since there’s no universal blog launch strategy to fit every situation, you must decide for yourself which route you’ll take. 

To help you make the right choice, I’ve listed the three most common blog launch strategies so you can determine which one would work best for your blog.  

Blog Launch #1: The Simple Launch

Many experts recommend that new bloggers don’t bother with a formal blog launch, but rather opt for the simple launch which involves letting your blog go live with just the first “welcome” post. 

You can then start adding content as you go. 

Pros of the Simple Blog Launch Strategy:

The advantage of this type of launch is that it allows bloggers to avoid procrastination and overthinking. 

They don’t have to be worried about planning a big launch and they can just start right away. 

Cons of the Simple Blog Launch Strategy:

While great, in theory, this type of blog launch has quite a few downfalls. No new blogger is ever 100% ready to launch, but taking this route is extremely risky, too. 

Most bloggers hit the launch button before they are ready, and quickly get discouraged as no one is reading the posts they publish. 

They wonder what they’re doing wrong, and lose the confidence to move forward. Many aspiring bloggers give up at this stage. 

I’m all for taking action and not getting stuck in the research and planning stage. 

But, you do need to spend some time setting up your blog and doing a formal launch if you want to avoid these pitfalls. 

Which brings us to our second type of blog launch...

Blog Launch #2: The Intensive Launch

This type of blog launching strategy involves several different stages: 

The Pre-launch Stage: 

This is where you make sure that people know that you’re launching your blog soon, and make it clear to them how it’s going to help them change/improve their lives. 

You might create a series of teaser images to share on social media or plan an exciting launch giveaway. 

Alternatively, you could team up with other bloggers in your niche to arrange a free launch bundle for your readers. 

This could include free checklists, ebooks, workbooks, or even physical items. 

Day 1 of the Launch: 

Prior to the first day of your launch, publish one post on your blog. Then, on the first day of the launch, publish 2-3 posts over a span of a few hours. 

Go all-in on promoting those posts and/or your contest/giveaway organically everywhere you can, including social media and email. 

Tell all your friends and family about your new blog and ask them to check it out. Encourage them to leave comments and feedback, and to share it with their own networks of friends. 

Day 2 of the Launch: 

Run Facebook ads targeted at your ideal audience. Set a low budget at the start, and focus on targeting people by specific interest, location, and age. 

This will be aimed at promoting your free bundle or giveaway. 

Publish another 2-3 posts at intervals during the day, and promote them on social media, as well as any niche groups that you are a part of. 

You can also share a link to your blog on any forums where your target audience hangs out. Basically, do everything you can to spread the word! 

Day 3 of the Launch: 

Publish another 2-3 blog posts and promote them. 

Continue promoting these posts throughout the day. After your third day, you can then slow down your blog posting schedule to just one post a day for the rest of the week. 

After your launch week is over, you can set a blogging frequency that is more manageable for you in the long term. 

As you can see, this type of blog launch is quite intensive, and while it will net you pleasant results in terms of traffic to your new blog, it can prove to be one truly exhausting week. 

Thankfully, there’s an even better way to get your blog out there. 

Blog Launch #3: The Ideal Launch

The “ideal” blog launching strategy works pretty much every time. 

This is a great blog launch strategy with which many new bloggers have found massive success. 

It’s my preferred method for taking your blog live and it involves having between 10 and 15 posts on your blog before publishing it.

When you officially announce your new blog to the world, you should have enough posts published for your blog to look "official." 

Ten posts is a realistic amount of content for a new blogger to create. 

But what type of posts should you write as your first articles? 

Well, take a look at the core categories of your blog. That will help you determine the types of content that will serve your future audience. 

Have at least one post for each category that you plan to write about on your blog in order to give your readers a taste of the topics you’ll be publishing about. 

Also, do your best to vary the post types. For instance, all your posts shouldn’t be "how-to" articles or "product reviews." 

You can also try varying the content length to appeal to different readers. 

Don’t worry too much about the posts being perfect. The trick here is to craft quality content that is packed full of useful information. 

These will be your blog’s pillar posts and you’ll likely come back to edit, fix, add to, and update them over time to make them (even more) awesome resources that will continue to bring traffic to your blog for years after your initial launch. 

So, for now, just focus on the goal of actually going live with your blog. 

Maintaining Momentum

Now your blog is live!

You have exerted phenomenal effort in getting your initial posts completed and your blog launched. Great work.

But even after that is done, you still need to create a plan to help you continue to post consistently. 

The content you publish after your blog launch is just as important as the number of articles you go live with. 

The last thing you want is to lose all that momentum you created with your launch.

To help you keep the momentum going, you should have an additional 4-12 posts written and lined up in your drafts folder, all ready to go. 

These will help you consistently post new content over the next few weeks (depending on the blog posting frequency you’ve chosen - once, twice, or three times a week). 

It will also take the pressure off and give you a chance to take a short break from writing so you can regroup. 

