Content Marketing: 7 Steps to Writing Your Best Blog Post

You’ve probably read or heard that starting your blog is a great way to market your business.

Indeed, a business blog allows to increase the visibility of your brand, it also allows to establish a direct link with your visitors. It is an essential tool of Content Marketing.

But who says keeping a blog necessarily says “write articles regularly” – and that can chill some!

To get you started, nothing beats a few tips. This is why we describes the 7 key steps that will allow you to produce the best blog articles possible   and with a smile! 

1 – Plan your topics

Chances are you’ll want to jump right into writing an article after reading these lines.

But what are you going to talk about?

On average, a good blog post will take you at least two hours.

You read that correctly: between the moment you type your first letter on your keyboard and the moment you click on “publish”, a considerable amount of time will pass.

No doubt, as an entrepreneur, you don’t have two hours of your time to waste. Might as well make them profitable, right? 

For this, take a moment to think about a plan. This step may seem unnecessary, but in reality it will save you a lot of time afterwards.

The subject

Understanding your target will save you precious time!

First, choose a topic that interests both your Buyer Persona, and yourself!

Having worked on your Buyer Persona beforehand, you surely know the subjects that will attract their attention.

But also consider choosing a topic in which you also have an interest. Otherwise, your lack of enthusiasm may creep into your style and you may quickly bore your readers.  

To do this, plan a small brainstorming session with the other people or ghostwriter Inside who work on the blog or are in practice to write and list all the possible topics that may be of interest to your Buyer Persona.

If you’re lacking inspiration, know that Hubspot has a pretty effective blog topic generator at your disposal: you’ll find more here  and there .

Then write down from 1 to 5 your specific interest in each topic. By keeping only the topics that have a score higher than 4, you will then have a list of blog posts that you can cover in the weeks or months to come.

What to do with other topics that you are less enthusiastic about? They will serve as a working basis for FAQs-type articles: “The 10 questions you ask yourself about”.

Rather than devoting an entire article to them, you’ll cover these topics with a single paragraph. 

If you come across a hot topic that immediately grabs your attention, it might also be a good idea to cover it on the fly.

The structure

A good blog post is an article read in its entirety

A good blog post does not happen by accident. You have to think about it before writing it and know its progress in advance.

This step will surely remind you of the painful hours of the famous “dissertations” in college, but it remains essential nonetheless.

For the general structure of your article, keep in mind the principle of the inverted pyramid: 

The inverted pyramid? A reflex to adopt to improve the performance of your blog

It is also advisable to make a detailed plan. To write this article, I started by writing this:

Introduction

Part 1: Planning

List in advance topics that interest the writer and the reader

Part 2: Research

Show that you have to look for a lot of information

Part 3: Writing

Give tips for writing your articles well

Part 4: The choice of images

Give tips for choosing what will illustrate your article

Part 5: The correction

Suggest techniques to correct the main editing errors

Part 6: Optimization

Indicate how to optimize an article for SEO, social media, etc.

Conclusion.

The goal of this plan is to show the different sections so that nothing is forgotten.

2 – Do your research

Reliable and relevant sources to meet the information needs of your readers

It would be wrong to believe that you know everything about a subject because it is your job. Better to be honest (with yourself to begin with) and accept that you will have to undertake research on the subject you are discussing.

This work takes time and some common sense. Wikipedia is, for example, a fairly reliable source of information most of the time, but certainly not foolproof.

The best is therefore to cross-check the information you copy with one, or even several reputed reliable sources such as official or government sites.

We are not asking you to show unstoppable journalistic rigor but only to be fairly certain of what you are saying.

If you are quoting a famous person, make sure they said it correctly.

3 – Choose your titles well

Everyone has an opinion on the titles. Some think that they should be written in a very descriptive way to guide the reader as in a manual, others on the contrary lean towards the choice of more abstract titles , as in certain press articles (for example “A very singular vision “Or” The carp and the rabbit “).

