How To Write Effective Blog Posts/Articles

The old SEO adage that “Content Is King” remains true today.  If you want your website to rank well and attract a large audience, you mustpublish great content.  If you want to establish your brand as an authority in your chosen industry, you mustpublish great content.  

In addition to producing original content, you must take steps to ensure that it is effective at reaching the goals you have set for it.  To help you get started, this guide will share several essential steps to making effective blog posts and articles.  We’ll also explain how the “Skyscraper Technique”can be used to promote your highest-quality content.

What is an “effective” content?

An effective piece of content is one that achieves specific goals like:

• Increasing brand awareness
• Attracting visitors to your website
• Increasing the number social media followers your business has
• Establishing your business or brand as an authority in your chosen industry
• Informing or entertaining readers to generate goodwill
• Improving the search engine optimisation of your website
• Generating leads

The type of content presents a business or business in a positive light while providing value to the people who read it.

Writing effective content

Use the following steps to create content that gets the job done.

Step 1: Know your audience

Before writing another blog post or article, spend more time getting to know your audience.  Are they young or old?  Highly educated or poorly educated?  Will they be able to understand technical concepts or will they need you to explain everything?  Are they interested in certain topics?

By learning more about the people actually reading your content, you can tailor it to suit their preferences — which makes it much more effective.  They will be able to understand what you are saying and your content will hold information that they find valuable.  Some aspects to consider when writing for a specific audience include:

• The terminology you use
• The complexity of your language
• How much you need to explain new concepts that are introduced
• How you present information to the audience (blog posts, white papers, articles, tweets, infographics, images)
• The topics that your audience would enjoy learning more about

Step 2: Choose an exciting topic for your readers

So, now that you have thought about what your audience actually wants, pick a suitable topic. Any topic that your audience finds engaging, interesting or entertaining will work well.  You should also focus on topics that you:

• Enjoy writing about
• Don’t mind researching
• Are familiar with
• Know have enough depth for a long-form piece
• Know will convert into sales (optional)

Step 3: Write a compelling headline

it can sometimes be difficult to grab the attention of people who are browsing content online.  That’s why it is critical that you develop an exciting headline that sparks the interest of potential readers.  Some useful techniques for choosing a headline include:

• Make the value proposition obvious, telling the reader who they will get
• Use strong languagelike “epic”, “exposed”, “fail”, and “love/hate” to trigger emotion
• Use alliteration (“Fun Facts About Fruit”)
• Use numbers (“10 Best Internet Research Tips For 2019”)
• Keep your title length below 15 words
• Identify and Solve a Problem
• Use any keywords that you are interested in ranking for

Step 4: Create a hook to grab the reader’s attention

Once a reader has decided that your headline is worth clicking on, you have another 3 or 4 seconds to convince them to keep reading.  This can be achieved by giving the reader a compelling hook that grabs their attention.  Some useful techniques for creating a hook include:

• Ask a question of the reader then tell them you have the answer
• Begin with important facts (like a shocking statistic)
• Use the active tense
• Avoid jargon and confusing words
• Start with a quote
• Be descriptive but keep sentences short

Step 5: Decide what you want the reader to take away from the article

Before really getting stuck into the article, think of a single key message or idea that you would like to convey to the reader.  Keep this concept in mind as you write the article, bringing your points back to this core message.

Step 6: Make sure your content is informative and provides value

Good content will always attempt to share useful knowledge with the reader.  Make a habit of including any relevant statistics, facts, figures and instructions in your articles.  If you make a point that could be disputed, use data to back it up.  By the time the reader has finished reading your content, they should always be better informed about the topic.

Step 7: Check that your content is conversion-ready

If your content is produced with the intention of driving sales, ensure that the reader has many opportunities to make a purchase as they read your content.  Use clear call-to-action throughout the article and provide all of the information you might need to convince the reader to go ahead with the purchase.