Another reason to have some posts in reserve is that it’s easy to get distracted by all the other aspects of running a blog, such as design tweaks, blog promotion, setting up social profiles, and so on. 

If you don’t have posts written and ready to publish, you may fall behind on your posting schedule. 

By writing the posts in advance, you get a great backup and avoid disappointing your new readers. 

Brainstorm Three Months’ Worth of Topics

One of the hardest things about creating posts on a regular basis - particularly when you’re just starting out - is figuring out ideas for topics to blog about. 

In addition to having some posts written and scheduled on your blog, you also need to create an editorial calendar to help you stay ahead of your posting schedule over the next few months. 

This will also help you avoid that stressed-out feeling you get when you’re continually struggling to come up with ideas for new blog content. 

Once your blog is live, aim to post at least once a week. Two or three times is even better if your resources allow it. 

Advantages of having at least ten posts before your blog launch: 

1: Your readers will like and trust you more when you show them a healthy number of articles. 

It shows that you’re serious about providing helpful solutions on your blog, and you’re not just sending them to a “Hey, check it out! I’ve started blogging” post. 

2: A website that looks lived-in is always better for conversions. People online tend not to trust “new” things. 

They like to see other people reading stuff before they start to read it, too. It’s the reason why social proof is so important in marketing. 

3: The majority of bloggers that launch with more posts tend to experience higher engagement rates from their new readers.

They get more blog comments and social media shares than those that launch with just one blog post. This is likely because more posts give you the opportunity to appeal to a wider segment of your audience. 

How Many Blog Posts Before Launching: The Bottom Line

As you can see, there are many different routes you can take to successfully launch your blog. 

You can either start with one post (not recommended), or a few posts (about 10-15). 

Ideally, you want to launch your blog with at least ten posts and have 4-12 more in reserve. 

Some SEO experts suggest that you should have 20 to 30 articles on your blog before going live. 

The reasoning behind this is that with a high number of posts, Google’s crawlers will be able to understand and index your content and rank your blog posts much faster. 

This, in turn, means you’ll escape the Google sandbox and start getting blog traffic a lot sooner.

The Google Sandbox is a real phenomenon, and it can be hard for new blogs to escape it. To learn more about the Google Sandbox and how it can affect your blog's ability to rank, I recommend reading this article from Ahrefs: Google Sandbox: Does Google Really Hate New Websites?

Final Thoughts

In an effort to help you determine how many posts you need to have before launching your blog, I’ve outlined the three styles of launches that are most commonly used by new blog owners: 

1. The Simple Launch
2. The Intensive Launch
3. The Ideal Launch

My favorite is the “Ideal” blog launch because it builds on the main drivers of traffic: Google and social media, and it sets you up for massive success as a new blogger. 

But, you still have to decide what’s right for your own unique blog, and once you’ve chosen your blog launching strategy, you’ll know exactly how many blog posts your site should have before going live. 

Which blog launch style appeals to you the most? Let me know in the comments below. 

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by Steve Rajeckas

Do You Need to Be a Good Writer to Blog? 

Blogging is one of the most accessible forms of writing in existence. If you have an internet connection and access to a computer, you can blog. But how much does writing ability play into writing good blog posts? 

You don’t need to be a good writer to blog. The main goal of blogging is to relay information. If the reader can understand the words you're writing, you can be an effective blogger. And even if you have a hard time with the writing, you can always outsource your blog content. 

Writing high-quality blog posts is certainly an art form, but your writing skill is only part of the equation. 

In this article, we'll discuss why being a great writer isn't essential for blogging, what is required to make a great blog post, and how you can make your blog posts more engaging even if your writing skills aren't top-notch. 

Why You Don't Need to be a Good Writer to Blog 

When I say you don't need to be a "good writer" to blog, I think it's important to define what a "good writer" is. 

A good writer is someone who has an excellent grasp of the English language. They are well-versed in using proper punctuation and transition words, and have a diverse vocabulary that they can call on to describe almost any situation or idea. 

While all of these characteristics are certainly useful to have as a blogger, they aren't necessary to write an effective blog post.

You don't need these extra perks because most forms of blogging are, first and foremost, about helping the reader solve a problem. 

The Purpose of Blog Posts

Nowadays, almost all blog posts are written to help readers solve a problem. 

The only instance in which this wouldn't apply is if you're blogging about your personal life. 

However, personal blogging has fallen by the wayside as businesses and individuals have realized the monetary potential that blogs can provide.   

If you're reading this, you're probably interested in earning money from blog posts in some way. 

Just so we're on the same page, here are the most common ways you can make money with blogs:

• Pulling in traffic from Google searches and monetizing via ads, affiliate commissions, and selling products and services
• Attracting B2B clients by writing blogs that explain how your product or service solves a problem in your industry 
• Building your professional profile by publishing insightful posts on LinkedIn
• Attracting customers to your local business by writing blogs that pull traffic from Google and social media 

No matter how you plan to monetize your blog posts, there's one basic principle that ties all of these blogging purposes together: they all need to help the reader solve a problem. 

