Staring at a blank screen and crafting the perfect post that ranks well and engages readers can feel like a Herculean task. If you're like most bloggers, you're looking for ways to make your content shine in the crowded world of SEO blog writing. This guide will offer expert-vetted blog content writing tips to help you write a killer post. Whether you're a seasoned pro or just starting, these insights will help you create content that resonates with your audience and meets your blogging goals.
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What is Blog Writing?
Blog writing is about creating content that connects with people. At its core, it’s a way to share ideas, tell stories, provide information, or even entertain readers through an online platform. Think of it as having a one-on-one conversation with someone—except instead of talking, you’re using words to capture their attention, answer their questions, or just brighten their day.
Crafting Relatable and Valuable Content
Blog writing isn’t just about throwing words onto a page. It’s about crafting something that resonates with your audience. Whether you're writing about travel tips, technology trends, or personal growth, the goal is to make the content relatable and valuable. It’s like being the friend with the best advice or the coworker who knows how to explain something clearly.
Keeping it Casual and Engaging
Unlike other types of writing, blog writing has a casual vibe. It’s not like an academic paper or a formal report where you must stick to rigid rules. Blogs thrive on personality and connection. You can use humor and analogies, even ask rhetorical questions to keep things engaging.
Building a Relationship with Your Audience
It’s also interactive in a way other writing often isn’t. Readers might leave comments, share your post on social media, or even return for more content if they like your style. In a sense, blog writing builds a relationship between you and your audience.
Structuring for the Web
And let’s not forget about the technical side. A good blog post isn’t just well-written and structured for the web. That means breaking up text with subheadings, using keywords for SEO, and including links and visuals to make the content easier to skim and more engaging.
1. Mastering How-to Blog Posts: Step-by-Step Guides
How-to blog posts are your trusty guides to getting things done. They break down tasks into simple, digestible steps. For example, if you're into recipes, a how-to post can teach you the ins and outs of making the perfect soufflé. These posts are about giving your readers the tools they need to succeed.
2. Listicles: The Art of Organized Content
List-based posts, or listicles, are all about structure. They present information in a tidy list format, making it easy for readers to scan and absorb. Think of them as your go-to for lists of products, fascinating historical events, or those quirky facts that make you say, "Wow, I didn't know that!" Cracked.com made this style famous, and it’s still going strong.
3. News Articles: Adding Your Spin to Current Events
News article posts are more than just reposting headlines. They provide your unique take on trending news, adding insights and opinions. Whether you agree or disagree with the news, these posts invite readers to think critically and engage with current events more deeply.
4. Interview Posts: Letting Others Share Their Stories
Interview blog posts let your readers hear from experts, thought leaders, or interesting folks with something to say. These posts typically start with a brief intro about the interviewee, followed by a Q&A format. It’s like sitting down for a chat and letting your audience eavesdrop.
5. Review Posts: Your Honest Opinion on Products and Media
Review posts are about sharing your thoughts on movies, books, gadgets, or anything else that can be critiqued. Some focus on a single item, while others take a list-based approach. They help readers make informed decisions by providing honest, firsthand experiences.
6. Personal Essays: Sharing Your Unique Journey
Personal blog posts are where you open up and share your thoughts, experiences, and opinions with your readers. While they’re usually found on personal blogs, they can be an excellent way for any blogger to build a more personal connection with their audience.
7. Explainer Posts: Diving Deep into Complex Topics
Explainer posts are like your trusty encyclopedia entries, breaking complex topics into easy-to-understand language. Unlike how-to posts, they’re not about completing a task but understanding a subject. Depending on the topic, these can be short and sweet or long and comprehensive.
8. Image-Based Posts: Letting Pictures Tell the Story
Image-based posts focus on visuals, whether a single infographic or a gallery of images. While heavily relying on visuals, they still include some text to provide context and make them more engaging and informative.
9. Explainer Posts: Making the Complex Simple
Explainer posts are where you break down complex topics into easily digestible information. These posts take a topic and make it understandable, often using visuals or analogies to simplify the information.
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How To Write A Blog Post People Want To Read?
The Art of Readability
A good blog post isn't just about the information you deliver; it’s about how you provide it. Long, winding sentences and thick paragraphs create a barrier to entry. Think of your reader as a tired commuter trying to get home.
They don’t want detours or roadblocks; they want a smooth ride. Break up your text with:
Short paragraphs
Direct language
Bullet points
Subheadings aren’t just for show; they’re the signs that guide your readers along the way, letting them know what’s coming up next.
