How to write great blog post

culled from:punch.com

Without mincing words, it is not easy to include blogging as part of the arsenal of any online marketing campaign.

But without creating adequate contents on a regular basis for the search engines to feed, a website can lose out on one of the over 200 factors that is being considered for ranking a website. Caveat here – truth be told, no one is really sure. And if you ask the Google team, no one is ready to talk about it.

Probably they don’t even know all the factors involved.

But one thing has been proved. Call it the freshness factor or whatever. Over time it has been established that a website that produces new content on a regular basis attracts more qualified traffic as people have the opportunity to stumble on such through other doorways. This has led indirectly to a higher lead acquisition rate.

When carried out intentionally, blogging can also help you attract editorial links which are the kind of back-links Google wants to see on your website.

While blogging holds a lot of potentials, business blogging is more difficult. From the tone, to images, length etc, it can be hectic turning out posts after posts on a regular basis.

I have therefore designed a framework that can help you to produce more content in lesser time.

Note: This is an extract from a larger framework but it will give you an insight into the process you can put in place to create content easy for your team depending on the number of people involved.

If you ask for my advice, I would say every member of your staff should get involved. After all, every member of staff is a customer care representative and can therefore bring their wealth of experience to contents your customers want to read.

Total production time: one week

Phase 1:

Research

The research phase is usually the most important and can take up to three to four days for effective brainstorming but with practice, this time frame can be reduced.

Some of the questions you want answers to include:

Who is this article for?

This is where defining your audience comes in. Any content that is produced must target a particular persona. Depending on the size of your business, your persona can be as much as 20 or as little as two.

What keyword are you targeting?

It is all about keywords. People look online for information based on a set of phrases called keyword. By knowing what keywords you want to target, you are making your content more discoverable. When you write your content without keywords, you lose out on additional traffic that the search engines might send to your website.

Next is to pick a particular topic you want to write about.

Immediately you have your target keyword, throw it into Google and see what topics people have written about that keyword. This will give you ideas of topics you can write about depending on your level of expertise.

This step is important to the research phase. Once you have your topic in mind, you want to see if there is any content gap you can fill. Can you make the post longer? Can you make it more visually appealing? Is it an aggregation of ideas or you can support a contrary opinion?

Remember at this stage, you want to do something different and not turn up the same content everyone has beaten to death.

If yes, then you can move on to the next phase. If not, it might make better sense to simply look for a new topic.

Phase 2:

Write

Usually it can take up to 48 hours to write an article of 700 words but with practice come perfection especially if you are writing from experience.

Step 1: Write out your initial draft: At this stage, you just want to get the ideas out. You do not need to bother with formatting etc. Just write everything out.

Step 2: Support it with quotes, statistics or any other references. If you want to make your article appear more authoritative, you need to support it with facts, statistics or sometimes link to an article that supports what you are writing about.

Step 3: Give it a break. Sometimes your break can be as much as a day or it might be matters of hours. The idea is to give you time to cool off. Then come back after that and start editing your blog.

Conclusion:

Creating content can be difficult but when you have a process in place, it becomes easier to turn out contents at a regular pace.

Do you have a business blog? How long does it take you to write a blog post?