Writing Great Blog Posts

Originally posted on 2011-04-05T10:53:00Z at http://theonlinekenyan.com/2011/04/writing-great-blog-posts.html

I recently wrote an article at EzineArticles on the art of writing great posts on your blog. It is a long and in-depth look at tips to successful blogging, this post will summarize the key points. You can aso check out this tutorial on Starting Your Own Successful blog for free.
Great blogging tips

Writing Great Blog Posts

Awesome blogs have, more often than not, one thing in common; nice content. The most important part of writing a good blog post is making sure it's readable. Think about who's going to read the post; who is your target audience? If it is a business blog, your target reader mostly sits in an office with work on wait. In that scenario it's a good idea to jump right in with the facts, figures and what your point is. If you're the chick blogger from Gossip Girl, it's doubtful your readers want any facts and figures at all. Hence the Golden Rule of Great Blogging: Put Yourself in Your Reader's Shoes.
As I always say, behind every successful blogger is good content, repeatedly written. As an introduction to great blog post writing, here's an everyday tip;put yourself in the reader's shoes. Think of yourself as a member of your target audience. Then ask yourself," what would I want to read?" If you write exactly that, you can never go wrong. - Read Full Article: How to Write a Great Post - Successful Blogging

Write Original Content

Unlike this blog post, write original information. If you have information from somewhere else, you can always write it in your own words. Google doesn't like duplicate material, and it also tells your readers that you can't take the time to write a decent post.

Choose a Topic

Try to regularly post about a specific topic. It not only increases your search engine rank on the topic's keywords, but also gives the reader an idea of what to look forward to in your blog.
 

Be Provocative | Make Your Blog Interactive

Write blog posts that make the reader think "I want to respond to that". Do this knowing you have an easy to use commenting system already set up on your blog. Most blogging platforms provide a nice default comment system. But if you can not settle for nice, there are free excellent commenting systems out there that can make your blog interactive. The best are: IntenseDebate and Disqus (Check them out).

Not Too Long, Not Too Short | Just Enough

Some bloggers then to get carried away in a line of thought and over-write a post. Some types of posts actually need a lot of information, for example if you are writing a review (e.g software and gadget reviews). At other times, your readers just want facts.

Grammar

It's good to make sense, but it's enough to just make sense. You need to make sure your "i"s are dotted and "t"s crossed, and not just figuratively. Put your commas in the right place, your words in the right context and spelling, and so on. Your readers like it and so does Google.

Make it Look Nice

Readers like things that look good. Pimp your post with nice looking graphics and images but avoid adding unrelated images, unless they're really awesome :). However, just remember that if you use too much graphics/images, your page loading speed will reduce.

Search Engine Optimization

Using some cool SEO tricks, you can get nicely ranked on search engine results. Here are some of the better SEO blogging tips:
  • Post Title and URL - Use keywords at the beginning of the post title and URL as search engine gauge the importance of words by the order they appear.
  • Keywords - Use keywords for the post sufficiently but avoid keyword stuffing. Try using it 2-3 times in a paragraph, but make it look natural.
  • Images and Video - While it is okay to add images and videos to your post, it' even better to add tags to them. Google can no read images, hence remember to add caption descriptions.
  • Using Appropriate Heading tags - h1,h2,h3; If you have no idea what these are, just Google "header tags". Find out how you can implement them on your blog platform to highlight key phrases.
  • Backlinks - Not really a blogging writing SEO tip, but the more links that point to your post, the better.
   

Be Educative

As pointed out by @MartinGicheru, be informative. Most often the reader is looking to find something new in your post. Try to give it something they can't find elsewhere.
Be educative, your readers are there to learn something new, and if possible try creating content that they wont find out there, they will love you for it. - Read his post on 7 ways to get more comments on your blog