Visuals: The Secret Ingredient
It’s not enough to have words on a page; you must also give your readers some eye candy. Images, videos, infographics, and gifs serve a purpose beyond decoration. They help explain complex ideas and keep your readers engaged.
Think of visuals as the spice that makes your content palatable. A well-placed image or chart can distinguish between a reader who sticks around and one who bounces off your page.
Delivering Real Value
Your readers are on a mission. They’re searching for solutions, advice, or inspiration. Your job is to give them what they need and then some. Don’t just answer their questions; anticipate them. Offer insights or tips they didn’t even know they were looking for.
And be sure to make your content actionable. Give readers something they can do right away. Those “aha!” moments will keep them returning for more.
SEO: Your Blog’s Lifeline
Your blog post isn’t just a one-time deal; it’s an investment. You must optimize it for search engines to ensure it keeps paying off. Keyword research is your first step, but don’t stop there. Craft a compelling meta description, and use internal and external links to beef up your post. SEO isn’t just about getting your content seen; it’s about keeping it relevant.
Finding the Balance
Writing a great blog post is all about balance. You must blend your unique voice and insights with the practical elements that make online content engaging. Get that balance right, and you’ll have readers not just clicking—but staying.
12 Expert-Vetted Blog Content Writing Tips To Write A Killer Post
1. Start With an Outline
Once you have an idea for a topic and the approximate word count, you’ll want to plan out the structure of your articles. This is a crucial step for producing a substantial piece of content. Your outline should contain three main elements:
Introduction
This will be the opening paragraph of your article. Add bulleted notes in your outline with ideas to include in your intro.
Body
This will be the meat of your article. Use your outline to organize all of your thoughts. Each main idea should have its section within your article. Jot down the main points you’d like to include in these sections and some examples to illustrate your points.
Conclusion
This will be the final 1-2 paragraphs of your article. While not every article needs a concluding section, it is a nice way to tie together all your main points. Wrap up your outline with a concluding section, and add bullet points with the ideas you want to include.
If you’re stuck creating your outline, look at these blog post templates for inspiration. They include a variety of blog content formats, from how-to posts to beginner’s guides to case studies. You can also learn to use AI to plan and write blog posts.
2. Understand Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Blog articles are valuable for driving traffic to your site through search engines. Each article is an opportunity to optimize for keywords you wouldn’t usually be able to optimize for on a static page on your site.
The most important thing to understand about SEO for blog articles is that you should always write for people first. Search engines love content that provides value to readers. Ensure you’re covering a topic people want to read about and that your article is a helpful resource. Make sure you use those keywords naturally. Don’t force keywords in to include them. Remember, we’re writing for people first.
3. Research Trending Keywords
SEO strategies in your blog post will help it reach a wider audience. If you don’t care about reaching a broad audience and just want to write your blog for yourself or to share with close friends and loved ones, don’t worry about this tip.
But if you do want to reach a wider audience by having your blog post rank higher on search engines, take the time to research relevant keywords for your post. Soovle, keywordtool.io, Google Search Console, and Google Keyword Planner are valuable tools to test out how well a specific keyword ranks and find related keywords you can include in your blog post.
4. Use Keywords Strategically
In addition to doing keyword research to understand what your audience wants to read about, you should incorporate those keywords into the text. First, adding keywords to your article's title and body is good practice. This helps Google get a clear understanding of what your article is about.
When you upload your post, be sure also to include keywords in the following places:
Meta Title: This is the blue title in Google search results.
Meta Description: This is the short paragraph beneath the blue title in Google search results.
Alt Text: This is text you add to your images to make them “readable” for search engines (more on that in step 12.)
It’s important to note that your keywords should fit naturally within the text. Repeated, indiscriminate use of keywords is called keyword-stuffing, a spammy practice that can harm your SEO.
5. Use Data and Research
In addition to giving your article a tight structure, you’ll need to back up your statements. This ultimately makes for a persuasive, influential, and credible piece.
On top of that, having a data-rich piece maximizes the chances that people will link back to your article on the web. Anytime you get a backlink to your article, the post’s search engine rank improves. As you piece together your article's ideas, research to find statistics that support your claims.
For instance, don’t just say, “More and more people are browsing the internet through mobile.” Say “About half of web traffic worldwide comes from mobile.” Building this data into your outline before writing is a good idea.
6. Prioritize Long Blog Posts
Research shows that longer blog posts, those between 1,500 and 2,000 words, perform better and get more shares on social media. On average, the most effective blog post length for SEO in 2020 was 1,890 words.