Let's take a standard "niche website" blog that aims to monetize Google traffic with ads and affiliate links. 

If you want to succeed at earning money with a blog like this, you need to write posts that target the search queries that people type into Google. 

You know that drop-down menu of suggested searches that appears when you type something into Google? 

Well, those are all searches that other people have typed in. 

And if you perform a quick analysis of the suggested searches that appear for anything you type in, you'll notice a common theme: most people typing something into Google are either looking for the solution to a problem or looking to learn new information. 

There are a few exceptions, like when people are searching for a particular website, or when they're looking for pictures of something. 

However, the vast majority of searches are performed because the searcher is trying to figure something out. 

Maybe they're trying to troubleshoot a broken washing machine, so they type in "whirlpool washing machine won't work."

Or maybe they want to understand why a light bulb generates heat, so they type in "why does light bulb make heat."

Whatever it is they're typing in, they're almost always trying to learn something new. 

Here's my point: most people read blog posts to solve a problem or to learn new information. 

Therefore, if you can clearly explain the solution to the reader's problem, you can write effective blog posts without resorting to fancy words or perfect sentence structures. 

All that's required to do this is a solid understanding of the reader's problem, what they need to do to fix it, and enough knowledge of the English language to explain it to them. 

How Much English Do I Need to Know? 

You can't write blog posts in the English language without knowing some English. 

The average internet user reads at an eighth-grade level. Therefore, if you want to communicate effectively, your writing needs to be near that level.

If you can only write in broken English that is very difficult to understand, you have two options if you want to make money blogging: improve your writing or outsource the writing.

Quick Tips to Improve Your Blog Writing

While stellar writing skills aren't needed to write effective blog posts that help people, improving your writing will increase the readability and clarity of your content.

And although there's no replacement for years of professional writing experience, a few simple tips, tools, and resources can go a long way toward improving your content.

Get Grammarly Pro

No matter what writing level you're at, Grammarly Pro can make your content shine. If you're in the for-profit blogging business, I think this tool is an absolute necessity. 

Why? Well, it detects all of your writing mistakes and tells you how to fix them. Here are a few of the issues using Grammarly can wipe away: 

• Spelling errors
• Grammar errors
• Wordy sentences
• Repetitive vocabulary usage 
• Improper punctuation usage 

I have a degree in English, and I'd been writing professionally for about five years before I started using Grammarly. Grammarly still found parts of my writing that needed improvement (and told me how to fix them). 

If Grammarly was able to help me improve my writing, it will certainly be of use to you as well. 

You should note that Grammarly has a free web-based program that picks up basic grammar and spelling errors. 

This program is certainly useful. However, if you're genuinely interested in improving the readability and clarity of your content, I highly recommend getting the Pro version. 

It's pretty affordable for how much it will improve your writing - and improving your writing will increase the amount of money you make in blogging. 

How will better writing make you more money? 

It's simple. 

In the niche website industry, better writing will keep people reading your content and scrolling down the page. 

Keeping users scrolling has three primary benefits:

• It increases the amount of time a reader spends on the page, which is a metric Google uses when deciding how high to rank your content. 
• The more a reader scrolls down the page, the more ads they'll view, which will increase the amount of money your website makes. 
• Better writing is typically more persuasive than poorer writing, which will help you boost affiliate conversions of any products you're promoting.

And even if you're blogging for a B2B website or a LinkedIn profile that isn't concerned with monetizing Google traffic, improving your writing will still make you more money. 

• B2B blog posts will be more persuasive, making it easier to convert readers into buyers or clients. 
• LinkedIn blog posts will be more coherent, netting you more followers, connections, and shares. 

Here's the takeaway: if you're a for-profit blogger, Grammarly Pro is a must-have. 

Use transition words 

A transition word is a word that signifies that you're moving from one idea to the next idea in your thought process. They often appear in the beginning of a sentence, though that's not a hard rule. 

A few of the transition words I use most often are:

• However. This signifies that I'm making a counterpoint to my previous statement.
• Example: Mold is usually easy to find and get rid of. However, if it's underneath your floor, you're going to have to call in an expert. 

 

• And. This signifies that I'm adding a related thought to my previous statement. 

 

Example: Cookies are considered unhealthy because they're high in calories. And the sugar content isn't great for your teeth either. 

 

• Because of. This signifies a specific condition or statement that is true due to some factor. 
  • Example: Because of the high risk of heat stroke, you should stay inside during a heat wave. 

 

• Especially. This is used to indicate importance. 
  • Example: You should always keep your seatbelt on, especially if you're driving past a cop. 

 

 

• Therefore. This signifies that something is true based on a previous statement.
  
  • Example: Spider plants are incredibly hardy and are non-toxic to humans and pets. Therefore, they're great for people who have never had a plant before. 

