9 basic tips for writing on your blog

What will we see in this post

Writing on your blog is a very important element in content marketing strategies. It is through it that you create excellent content and involve your audience around your brand. Therefore, it is fundamental to know how to create complete content.

However, excellent guidelines and knowledge of the English language do not make someone an excellent copywriter. Some techniques are necessary so that your texts are more and more assertive for your public.

So, here is the great challenge: how can you write on your blog well?

In this post, we’ll help you understand the main points you need to think of when you’re writing content for your blog.

Are you ready for a day in the world of writing texts for the web?

Then, let’s get to it!

1. Know your target audience

Good ideas for the wrong people are merely things that don’t matter.

What’s most important when you write on your blog is to have complete content delivered at the right time and for people who are interested in it. Which means, write texts that have a purpose, with content and context.

There’s no point to searching and writing a complete post if it is not read by people who want to know more about that subject.

And how do you know who is interested?

Define your buyer persona!

Understand the problems of your potential readers and put yourself in their shoes. By doing this, you can write on your blog with real goals.

2. Choose keywords

If you already have a well-defined buyer persona, this is the ideal moment to search for keywords.

Use terms related to the niche of your blog, which have several hits when searched. To do this you can use tools such as Google Keyword Planner and Keyword Tool. They show terms related to what you are searching and indicate the average volume of search on Google for that word.

In general, you will work with two types of keywords: head and long-tail.

‘Head’ keywords refer to broader words. They describe the niche of your post in a general way. For example: you want to write a text on violins. In the development, you intend to list songs to play on the violin. A head keyword could be: “songs for the violin”.
‘Long-tail’ keywords refer to very specific terms. Because they really describe your topic, it is likely that the text reaches the first places on search engine mechanisms with little competition. Still in the example of the violins, you can be really specific. “Romantic songs to play solo on the violin at weddings” is an example that could be used.

Remember to choose keywords based on topics that your persona is trying to learn more. But avoid writing the same word repeatedly.

Right when Google was created and people started using it, in the 1990s, research results were given according to the exact keyword. Search engines weren’t able to analyze semantically. That is, they did not understand that words from the same semantic field referred to the same topic.

The analysis to rank texts in the first position on Google was done only by the syntax. This means that texts that repeated the keyword several times were shown at the top of the first page of the search engines.

Noticing this loophole, owners of websites and blogs that studied SEO techniques started to write the same term repeatedly throughout the text. Therefore, these texts were well ranked on search results. Then, search engines noticed that it was necessary to prevent that the best positions were occupied by repetitive texts.

Therefore, throughout the years, the algorithms that calculate the percentage of times that a word appears in the text have improved. Around 2007, the number of repeated keywords wasn’t taken into account to rank the text. The important thing now is the relevance of the subject and words in the text related to this content.

Some of the algorithm updates are Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird. They are responsible for relating the title to the rest of the text. So, if you write about “How to make a birthday party”, the algorithms look for synonyms and words of the same semantic field, for example, “balloons”, “hall of party”, “decoration”. Then, by using similar terms from the same semantic field, it is possible to prevent keyword stuffing (unnecessary repetition of words).

Thus, the search robots identify texts that use the same keyword many times. They are penalized and do not appear in the first positions on Google.

Now, search engines try to understand the intention of people who research each subject. By doing so, the results shown are the most useful and the ones that most relate to the keyword.

Then, the most valued texts on the search engines are the ones that provide a good user experience. That’s why the content is very important. When writing on your blog, your texts need to be educative and complete for the users.

Moreover, repetitions make the text tiresome. Readers might stop reading until the end because of this.

3. Have good ideas

It may seem easy, but having good ideas is more than just thinking about subjects that you know.

To write on your blog is a way to inform readers. Therefore, you need relevant content.

Sure that, whenever you think about a subject, it is important to write down your idea. But after this, you need to analyze if that will be useful for the blog.

So:

Research the content you’ve imagined. Check if they are subjects people research and if they are developed on the Internet.
Always keep yourself up to date. Read different blogs, magazines, newspapers and books.
Establish a study routine. Learn to search information on subjects that you don’t yet fully understand or know.

4. Be clear and objective

“Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun of York; / And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house / In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.” (Shakespeare, Richard III, Act 1, Scene 1)

Was it easy to understand all of Shakespeare’s words?

