Writing a blog is like writing a perfect essay. In school, we learned essay writing from our teachers. We know that the essay must have a title. At its most basic form, the essay must have an introduction, a content section, and a conclusion.
Guess what? A blog is just like an essay! A blog is a web page that is regularly updated and is usually written in a less formal and more conversational tone. It has a structure like an essay, but it also has several key elements that make it a successful read.
Before we discuss a blog’s anatomy, we are going to try and convince you why your business needs to start generating blogs.
The Importance of Business Blogs
Blogs belong to the category of digital promotion known as content creation. Blogs serve several purposes including educating your readers, teaching them a new skill, informing them of events, engaging with them to become your community, amusing them and entertaining them.
All of these activities are intended for a single over-arching purpose – to drive inbound traffic to your website, so more people are visiting the website, maybe spending time reading interesting blogs in the site and hopefully sharing it to their community.
This increases your website’s reachability which in turn can indirectly increase conversions and sales.
The Blog Anatomy
Now that you know what blogs are meant to do for your business, let’s look at the anatomy of a blog.
1- Use Catchy Headlines
An awesome headline will grab attention immediately. The headline (or title if you like) is the hook to get the reader interested in the blog. It must compel them to want to continue reading not click away.
Ask a cheeky question. Make a bold statement. Flash some impressive statistics. One of Gizmodo’s blog was titled: ‘Kanye West used to be a great tech writer.’ The article had nothing to do with Kanye’s past. But it was a compelling hook, and a reader would be curious to read on.
Your title is the first point of contact with the reader. If you miss this part, you may have lost them completely.
If you are utilizing SEO tactics, your web content developer may also weave in keywords into the headline. It goes a long way in establishing your website organic search ranking.
2- Use Relevant Images
Images are powerful reinforcements. 92% of readers will remember an image, not the text. The image you use for the blog must complement the theme/topic discussed in the blogs.
So if you are blogging about 10 crazy foods around the world, you would want to include (one or several) images of unusual food.
Paris Hilton blogs about all things Hollywood so the images in his blogs are littered with photographs of the glitterati. The best images to use are probably your own.
But if you were writing about a techy topic like electrical transformers, it is okay to use an image of an electrical transformer.
You reader will find it strange if you stick a selfie of yourself in the blog. Unless it’s a selfie of you hugging the transformer but then you will have to relate the writing back to the image. It gets complicated so the best advice we can give you is using an image that can accurately represent the content.
If you are using stock images for your blog, please make sure that you have checked copyrights.
3- Use Catchy Titles
The blog’s introduction is your second chance to hook the reader in. If you failed to do it in the title/headline, then this is the place to do it.
Write a short introduction, not an entire essay. If you beat about the bush too long, your reader will get bored and click on.
4- The lead-in
After you’ve introduced the topic segue into the main discussion with a statement or two. If you are writing a listicle (a cross between an article and a list, by the way), you want to write a sentence or two before you start listing.
5- Use Long Tail Keywords
Write the main points you want to make in your blog in this section. Write for the audience, not the search engine. Proper keyword research is important, but your piece must also flow smoothly and read normally.
While it’s good to use long tail keywords, it’s equally important to know that littering the blog with keywords is not going to help your search engine ranking. Worse, it will drive all your readers away.
6- The Conclusion
Remember we said blogs are like essays? Blogs are however not a school essay. So there’s no need for you to summarise all the main points in a concluding section.
Instead, use the conclusion as a closing paragraph to end your blog, so readers are not left wondering what’s next?
7- An invitation to feedback
An invitation to make a comment or feedback on a particularly exciting or controversial topic is irresistible to some readers. Make sure you have a teaser or a comment section that allows the reader to respond to your blog.
If you have a comment section it is important that you check and read these regularly and reply to any reader who has posted a comment. Start the engagement with them to build the relationship. That’s what blogs are for.
8- The Connection
When you read a news article online, there are always icons above or below the article that makes it easy for you to share with others.
Putting in the right links to your blogs, integrating it with other platforms to make sharing easier are all part and parcel of blog content creation.
Now that you understand the basic structure of a blog, it’s time to get out there and start blogging. If you are too busy running the business, then contact a professional blog optimization company like GoForPost and have them design and manage your blog strategy for you.