 

There are hundreds of transition words you can use in your writing, and each has its own unique purpose. 

The five I listed above are just some that I use frequently. If you'd like to learn more, check out this comprehensive list of transition words from Smart Words. 

Swim through the ocean of free writer improvement resources that exists on the web. 

There are plenty of articles and videos out there telling you exactly how you can improve your writing ability. 

If this seems like a lazy copout, so be it. It just seems silly to rehash the general writing tips that countless writing blogs have already covered in great detail. 

To make sure this isn't a total copout, I'll put in some effort and list some of the best resources for improving your writing out there: 

• WordStream: 16 Easy Ways to Improve Your Writing Skills
• WriteToDone: How To Write Well: 10 Essential Self-Editing Tips
• Grammarly: How to Improve Writing Skills in 15 Easy Steps

The Easiest Solution (Outsourcing) 

There's a lot of potential to make money in blogging. 

And the higher quality your posts are, the more money you'll be able to make, whether it be through increased ad views, more affiliate conversions, or more persuasive selling of your product or service. 

So if you're invested in blogging as a way to grow your income, but don't have the writing skills needed to make your posts truly shine, I recommend hiring an expert to write your posts for you. 

Hiring an individual writer is one option, but it's risky. 

For starters, your entire website is reliant to the availability and dedication of a single person. I'm a pretty risk-averse person, and placing all of my eggs into one writer's basket 

There are quite a few content services out there, but my content service (We Write Blog Posts) will get your content ranking on Google. 

Why? Well, we use a proprietary writing method developed by the blogging wizards at Income School. 

This method is optimized to win the featured snippet for any keyword you want to target - and we've got a crack team of professional writers who are trained to use this method on any subject you want to write about. 

Alright, I'll stop selling and get to the point. If you're not a great writer - or just don't have the time to write - we can help you. If you want information about rates, turnaround time, or anything else, head over to our home page and give it a read-through.

Final Thoughts 

You don't need to be a good writer to make good blog posts. If you know how to solve your reader's problem, the useful information you provide should be enough to overcome many of the issues your writing may have. 

However, your writing does need to be readable. Therefore, you do need to use the tools and resources available on the web to make your posts as clear and engaging as possible. 

The easiest way to ensure good blog posts is to outsource them to a professional content service. But if you can't afford to do that, a premium writing tool like Grammarly Pro is an absolute must-have.

What are your thoughts on how writing quality correlates with writing good blog posts? 

Leave a comment below; I'd love to hear what you think. 

 

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by Steve Rajeckas

How to Write Better Blog Posts (19 Expert Tips)

This is a complete guide to writing better blog posts that rank higher on Google, bring more traffic to your website, and ultimately make you more money.

Here's a brief rundown of what we'll be discussing:

1. Understand what the reader wants.
2. Optimize your titles for high clickthrough rates.
3. Write clear and informative subheadings
4. Use Grammarly Pro.
5. Get to the point.
6. Write every single day.
7. Edit every line.
8. Speak to the reader (use "you").
9. Use transition words and phrases.
10. Use bullet points when listing things.
11. Use numbered lists when giving instructions.
12. Don't be repetitive.
13. Get a second monitor.
14. Use tables to compare things.
15. Place your featured image below the fold.
16. Use (and embed links to) authoritative sources.
17. Customize your featured image (don't use unedited stock photos).
18. Add YouTube videos.
19. Outsource your content creation.

Let's get started.

1. Understand What the Reader Wants (Search Intent)

If you only take one thing away from this article, make it this one.

If you want your articles to rank at the top of Google, you need to write your articles with the reader's search intent in mind.

What does that mean?

In plain English, it basically means you understand what the reader wants to know when they type your target keyword into Google.

Brian Dean from Backlinko gave a great example of this in one of his blog posts.

He wanted to rank for a particular SEO-related keyword, so he wrote an incredibly thorough article about this keyword. The focal point of his article was an in-depth analysis of why this keyword was important, and much of the content centered around a single case study he had performed examining the importance of this SEO topic.

He posted it after weeks of painstaking work, expecting it to rocket to the top of the results.

But months and months went by... and nothing happened.

Confused, he typed his target keyword into Google to see what was showing up at the top... and then it hit him.

All of the top-ranking articles were providing lists of actionable tips. The people searching for this keyword wanted concrete advice that they could quickly implement on their own websites - not long-winded explanations about what this keyword is and why it's important.

Brian rewrote his article to provide a bunch of awesome, easy-to-implement tips, and he was ranking near the top of the search results not too long after.

Here's the point:

Before you start writing an article, you need to know what kind of information the searcher is looking for.

In other words, you need to interpret the searcher's problem.

Here's another example:

Say you're writing an article targeting the keyword "Why Isn't My Tomato Plant Growing?"

What problem is someone typing this into Google having?

