Welcome back to "Building an Online Community" series. In Part 4, we will talk about what creates a wonderful blog entry that will be useful to your readers and search engines.
A blog post should serve one of these three purposes.
- Education
- Entertainment
- Inspiration
An effective blog post will have a minimum of these things.
- Well written header
- Picture
- Opening paragraph
- Personal experience
- Main body AKA message of the post.
- Call of action
The purpose of a header is to let the readers know the subject of the post. A well written header entices readers to click on it. It builds curiosity. My most popular post is titled Never let two days go by without ... . It was one of the first posts when I started this blog. That post currently has about 4-10 times more views than any of my "Building an Online Community" posts.
Picture
Some bloggers consider posting a picture in their post very important and some consider it optional. It is your personal choice really, but I would include it if possible. Especially, if you have a picture that is relevant to your content. A good picture is like a tie. Common belief is that a good tie makes an ugly looking man attractive. Similarly, a good picture makes your post look attractive.
Opening Paragraph
It's like writing a school paper. You have an intro paragraph, a body and a conclusion. A opening blog paragraph tells the reason the blogger decided to write about the particular topic. It answers the questions, "Why are your writing this blog post?"
Personal Experience
I call this blogger's weapon of increasing stickiness. We love to know about others. It's the inquisitive human nature, we can't help. A good blogger will make use of this ... weakness if you may, and personalize the post for the readers. The readers get to know a little about the blogger's life and will also feel that they know the blogger personally. This is important if you want to turn your visitors into "repeated" visitors.
Main Body AKA Message of the Post
This is where you deliver the main message of the blog post. Regardless of whether you are trying to inform, entertain or educate, it should happen in this part of the post. It is the core of your post and should be the longest than any other part. Be careful that your blog post doesn't become so long that readers lose interest.
Call of Action
What do you want your readers to do after reading your post? Commonly, the blogger asks his/her readers to post their thoughts on the article, share the post with their friends and family, share new ideas, contact the blogger, go to a specific site to buy a product or read the next post. Call of action should guide readers to take the next step.
Few things to consider while writing blog posts
- Don't write endless posts. Size matters. Keep them short and straight to the point.
- If the post is long, make it scannable by bolding the main points or adding bullet points where possible.
- Use simple language. Your readers' vocabulary might not be the same as yours. Hence, simpler the language easier it is for everybody to understand.
- Provide internal relevant links. This allows your readers to access other interesting material on your site. It also helps search engines give your site a higher rank since that is one of the deciding factors in page ranking.
Hope this helps. If you have a question or comment about this, please post them in the comment section below. I will reply to them at my earliest.
In the past weeks, we talked about what to do before you begin your efforts of building an online community, how to prepare for the launch of your community, how to market your community after you launch it. Today, we talked about how to create a successful blog post. Next week will be the last entry in this series where we will talk about measuring your results and analyzing them for continual improvements.
Thank you for reading!
Like they say in Spanish,
Hasta La Vista, Amigo!
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