You probably know that blogging is an important part of digital marketing: Blogs can improve your Search Engine Optimisation, engage your audience, drive traffic to your website and more.
You might be thinking: how can I write a good blog to up my marketing game? Here is our beginner’s guide to writing a blog in 6 simple steps.
1. Content Planning
Good planning is half the battle won, you need to plan before writing your blog. To first go about your planning, you need to understand your audience. Who is your audience? A teenage boy may not find the same article as interesting as a middle-age lady would.
Based on who your audience is, next, brainstorm the topic of your blog. To help you brainstorm, you can head over to social media platforms or Google Trends to check out trendy topics.
Once you have researched a list of topics, you can plug into a keyword research tool like Google Keywords Planner to rank these keywords. A popular keyword means that there are more people searching for that topic.
2. Writing the blog
The first thing your reader sees is your title. Having a catchy title will attract the attention of your readers. Make sure to keep your title simple and include keywords in your title.
Next, you will need an introduction. Like the title, it should grab the readers attention, you can do it in many creative ways: a quote, a question and much more. Then, summarise the purpose of your post and relate to how it will address a problem the reader is facing. For example, this post is about helping beginners to blog!
3. Structuring your post
To make things easier to read, you can :
- Structure it using header, subheaders and sub-subheaders. In HTML, the header is <h1>, the subheader is <h2> and sub-subheader is <h3>.
- Utilise bullet points to make your post more concise.
3. Add photos
To make your post more interesting and colourful (literally), you can add photos that are relevant to your post! Make sure that you credit the source of your photos and add an alt text to the image. Search engines and websites cannot “see” your image, thus an alt text allows them to process what is shown in your images. For example, the alt text for this image is “Men putting up photos for a blog post”
4. Add a Call to Action
Before finishing off the post, make sure you have a Call to Action (CTA). CTA is an action that you want your audience to take: Do you want your audience to download your app? Visit your website?
5. Organise and Tag your Blog
Tagging your post allows your reader to find different articles in your site better. For example, this post can be tag as #tutorial #blogging #digitalmarketing
6. Optimise for Search Engine Optimisation
To drive traffic to your site, you need to optimise it for Search Engine. Here are some points to take note:
- Integrate keywords in your title, heading, subheading, URL, alt text and basically throughout the whole article
- Link to external credible sites. This would make your article more credible to readers and also show Google that you have done your research.
- Link to other blog post or pages on your websites. This helps search engines crawl your website and create a more accurate sitemap. When linking, make sure to use descriptive words to explain what the link is.
- Use smaller sized photos. Google rewards sites that load faster, using smaller sized photos helps your blog load faster.
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