What’s this? A Blog on Blogging!?! Truly this is the Inception of Online Marketing! When writing a Blog, we want to focus on several things. Beyond giving good content, beyond giving an interesting Blog, we have to create one that will be found online and also help persuade your customers to come in. In this small guide, I will try and take you through how to write a good and effective Blog which will help you get more traffic on your website and help sell your product.
So You Want To Write A Good Blog?
Initially you’ll want to choose a topic relevant to your business. Let’s say you’re an Indian Restaurant, and you want to get people to come to your restaurant, you can write about your staff, your business and your products. You’ll want a blog you can share on Social Media and one you can feel proud of writing.
So check out my example of a blog on Chicken Tikka Masala. Have a read here!
What Makes This a Good Blog?
This is a blog that wasn’t written in a day. It required research, patience, time and effort. My initial steps were to look into Chicken Tikka Masala as a dish. I did some basic research into its history so I could share it with the audience and try to hook them in. A little break before getting into the meat of the Blog can be useful because the user reading the Blog wants to get to the meat, meaning they will be on your page a little longer, because they can see the topic is being covered. This will reduce your bounce rate and increase the value of your blogs in the eyes of search engines.
My research had to go into great detail into the health benefits of Chicken Tikka Masala, I needed to overcome all of my competing blogs which merely went into speculation. They were lazy, so I needed to provide good solid facts. It’s easy to say: Chicken Tikka Masala is good because it is said that Garlic keeps away vampires. It’s better to find out the things that Garlic does that really benefit people and talk about those.
I generally like to add humour to my blogs, though I left it out in this one because the subject matter felt like humour might alienate the audience. Each ingredient is in itself pretty healthy, so I covered them in great detail so the potential customer realises that actually, the only thing they want for dinner is Chicken Tikka Masala! I mean wow, I want one now whilst I’m writing this and I don’t even like it! I strongly suggest Hariyali Chicken Tikka with Mushroom rice instead! The flavour is astounding, and surprisingly it’s also pretty healthy!
I added a brief guide to the preparation and cooking of Chicken Tikka Masala avoiding going into too much detail and giving measurements so I wouldn’t get people making it rather than coming in. It’s not hard to look up a good guide on cooking our product, but ideally what I want to achieve is a potential customer looking at it, thinking “Wow! Indian food is healthy, I know where I’m going to eat tonight!” Then coming in to my restaurant. We want them to know we can cook the product but also why it’s healthy, so this is the focus of our blog post.
Exclamation Marks!!!
I love exclamation marks! I use them everywhere I possibly can in marketing! But why? Aha! A question mark! Now you really want to know!!!
Enthusiasm is complicated when it comes to reading. Commas extend sentences and Full Stops are boring. If you see too many Full Stops, your eyes just read the statement and that’s all it is. It doesn’t embed it in the mind. Long extended sentences can be really, really, really, unnecessarily boring…
Using exclamation marks will make your work feel more exciting and keep a reader’s eyes on the page! See how it picked up there! I learned this from Ray Bradbury, who’s usage of exclamation marks in his short stories created a level of dynamism between most characters that is generally missing in most of the books I’ve read, and I’m a big reader!
Break Up That Blog With Helpful Headings!
Headings are useful in several ways, they show your reader where they are in the Blog and they give the reader a tiny psychological rest. Sometimes your information may be good but it might feel like a slog rather than a Blog – feeling almost like that your reader is bogged down with endless text, almost like they’re starting to drown in an endless miasma of writing that blurs and swirls and falls into nothingness.
A helpful heading will wake up the reader and bring them back into the blog, let them know where they are and ground them again. It helps keep your readers awake. I do like using alliteration in my headings as a stylistic choice because I feel it helps them flow which works well with exclamation marks!
Keep A Watchful Eye On Your Word Count!
Word count is important. There are some Bloggers who recommend you write around 250 to 500 words in your Blogs. These kind of Blogs are short and insignificant and they can be almost completely pointless. It’s hard to convey a good level of quality information with such a small word count and your ranking will not be as good as it will be if you write a lot more! I try and keep my Blogs at a minimum of 1000 words, though sometimes go as little as 750 if I don’t have a lot to say in them.
In 1000 words, you can place a lot more Keywords and have them appear a lot more, with 19 or 20 uses per Keyword in the Blog. This will keep your Blog feeling a lot less spammy and increase the plethora of information you can include on whichever topic you choose to cover. It’s recommended to keep sentences with less than 20 words each, though this is something I don’t strictly adhere to. I find you can also break up the flow by using commas in much the same way as you can see in my Chicken Tikka Masala Blog!
Show Your Readers What You’re Talking About With Impressive Images!
Images will enhance your blog and help you engage visually with your readers. You can get good quality images for free to use in your blogs. We recommend using Pixabay and Pexels for your images as their images are CC0 and free to use in this way. If you have an extensive knowledge of web design, you can also add alt-tags to these images to help increase the SEO of your blogs.
Keep Visitors Coming In With Carefully Crafted Keywords
Keywords are an integral part of Blog Writing. Your Keyword count is actually incredibly important when it comes to being found online. A lot of the time people focus on having the Keyword appear too many times, but if you’re saying Keyword, Keyword, Keyword, every sentence, your Blog will feel spammy. Good search engines have caught on to Keyword spamming and can penalise your website if you overuse Keywords in your Blog. (How many times have I used these words already! This is terrible! What you want to do is limit these words to between 1.5% and 2% of your total word count at most. Having too many of them will naturally damage your Blog’s ability to perform on search engines. That said, they are very important.
Finish With A Smile!
Whilst it’s not necessarily the most important thing in the world, it’s always nice to finish your blog in a light hearted way! This helps to break down the wall between you and your customers and people generally remember things that make them smile or laugh. You will become less of that faceless corporate entity we talked about earlier and humanize your work far better with a little humour!
I’m a social media marketing specialist based in Wivenhoe, the CEO of Fantasoft and wannabe space adventurer.