Well, they're clearly having trouble getting their tomato plant to grow.

However, they aren't merely interested in learning about tomato plant growth problems for academic purposes.

They're trying to solve a problem and make their tomato plant grow, which means their real question is, "What can I do to make my tomato plant grow?"

As such, you need to address both their surface-level question ("Why isn't my tomato plant growing?") and their "real" question ("What can I do to make my tomato plant grow?")

Therefore, the subheading structure for this article should look something like this:

• Tomato Plant Isn't Not Getting Enough Sun
• Not Getting Enough Water
• Soil Isn't Nutritious Enough
• How to Make Your Tomato Plant Grow
  • Plant It In Nutritious Soil
  • Water It Regularly
  • Plant It In Nutritious Soil
• Conclusion

Takeaway: Place yourself in your reader's mind. When they type the keyword you're writing about into Google, what information would help them most? Give them that information in your post.

2. Optimize Your Titles for Higher Clickthrough Rates

Your titles are the backbone of your content.

If you have an eye-catching title that is optimized for increased clickthrough rates (CTR), your articles will get more clicks in the search results. Here are a few proven ways to titles that get more clicks:

• Keep your title between 15 and 40 characters. According to a Backlinko study, Titles with this length have a significantly higher clickthrough rate than titles outside of this range.
• Add a question to your title. The same study found that titles that contain questions have a 14.1% higher clickthrough rate than titles that don’t. This won’t be applicable to all titles, but take advantage of it when you can.
• Use numbers in your title. A Conductor study found that using numbers in your titles significantly increases clickthrough rate.
• Use odd numbers in your title. If possible, you should use odd numbers over even numbers. Studies indicate that people are drawn to odd numbers over even numbers. And include a “7” if you can. According to The Guardian, “7” is the world’s favorite number.
• Include as much of your target keyword as possible. Readers are more likely to click on an article that closely matches what they typed into Google. Google is also more likely to rank your article on the first page if it contains the exact keyword people are typing in.

3. Write Clear and Informative Subheadings

While CTR-optimized titles will help drive traffic to your site, writing clear and informative subheadings will keep them on the page and give your article a longer average session time.

Here are a few tips to help you write great subheadings:

• Be descriptive. Don’t make your subheadings simple one or two words statements. Be as descriptive as possible about the content contained in the subheading.
• Use action words when appropriate. If you’re writing a step-by-step guide on how to do something, use action words that tell the reader exactly what they should be doing. For example, if the next step in your guide calls for the reader to hammer a nail into a piece of wood, don’t use a statement like “Hammering the Nail,” use a statement that contains an action, like “Hammer the Nail Into the Wood”
• Make sure your subheadings are in title case. This is a minor detail, but I find ensuring subheadings are in title case makes your content look a bit more professional. Use a tool like TitleCaseConverter.com to easily capitalize all of the right words.

4. Use Grammarly Pro

Grammarly Pro is an excellent tool that I consider essential for anyone looking to earn a living from blogging. Here's what it offers:

A Grammar Checker

If you don't have perfect grammar - which almost no one does - then Grammarly can be incredibly helpful. It automatically points out issues with spelling, tense, punctuation, and everything else related to writing. And you'll be able to fix most issues with a single click, as Grammarly knows how to fix most grammar mistakes.

Another bonus: while you need the premium version of Grammarly for most of the benefits listed here, the grammar checker is free for anyone to use. You can access it here: Grammarly: Free Grammar Checker.

A Clarity Checker

Grammarly's clarity checker will help take your writing to the next level. It points out run-on sentences, unnecessary phrases, and anything else that makes your content less clear and concise.

An Engagement Checker

The engagement checker detects overused words and suggests alternatives to make your content a bit less dull. This tool is nice to have if you find yourself using the same verbs and adjectives over and over again.

A Delivery Checker

Grammarly's delivery checker finds words and phrases that weaken your overall message, such as adverbs and prepositions at the end of sentences and adverbs.

 

A Plagiarism Checker

This is a must-have if you're outsourcing your blog content. Whether through laziness or inexperience, some writers will copy other content on the web word-for-word and pass it off as their own work. Grammarly's plagiarism checker scans through billions of web pages to ensure your content is 100% original.

No matter whether you're writing your own content or outsourcing to someone else, I highly recommend running all of your articles through Grammarly before you post them online.

Not only will it remove errors and improve the clarity of your content, but it will also train you to be a better writer, as you'll start to notice the things you consistently do wrong when writing and will learn to avoid doing them in the first place.

5. Get to the Point

Think back to the last time you read a blog after searching for something on Google.

If you're anything like me, all you wanted was a straightforward answer to your search query.

If the writer wasted too much time trying to be funny or personable, you probably backed out of the page and went to find another article.

People are coming to your blog because they need information. Make sure you give them that information up front and without any fluff.

It's okay to add some humor or other personal touches to your content. In fact, I recommend this, as it will help to form a relationship with your reader.

