How to craft a great blog post

Despite the fact that content is always the king, writers also know that the content they produce must be interesting and engaging – not just copy. Researching a good topic is the first step, this then combined with a few multimedia elements and some web design skills can improve the readability and, according to some research, the amount of social shares and likes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The following suggestions are valuable for the broad online community, from the freelance writer to the guest blogger/link builder. Check these quick wins and get known for your blog posts:

 

– The basics: heading and subheading

With YouTube becoming so big, our attention span has somewhat reduced since the 90’s. For this reason it is always best to divide your copy into subheadings and paragraphs – increasing the chance that the reader will look at the full article.

 

– The visual: images and videos

How many readers does the Sun have in comparison to other more political based papers? Much more because people like pretty pictures – so include images and videos in the blog post. There’s a trend in blogs to include funny images, high quality photos, meme, infograph etc.. Do some quick research in Flickr Advanced Commons images or YouTube, and choose what you should embed in your content. Remember to include descriptions if the multimedia content needs an explanation.

 

– The engagement

For example, your article evaluates the benefits and drawbacks of renting compared to buying, you could include a poll, asking to your readers what they prefer. Alternatively if you are talking about the Olympics you could include a quiz to complete. Going further you can embed a Flash video game if you prefer, sometimes I found myself playing with the ones shown through display advertising.

 

– You are social

Social buttons are something every publisher needs to have. There’s no way of getting away from it – it’s a big way to get more eyes reading your article.

 

– Reclaim the authorship

Authors can usually benefit from a blurb at the end or at the beginning of the article where they shows their credentials. Great author boxes contain a photo, a small description, a link to the writer’s blog, social profile and client or company website. The era of Google+ can strongly benefit from this and the new rel=author function. Basically you can connect your G+ profile to your articles. According to the new Google algorithm: the value of the content in terms of SEO is proportional to the influence of the author inside a particular community and the Pagerank, see the function below:

Page rank x Author Rank = Authority page rank

Have you stumbled across other great ways of crafting blog posts? Drop us a tweet @tugagency and keep on talking about best practices.