How to Write Great Blog Posts

October 3, 2008 ·

The key to writing effective blog posts is to keep in mind that you are writing for two audiences – search engines and your customers.

Writing for Search Engines

Search engines love blog posts because the content is fresh and usually focuses on one subject per post. Every post you write about a topic or product relating to your business gives you another chance to come top in a Google search.

Here are a few tips to make sure your blog posts get you lots of targeted search engine traffic:

Decide on one key phrase or word for each post you write and include it in the post’s title, content and tags.
Write titles full of kewords. Eg. “Lego Trucks for Boys” instead of “Get Building with Lego”
Think about what potential customers will type when searching for your business. Use their language, not yours.
Write in a friendly conversational tone, as if you were talking to a client over the phone.
Leave advertising and brochure text out – this is not what blogs are for
Provide links to more info, supporting video clips etc
Include photos or screen shots if appropriate.

Writing for Customers

In this instance I refer to customers as people who have subscribed to your blog posts via the Post Notification Plugin or via Feedburner. Your subscribers will receive an email (formatted like an e-newsletter) everytime you write a new blog post.

Here are a few tips to make sure your subscribers click through to your website when they get an e-newsletter from you:

Insert the “Read More” tag into your post somewhere after the first paragraph (go to code view to find this) so they only get part of your post via email.
Include a prompt to enquire or purchase something on your website.
Include an appropriate affiliate product (such as a book) to earn your commission
Add the Related Categories plugin to your website so a list of posts in the same category appears under each post you write.
Include questions on your post to encourage readers to make comments.
Include a teaser sentance about your next post

Keep an eye on your statistics to see which posts are your most popular and which links are being clicked on the most (My next post will be about a great feature in Google Analytics called ‘Site Overlay’). You can then tweak those posts, add updates via the comments section or write more posts on the subject at a later date.

Comments

3 Responses to “How to Write Great Blog Posts”

Jo on October 3rd, 2008 3:06 pm

Forgot to mention that the e-newsletter template which goes out to your subscribers should be on a white or pale background with at least Arial size 10 text for readability.
The template should include your logo and website colours if possible.
Sorry about the newsletter I sent earlier with black background and tiny text. Lucky my subscribers were on the ball!
Rachel on October 7th, 2008 8:46 am

When I put an email link in my blog posts, is there a way of automatically inserting a title into the message? For example, I asked readers to RSVP today via a link. I’d like the title of their message to indicate that the email was generated by my post by having a title such as ‘RSVP to the kitchen garden talk’. I know people could change it, but I doubt many would and I’d like to know the response rate.
Jo on October 7th, 2008 8:47 am

There is an easy way to do this.

When you create the email link using the achor icon, you just add a ?Subject= to the end of the address (no spaces) and then write the subject. The link would look something like this…

mailto:rachel@thekitchengarden.co.nz?Subject=RSVP to Garden Talk

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