When the writing is very flowery, the understanding of the text is not complete.

Words that are difficult to understand, rarely used and that are not in accordance with your buyer persona’s vocabulary are not recommended.

The objective of your post is to solve possible problems readers of the blog may face. So, be clear and present information in an easy way so they are consumed.

5. Come up with a great title

The title is the first contact of the reader to your post. It guides the content and attracts visits to your website. Especially if it’s in competition with other content on the first page of the search engines, such as Google.

Therefore, the title needs to relate to the subject. In it, you will summarize all the content developed in the text.

An excellent title needs to:

Be attractive.
Convince the reader.
Use the keyword.
Arouse curiosity.
Have between 55 to 67 characters (so that it appears as a whole in search results).
Make promises that can be fulfilled. However, take care not to go overboard. You can’t promise a solution that the text will not present.

Moreover, you can:

Use numbered lists: 9 mistakes that are ruining your Facebook page.
Write eye-catching adjectives: How to be an innovative entrepreneur in the digital world.
Ask questions: What are the best-selling courses on the Internet?
Offer benefits: How to sell online courses: THE COMPLETE GUIDE! Notice that the person will have a complete guide.
Create urgencies: 11 facts that you need to know before you become a digital entrepreneur. To be an entrepreneur, the reader has to know these 11 facts.

Don’t forget: the title is what makes people read your text to get to your promise. Develop your content with this in mind.

6. Think about the digital format

The communication channel between you and the reader is the Internet. So, you need to think about texts that work here!

Usually, people look for fast and dynamic readings. Therefore, it is important that you write small paragraphs and sentences.

Writing on your blog is different from writing essays for school. You do not need to write an article or a text to score on the SATs. Grammatical rules still matter but the structure of the text is different.

Calm your heart, take deep breaths and think if your post is ideal for a blog.

And believe: if you write short paragraphs, people will read with much more pleasure and speed.

You can also use some tricks such as:

Divide the content by using subheadings.
Make lists throughout the text.
Use bullets to show highlighted points.
Ask questions and establish a dialogue with the reader.

These points help to improve the scannability of your text. This means that the reader will look at the post and understand the subject at once.

But don’t think that writing smaller sentences means to write less. You need to write a complete material and show everything you know about the subject. To have content that answers all the questions proposed in the heading is a very positive factor.

7. Write the best text

Depending on your market segment, it is likely that there already is content about the same subjects you wish to approach.

Don’t panic!

Research your keyword on Google (in an incognito tab) and investigate the three first websites ranked for that term. Your goal now is to write on your blog more interesting and complete texts than the ones from your competitors.

Interactive Elements generate a good experience for your buyer persona and help to educate her more. Therefore, add images, videos, and infographics. When necessary, also add hyperlinks in your text for other posts from your blog, and why not, external websites and blogs. The intention is that the reader has the richest amount of information about the topic.

8. Share the text

After these 7 tips, you can already create complete content on your blog!

So, now it is time to promote your material.

Share the post on your social media and show why people should read your text. Be creative and share what you wrote.

Keep in mind that not all people read posts through the computer. So, think about the user experience.

Before sharing your content, remember to optimize it for different devices. This will broaden the reach of your material.

To do so, you need to think about responsive websites. This means creating a blog that automatically fits any kind of device (computer, tablet, mobile phone, etc.). This kind of website shifts the display and the appearance of the elements in your text according to the size of each screen used by the reader.

WordPress is a good option to create a blog. It is possible to find optimized layouts for WordPress ready to use. And as soon as you finish creating the blog, you can make a mobile-friendly test powered by Google itself.

9. “The ace up your sleeve”

Have you ever heard the expression above?

It concerns a particular knowledge that gives the person an advantage in a given situation. Basically, it is when you change levels and manage to come out ahead of people who do the same thing as you.

The “ace up your sleeve” to write on your blog concerns your content.

When you’re developing your ideas, you can think of two kinds of content: topical and evergreen.

Topical content

It is the topic connected to a specific moment in time. For example, daily news and seasonal content.

This type of information is very useful to write on your blog. However, you will only have traffic on your post for a time of the year. It will have access peaks, but the text can become obsolete later.