Why are long posts so effective? First, they allow readers to explore topics in-depth, providing them with more profound value. They also let you establish your expertise and build your authority in the field. Typically, longer posts will perform better for SEO since they give you space to address the most critical keywords around a particular topic.
7. Keep it Conversational
A blog post is a relatively informal, often fun piece of writing. Although there are plenty of technical blogs on the web, you’ll notice that even these tend to maintain a reasonably conversational tone when explaining niche and complex topics.
The Casual and Conversational Tone of Blogging
Notice how most blog posts speak directly to the reader in the second person. You would never do that in a piece of academic or professional writing. Also, notice how plenty of blog posts, from how to finish highly technical projects to completely subjective movie character hairstyle rankings, give you a sense of the author’s personality by including short asides, personal opinions, and sometimes even broken grammar rules to mimic speech patterns.
Breaking the Rules Intentionally
If you’re going to break the rules, you need to do it carefully and with an apparent stylistic reason for doing so. For example, you might opt for sentence fragments, rather than whole paragraphs, in certain sections of your blog post because this magnifies your words’ impact. Take a look at this to see what we mean:
I’d applied to 10 colleges in total. Five of them, I knew I was a shoo-in. I thought I had somewhere between an OK and a good shot at getting in for four. And the last one, my holy grail of higher ed, I was sure they’d never accept me.
Then the envelopes started coming in. Thick ones, thin ones, glossy, colorful ones, and nondescript white ones that could easily be mistaken for junk mail. And then it arrived. The letter I’d been waiting for since seventh grade. My acceptance letter from my dream university.
See how this blog post emphasizes key sentences by making them stand-alone paragraphs. That’s one way bloggers make their posts sound and feel like in-person conversations. Also, notice how this excerpt includes informal language like “shoo-in” and literary devices like a synecdoche (referring to acceptance and rejection letters as “envelopes.”)
8. Don’t Shy Away From Voice
In a sea of noise, it’s difficult for signals to stand out, even if those signals are meaningful and truly valuable.
One method for grabbing your audience’s attention is by expressing your personality in your writing. It makes you stand out from every other blogger, which means you can build an audience organically. Don’t be afraid to let your personality infuse your blog writing.
9. Read and Re-read
Once you have finished a post, leave it and return to it later with a fresh mind and eyes. Read and reread it for grammatical errors, and ensure that you have brought your points concisely, with points logically flowing one after the other. Look at your title again and see if you can fit a critical keyword.
Reviewing your work is hard, but there are a couple of nifty tools that can help you with that:
Grammarly: This writing app includes a grammar checker and gives you tips relevant to your style.
Hemmingway app: Like the famous writer, this app is about keeping your writing style bold and clear. It’ll guide you through cutting out any unnecessary words.
10. Use a Variety of Visuals
Your writing is the core of your blog posts, but it’s not the only element to include. It also helps to add visual elements to your articles. Articles get shared twice as much when they have one image per every 75-100 words.
Breaking Up Text with Visuals
With that in mind, break up large blocks of text by incorporating images and videos. This keeps your readers’ attention on the page for longer and prevents them from getting bored or intimidated by so much text.
Using High-Quality Images and Optimizing for SEO
Use unique, high-quality images to create a polished and professional piece. If you cannot use your photographs, you can get free stock photos from sites like Unsplash and Pexels. Once you upload the images to your blog, add alt text to optimize them for SEO.
11. Include Clickable CTAs
Do you ultimately want your readers to become clients? This may be the case if you’re blogging for your business or selling items or services related to your brand. If this is your goal, you can design blog posts in a way that points readers to your products. Sprinkle calls to action throughout your post, especially toward the beginning of your article, where you know readers will see them.
CTAs are short, actionable phrases that get readers to buy or move them closer to making a purchase. “Start my free trial” or “Book a 15-minute call.” You’ll want to add a hyperlink to your CTAs that takes readers to a registration, sign-up, or product page.
Even if you aren’t selling products, you can still use CTAs to build engagement among readers and encourage them to explore your blog. For example, you can add CTAs that link to other blog posts or encourage readers to subscribe to your blog newsletter.
12. Make Use of Social Media
Attract more readers to your article by sharing it on social media. Tools like HootSuite and Buffer can help you manage your social media and schedule posts in advance. You can add sharing buttons directly to your articles through tools like AddThis.
Suppose you want to be even more aggressive about reaching a larger audience. In that case, you can also run ads on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn promoting your article to people with a specific interest in your topics.
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