Just make sure any flair you add is secondary to relaying accurate information directly and concisely.

One easy way to get to the point is to make your sentences as short as possible without sacrificing clarity.

After you're done writing, read through every line of your post and remove unnecessary words and phrases. If you have a hard time identifying which words aren't needed, I recommend using Grammarly Pro to help you.

6. Write Every Single Day

If you want your blog to succeed within a reasonable amount of time, you need to write a lot of content. And if you want to write a lot of content, you need to write every single day.

Writing every day isn't just about writing a bunch of content for the sake of it. It's about building the habit of writing.

According to a study published in the Journal of Social Psychology, it takes an average of two months for a new habit to become automatic.

If you want to write enough to build a successful blog, writing needs to become an automatic habit. And forming that habit will take an upfront effort to write something every single day.

Fortunately, it doesn't have to be a lot. Just commit to writing 100 words per day.

Such a small goal will remove the mental barrier that the prospect of writing an entire blog post creates - and will make it much easier to start writing.

I learned a great tip for forming habits while reading Atomic Habits by James Clear. It's called "habit chaining," and it may just change your life.

According to numerous studies, it's easier to form a new habit if you do it right after another habit you've already formed.

By "chaining" the new habit to an old habit, it's much easier to stick with that habit day after day.

The key is to make it very specific. If you give yourself wiggle room, it's going to be harder to follow through.

For example, if you want to chain your writing habit to your habit of taking a lunch break, Don't say, "I'm going to write after lunch." It's too vague and leaves too much room for other tasks to take precedence.

Instead, say, "After I sit back down at my desk after my lunch break, I'm going to open Google Docs on my computer and type 50 words for my latest post."

By writing a little bit every day, you can form a habit of writing and create more content in less time. Eventually, you may even find yourself writing multiple posts per day. Imagine how quickly your site will grow then!

7. Edit Every Line

The posts you're writing are going to be read by thousands of people over the coming years. To make sure you put the best foot forward, re-read every line and check for grammatical and factual accuracy.

It doesn't take that much time, and you'll be surprised at how much improvement you see over the first draft.

If you can afford an $11 per month subscription fee, I highly recommend editing in Grammarly, as it'll automatically catch a ton of potential issues.

However, if you don't want to subscribe to Grammarly, a line-by-line readthrough in your preferred writing software is still much better than not editing at all.

While it's important to be thorough, you don't want to over-edit. Your main concern should be that your reader can understand what you're saying. As long as you've got that covered, your post will be successful.

8. Speak to the Reader (Use "You")

Even though what you're writing will be read by thousands of different people, you should treat it as a one-on-one conversation between you and a single reader.

The best way to implement this is to use "You" whenever you're speaking to your audience.

This allows you to build a one-on-one relationship with the reader, which benefits you in quite a few ways:

First, the reader will like you more, which will make them more receptive when you ask them to do things (buy recommended products, sign up for your email list, etc.)

The content will also feel more relevant to them, which may cause them to spend more time reading. Making content feel relevant has a few benefits:

• Improves session time (an important SEO metric)
• Readers scroll further down the page (more ad impressions)
• More likely to subscribe to your email list or read more articles, which will help you get more page views

9. Use Transition Words and Phrases

If you want your content to flow nicely and be easy to read, you need to use transition words and phrases.

Writing that lacks transition words is like a car that lacks oil. Sure, it might work, but the drive will be filled with the sounds of grating and grinding and will be an altogether miserable experience.

Transition words make it easy for your readers to see the connections between words, sentences, and even whole paragraphs. Without them, your articles will be little more than a dull series of uninteresting statements.

The best way to illustrate the importance of transition words is with an example. Here's the paragraph where I mentioned the car oil analogy, but with the transitions removed:

Writing that lacks transition words is like a car that lacks oil. It might work. But the drive will be filled with the sounds of grating and grinding. It will be an altogether miserable experience. 

Do you hear the subtle difference in flow?

Even though this second sentence is only missing two words — sure and and — the sentence is choppier and more unpleasant to read.

If you'd like a full rundown of all the transition words you can add to your writing, use this comprehensive list from the University of Wisconsin.

10. Use Bullet Points When Listing Things

One of the first things I teach my writing team to do is make the content as skimmable as possible. And one of the best ways to make content skimmable is to use bullet points when listing things.

Here's a quick example: which of these ways of presenting a list is easier to read?

Things I need from the grocery store: eggs, milk, 17 boxes of special K, a single grape, paper towels, frozen pizza, 43 sticks of butter

Things I need from the grocery store:

• Eggs
• Milk
• 17 Boxes of Special K
• A single grape
• Paper towels
• Frozen pizza
• 43 sticks of butter

See what I mean?

Using bullet points to list things looks so much cleaner. Please take the time to format collections of items using bulleted lists — your readers (and your SEO metrics) will thank you.