Unless you are a well-recognized figure in your field, we nevertheless advise you to stick to descriptive titles.

In addition, the choice of titles can be made in two other ways.

Either determine them in advance and they will be the structure of your article, or you write your paragraphs and choose a title that fits well with the idea of ​​the text. No one approach is better than the other.

In some cases, one will work better than the other depending on your readers.

A common technique is to ask a question.

This can be very effective in capturing the interest of your reader. However, be careful not to overdo it as the effect wears off quite quickly.

If you are wondering about the impact of your titles (apart from H1) on your SEO, know that it is very relative.

The search engine algorithm is no longer fooled by titles filled with keywords for a long time. It’s what’s underneath that counts!

4 – Work on your writing

We’re getting to the heart of the matter!

To write a cohesive article, it is highly recommended that you write it all in one go.

This keeps the mind focused on the subject and minimizes the risk of major oversights. 

If for practical reasons you cannot write in one piece, try to complete a whole subsection each writing session.

There isn’t much of a trick or “hack” that applies to this job in general. Writing is a skill that develops with practice, like playing the piano or dancing.

The only way to progress is to spend a lot of time on a keyboard so that at some point the text comes out naturally, expressing your ideas as fluently as possible .

If possible, avoid figures of speech and convoluted formulas.

You don’t have a literary blog, the important thing is to be understood, not admired for your style.

5 – Choose your images wisely

 Writing for the web is a special exercise, very different from writing for print.

On a digital medium, people are often in a hurry, and will be very influenced by visual stimuli.

If you only use text, even with nice formatting, it’s a safe bet that Internet users will quickly look elsewhere.

Hence the crucial importance of images to keep their attention.

Remember 3 main principles:

Images are used to make reading more comfortable: they are there to “break” the text and make it less difficult to read.

Images are used to support your point: a well-chosen image can be very useful in getting your reader to agree with you.

Pictures are used to simplify complex subjects: everyone knows Confucius’ maxim “A picture is worth a thousand words”.

Do not hesitate to use infographics if you have to put forward a lot of figures.

6 – Correct yourself

This step is much harder than it looks. It is not only a question of correcting typos and grammatical errors but above all ensuring that your text is as readable as possible.

This may mean deleting an entire paragraph if you feel it is too off topic.

A sometimes hard sacrifice but essential to the general consistency of the article.

You will therefore need to identify repetitions, of words of course but also of ideas. You can do this by asking a colleague to reread your text or reread your text aloud.

This last technique may sound strange, but you will realize that a lot of mistakes become clear when you say them.

A common mistake is to add subordinate clauses to the string. Whenever your sentences seem too long to hear, don’t hesitate to cut them.

7 – Optimize

In order for it to be read by Internet users, your text must be optimized for search engines. Here is a list of the main actions to take on a blog post to increase your chances of ranking in a good position.

Never copy text: Google favors the originality and quality of content and judges the copy very negatively. To guarantee good SEO, be inspired by others, but without copying them!

Use keywords: your text should include a number of word sequences that may correspond to what your buyer persona would enter. This will involve modifying a few passages of your original text. These insertions must therefore appear as naturally as possible.

Describe your images: Search engines cannot “see” your images. It will therefore be necessary to fill in the “alt” tag allowing them to index them.

Add links: links are the basis of SEO. Link your article with other articles on your blog but also with other blogs.

Respond to comments: Content produced in comments is indexed. By responding to your readers, you will help update the content which will benefit your SEO.

Add share buttons: thanks to these buttons, your readers will be able to share your article with their friends. Caught in this dynamic, it will be spotted by Google which will push it up in search results.

To you!

You are now better equipped to start writing your first articles. As you can see, there is nothing magical about this job.

With a little method and a lot of persistence, you will quickly see your articles being read by your customers.

Do you have something to add to this article? Leave a comment to let us know or just to let us know what you think about this article.