Step 8: Use a unique voice

If you want your content to stand apart, write it in a unique voice.  Use a tone that matches your personality, the audience, and the brand persona.  Is it a fun lifestyle brand?  Make your content funny and clever.  Is it a security company?  Focus on being professional and informative.

Step 9: Write for the web (format your content)

The way that humans consume online content is very different to how they might read a book or pamphlet. They are more likely to scan pages quickly, looking for information that is of some value.  Accommodate this kind of behaviour by formatting your content appropriately and using:

• Short paragraphs and short sentences
• Headings and subheadings
• Bullet points
• Easy-to-read fonts and colours
• Links
• Images and infographics

Step 10: Optimise for SEO

If you are creating content for search engine optimisation purposes, make sure you have included all of the keywords that you are interested in ranking for.  If you haven’t performed any keyword research, simply focus on the keywords that you think people interested in the article will use when searching for content.  Use a mix of short and long tail keywords in the article’s title, headings, URL, and links.

Step 11: Proofread and publish

Once you have finished creating your article, proofread it multiple times.  If it is a particularly important piece, you can also ask for a colleague or friend to read it and provide you with feedback.

Step 12: Promote!

Your job isn’t over once you have pressed the publish button.  Great content should be promoted with great marketing.  Use social media, email newsletter, advertising, and other marketing techniques to promote your content.  If you are stuck for ideas, look at this excellent list of content promotion techniquesposted by Neil Patel.

Step 13: Track the success of your content

Finally, track the success of each blog post or article you publish.  This will tell which types of content are most popular with your readers and effective at reaching your content marketing goals. You can use tools like Google Analytics and Social Mentionto track how many times your content is read or shared.

Promoting content with the skyscraper technique

Content creation rarely works unless it is performed in conjunction with link building and other forms of marketing. One of the best strategies for marketing high-quality content is the skyscraper technique, which was developed by Backlinko. It can generate the high-quality links that your high-quality content deserves.

The concept is fairly simple as it only involves three steps:

Step 1: Find link-worthy content

Step 2: Make content that is even better

Step 3: Reach out to the right people to promote your content

The first step involves locating a “proven linkable asset”.  This is another way of describing a high-value piece of content that people are happy to link to.  This kind of content is extremelyinformative, useful, or entertaining. Proven linkable assets can quickly accumulate links from other websites and social media profiles.

The next step is create your own version of the article and make it better — “much” better.  There are a few ways to do so:

• Make it longer
  If the original post was 3,000 words on the 20 Best Weight Loss Supplements, your post should be 5,000 words on the 30 Best Weight Loss Supplements.
• Make it more up-to-date
  If the proven linkable asset was created a few years ago, it may be out-of-date. Add recent facts and figures to your version, and correct any concepts in the original article that are no longer valid.
• Better designed
  Content that is visually attractive can attract a bigger audience. You can add visually striking infographics and images to your article to make it better than the article you are attempting to beat.
• More thoroughly researched
  You can go into more detail than the original article and link to the sources of information that you used.

Finally, we have reached step 3 — reaching out to the right people.  In this step, you will reach out to website owners who have linked to the proven linkable asset or other content that is similar in nature. We are looking for websites that are in your niche, interested in the topic, and happy to link to high-quality articles.

To find the websites that are linking to similar content, you can use a tool like ahrefs.com, Majestic SEOor Link Explorer.  Search for the domains that are pointing to the proven linkable asset (or articles that are similar to it).

Export this list of links to a spreadsheet.  Clean it up by removing websites that contain user submitted content links article directories and forums.  We are only interested in websites where the owner has manually added the link because there believe it is a high-quality asset.

Next, manually contact the websites in the spreadsheet.  Inform them that you have created an authoritative piece of content on a topic they are interested in.  Tell them that it is more up-to-date or comprehensive than the other site that they were already linking to.  Most webmasters will be more than happy to change their link to point to your content. The quality of the links that are generated using this technique is typically very high.

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