If you want to make your content the best it can be, there are a few things you should know about using bulleted lists:

• If each item in the list has multiple sentences, bold the first sentence. The first sentence after the bullet point typically contains the main points, while the following sentences are there to provide context. You can see an example in this very bullet point.
• If any items in your bulleted list require more than one paragraph, consider using subheadings instead. Bulleted lists are great for organization, but they lose their clarity once you start trying to attach multiple paragraphs to a single bullet point. If you need multiple paragraphs, use subheadings instead.

11. Use Numbered Lists When Giving Step-By-Step Instructions

Bulleted lists are great for collections of items where the order you list them in doesn't matter. If you need to provide step-by-step instructions, numbered lists are more appropriate.

Again, a quick example to show how much easier to read this is:

How to make scrambled eggs: First, turn your stove on at medium heat. Next, place a pan on the stove and coat the bottom with butter. Then, crack 2-4 eggs on the side of the pan and drop the yolks and whites into the pan. Whisk the eggs together until they are yellow and fluffy, and then add to a plate and serve.

How to make scrambled eggs:

1. Turn your stove on at medium heat
2. Place a pan on the stove and coat the bottom with butter.
3. Crack 2-4 eggs on the side of the pan
4. Drop the yolks and whites into the pan.
5. Whisk the eggs together until they are yellow and fluffy
6. Add to a plate and serve.

12. Don't Be Repetitive

Here's a writing sample I received from someone applying to join my writing team:

"Eating is fun but washing the dirty dishes that come afterward is the downside. Since nobody wants dirty dishes to pile up, dishes need to be washed. Dishes can be washed by hand or with a dishwasher, but this article will focus on how to wash dishes by hand."

When you break it down, this drawn-out paragraph can be rewritten in a much more compact manner:

"There are two ways to wash dirty dishes: by hand or with a dishwasher. In this article, we'll focus on how to wash dishes by hand."

It's easy to meet your target word count by repeating your point in two or three different ways. But while you might feel like this is adding clarity by providing additional explanation, all you're really doing is annoying the reader with needless repetition and making your content less effective.

13. Get a Second Monitor

I'm hesitant to include tips that aren't strictly related to writing or SEO, but getting a second monitor will significantly speed up your writing workflow.

A second monitor will make it much easier to research while you're writing. Instead of switching between tabs or making two tiny browser windows on your screen, you have the luxury of looking between two full-sized windows.

Also, if you have a laptop, getting a second monitor will save you from a lot of neck pain. I've been working exclusively on laptops for over ten years, and it's hard to describe how much better my neck feels now that I've got a second monitor sitting at eye level that I don't have to look down at to use.

If you do get a second monitor, I recommend the ASUS VS239H-P 23" LED Monitor (not an affiliate link). This is the monitor I use, and I find the screen quality and size to be excellent for the relatively low price.

One more tip: I recommend elevating the monitor so that it's at eye level, as this will greatly reduce neck pain. You can accomplish this with a monitor stand or by stacking a few large books.

Whatever you do, don't place it to the left or right of your laptop screen — you'll end up constantly craning your neck to the left or right, which will make your neck pain even worse than if you didn't have a second monitor at all.

14. Use Tables to Compare Things

Tables are an excellent way to compare two or more different things. If you're comparing different products, locations, or anything else, placing at least one table in your post is a must-do.

Inserting a table is also a great way to give your post another shot at winning the featured snippet. While Google usually doesn't award table snippets over paragraph or list snippets, there are certain instances where tables will nab the top spot.

15. Place Your Featured Image Below the Introduction

If your article is "below the fold" when the page loads, you're going to have a higher bounce rate. This means that when the screen loads, your article text isn't visible: readers will need to scroll down to start reading the post.

To reduce your bounce rate and rank higher on Google, you need to make sure your content is the first thing the reader sees. To do that, you have to place your featured image below your introduction.

Many WordPress themes give you the option to insert featured images into your posts automatically. To ensure your content isn't below the fold, you should disable this option and insert featured images manually into the post instead.

16. Use (and Embed Links to) Authoritative Sources

When researching your articles, you must use authoritative, trustworthy sources.

Here are a few examples of sources you can trust:

• .edu domains
• Academic journals (use Google Scholar)
• Wikipedia (find the root source if possible - check Wikipedia's footnotes).
• Subject matter experts
  • With a subject matter expert, you don't need to find their "root source" for a claim. If they are credentialed in their field or are clearly an expert on a topic, you can take them at their word.

In that same vein, you should do what you can to avoid using "untrustworthy" sources like random blogs or forums.

To emphasize the importance of using authoritative sources, here's a true example I encountered when editing an article written for one of my writing service clients.

My client wanted an article about whether coffee makes you dehydrated or not. I assigned this to one of my writers, and they found a blog that stated that coffee makes you dehydrated. They then wrote the entire article based on the premise that coffee dehydrates you.

I did some fact-checking while editing the article, and I came across multiple authoritative health websites and academic journals that said that coffee doesn't dehydrate you - it only increases the urge to urinate, which makes it seem like it's a dehydrating drink.

As you can see, blogs from random authors can be completely wrong. This happens because the authors of these blogs face no real consequences if they publish incorrect information.

Industry professionals and academic journals, on the other hand, have a reputation to uphold. In certain instances, there may even be legal repercussions if they provide false information.

So if a doctor, lawyer, or other accredited professional makes a statement, you can take it as fact. But if it's some random person, take their claims with a grain of salt and do some follow-up research to confirm that what they're saying is true.

Note: It's okay to find claims on forums or blogs. There's nothing wrong with it. In many cases, it will be the only information on a topic you can find.

Just do everything you can to track down the "root source" for your claim. This will be easy if the blog author or forum user links to their sources, but you'll need to do some digging if they don't.

Also, know that not every claim will have some ultra-authoritative source backing it up.

In some instances, there won't be any authoritative sources to verify something. Some examples include:

• How well a certain product does a certain task (Example: A product review says a certain lawnmower doesn't wet grass very well).
• A claim or fact about some niche, non-scientific topic (Example: The best way to clean tape residue off a book cover).

In these situations, you'll need to either verify the information through your own experiments or trust the word of whoever is talking about the topic on the internet.

17. Customize Your Featured Images (Don't Use Unedited Stock Photos)

According to a Backlinko study, sites with unique images outrank sites that use stock photos.

This might sound like a problem at first. Who has the time to buy a camera and take original, high-quality images for every blog post you publish?

Fortunately, the solution is pretty straightforward. You don't need to give up using stock photos. You just need to edit them a bit.

All you need to do is use some image editing software (Canva is an excellent free option) and add your post's title to the image. You can also add a layer of black with some opacity to make the title stand out against the backdrop of the image.

That's it. A few minutes of extra work, and you've turned a stock photo into an original featured image that will make your site look more professional and help you rank higher on Google.

18. Add YouTube Videos

Embedding YouTube videos into your content is an easy way to boost post quality and make the content more helpful for readers.

While there aren't any studies that prove that embedding YouTube videos into your posts helps your posts rank higher, making your content more interactive and helpful is never a bad thing. There are quite a few instances where a video will be much more useful to a reader than a blog post explaining what the video shows.

If you run a YouTube channel alongside your blog, this is also an excellent way to direct blog readers to your channel.

Note that embedding YouTube videos can increase your page's load time significantly. To cut down on this load time, I recommend using the Lazy Load for Videos WordPress plugin.

19. Outsource Your Content Creation

If you're short on time or have trouble writing, the easiest solution is to outsource your content creation. 

Like it or not, writing quality has a huge impact on how well your posts will rank and how much money your site generates.

The main purpose of your blog might be to inform readers. However, if extracting information out of your post is the literary equivalent of pulling teeth, most people will bounce from your page pretty quickly and go find another article to read.

That's why your posts must be written by someone who is trained to write helpful, easy-to-read blog posts.

That person might very well be you ‒ if you're a good writer and have the time to dedicate to learning all of the ins and outs of blog writing.

However, if you're lacking in either time or writing skill, outsourcing your posts to a professional content service is the best way to grow your site and build a passive, location-independent income.

If you're interested in outsourcing your content, I recommend my professionally trained team at We Write Blog Posts.

Hundreds of website owners have hired us to create content for their blogs and have been extremely happy with the results.

Take a look at our testimonials page and see for yourself.

Website owners across all different niches keep hiring us for one simple reason: 

We know how to write accurate, in-depth blog posts that engage readers and are optimized for ranking first on Google. 

My team has undergone extensive proprietary training to ensure the posts they produce are well-researched and easy to read. No matter what niche you're in, we'll be able to write authoritative content that outranks the competition and drives truckloads of traffic to your site.

We also go the extra mile with SEO optimization to ensure your posts rank as high as possible. This includes...

• Optimizing your posts to win featured snippets
• Writing titles optimized to increase clickthrough rates
• Embedding outbound links to authoritative websites
• Optimizing posts for skimmability
• And much more

And if time is a concern handle every part of the post creation process:

• Keyword research
• Post length recommendations
• Subheading selection
• In-depth research
• Post writing
• Post editing

Finally, we offer unlimited rewrites and revisions on all content. If you're at all unhappy with any of your posts, we'll revise and rewrite them until you're satisfied. That's a promise.

To learn more, head to our website or send me a message via our contact form ‒ I'll be happy to answer any questions you might have about our process or how we would approach creating content for your niche.

Final Thoughts

Thanks for reading ‒ I hope you found this guide helpful. If you implement these tips moving forward, you're virtually guaranteed to write better blog posts that rank higher on Google and make you more money.

What are your thoughts on this list? Do you have any tips of your own to share? Let me know in the comments below.

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by Steve Rajeckas