How to Create Blog Content

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How to Create Blog Content

Before you start writing your day-to-day blog posts, you will want to make sure that the static pages and other parts of your blog, such as the sidebar and footer, are filled with suitable information. Let’s explore each of these content areas.

Step #1: Content for static pages

About page

The most traditional page on any blog is the About page. This page tells new visitors to your blog what it is about, who you are and why you have a blog about your particular topic. Depending on your niche and your style, the information you provide can be “all business” or personal and fun.

Contact page

This page allows visitors of your blog to communicate with you at any time. It can be a simple page with your email address plus social network links, or you can use plugins like Contact Form 7 to have a simple contact form that visitors can use to communicate with you without leaving your website.

Products/services

If you have created your blog to promote your business, you’ll want to make sure that there’s a page that details the goods and services that you sell. Alternatively, if you already have a website for your business, you can provide a link to it in your menu.

A blog is a low-cost, low-risk way to invite readers into your world and begin a conversation with your company. 68% of consumers are likely to spend time reading content produced by a company they are interested in.

Disclaimer/policy

For example, if you are writing a health blog, but you’re not a medical professional, you may want to create a disclaimer to say that you are not a physician or other healthcare provider and to recommend that readers see their doctors for medical information and evaluation.

Be sure to visit the best blogs in your niche, preferably larger ones, to see what pages they provide links for in their primary navigation menu and footer. Chances are, your visitors will be looking for the same types of pages on your blog.

Blog category pages content

To begin with, you will have to choose categories for your new blog. Depending on your main topic, you can have different categories. For example, if you are starting a food blog, your categories could be recipes, desserts, breakfast, and more.

The next step is to create short text for each category page that is going to be available on your blog. The text can be anywhere between 50-150 words. You might wonder why you need this text. The answer is that it will help these pages to rank better in search engines and users can easily understand what type of content is included under this category.

short-text

Step #2: Blog sidebar content

Your sidebar is the smaller column to the left or right (depending on the theme you selected) of your blog’s main content. You can add the following content in sidebar widgets for your visitors to see. You don’t have to add all of the sections described below, but these are some common sidebar contents sections people have on their blogs.

Encourage visitors to your blog to subscribe via email or RSS. Email, of course, is best, especially if you would like to monetize your blog in the future. MailChimp is a great service to use as it is free for the first 2,000 subscribers.

smashing newsletter

About

It’s helpful to include a simple sentence or two about you and your blog for new visitors who may not take the time to read your About page. Having your photo included in this blurb of text helps visitors to put a face to the blog, whether you are the owner and editor managing other writers, or the primary content author.

about

You can also display links to your social profiles so that people can follow you. You can use icons to represent each network or use official boxes, buttons, and badges from these networks. The latter helps you to build your social media audience by allowing people to connect with you without leaving your website.

Advertisers

If you plan to add advertising banners to your blog, then add them from the start, so that regular visitors will not be surprised when you do start gaining advertisers. The banners you use until then can link to products for which you are an affiliate marketer or to products that you simply like.

Step #3: The 6-Point Framework of a Persuasive Blog Post (Plus an Outline You Can Steal)

six pressure points of persuasion how to write a block buster blog post

1. Likeability: If your readers don’t like you, everything else is irrelevant. Naturally, people are skeptical of perfection. So be vulnerable, tell your story, and document the imperfections. Eighty-six percent of consumers say authenticity is important when choosing a brand to do business with.

2. Credibility: Your readers not only need to believe in you, but they need to believe in their own ability to produce results. That’s where providing easily consumable and actionable content comes into play. A great way to create more bite-sized content is to add images every 100 words or so. In fact, images can boost content credibility by 75 percent.

how to create blockbuster content add images chart

Why does the information in your blog post matter today? A genius way to insert call-to-action in your post is to create content upgrades. Backlinko improved their conversion rates by 785 percent (in one day!) using this method.

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4. Authority: Your authority is increased by creating comprehensive, data-driven content with unique insights. The more authority you command, the more people will bet on you to deliver the transformation that they seek.

5. Reciprocity: Attention is currency in the online space. So when someone gives you their attention, you reciprocate by providing value with no strings attached. In fact, giving away your best content for free can help you reap big rewards.

If you’re shaky with your ideas or complacent about the way that you express them, you won’t hold up to scrutiny. A study of 27,000 consumers revealed that consistency is critical for trust and loyalty.

how to write a blockbuster blog post in 45 minutes outlines to write faster

Step #4: Flesh Out Your Outline In Record Time

How to write blog posts faster outline for writing

I suggest putting on some concentration music and diving into the outline. I also use a digital timer to keep myself from getting pulled down rabbit holes. Sure, you could spend two hours researching — but you’ll create better content if you can stay focused.

Craft a Heavy-Hitting Hook (5 Minutes)

Rule #1: Be super-specific. Use numbers in your headline and avoid ambiguous words like amazing, awesome, and great. There are other lackluster words that put readers to sleep, but these are the likely culprits.

Rule #2: Flirt, don’t reveal your total solution. If you uncover your solution right away, there’s no incentive to keep reading. Be mindful that there is a fine line between a curiosity-infused headline and desperate clickbait.

Write A Magnetic Opening (5 minutes)

Rule #2: Aggravate the problem and use emotive language to paint a picture of your big promise. Here are 801 power words that you can use to create an emotionally gripping narrative.

The Quote Lead: Use a quote relevant to your blog post. Your readers should be able to recognize the author of your quote so it’s best to use an influencer in your niche.
The Impending Danger Lead: This is where you introduce an evil villain and lean strongly on emotion.
The Counterintuitive Lead: Open by presenting a solution which goes against the grain.
The Empath Lead: Let readers know that you understand how they feel, you’ve walked in their shoes, and that they’re not alone.
The Shock Value Lead: Open with an unexpected fact.
The Storytelling Lead: An intriguing tale goes a long way to draw readers in. It could be true or metaphorical, as long as it’s within the context of your blog post.
The “Get Right To It” Lead: The no fluff, “I won’t waste your time” lead. You have to establish the premise of your post right away.
The “Call Out” Lead: Have the audacity to call your reader out. Do they have a bad habit that’s keeping them in the dark? What are they complacent about?
Pop Quiz Lead: Open by providing a list of options and set it up where there can only be two or three outcomes.

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How to Create a Blog Content Strategy – What 4 Years of Experience Have Taught Me

Create a Blog Content Strategy

You basically double your chance of success with a written blog strategy. According to Content Marketing Institute, 60% of organizations with a written content strategy are effective, compared to only 32% of those with a purely verbal content strategy being effective.

Not only does a written plan increase your chances of success, it also saves you hours of time you would have wasted on the wrong promotion strategies, writing about the wrong topics, and working with the wrong influencers.

Five Steps to Craft a Blog Content Strategy

Step 1: Define your goals.

If you don’t take anything else away from this article, take away goal-setting. Having a clearly defined goal will set you up to push through all the other steps, all the hours of writing, and all the obstacles bound to show up.

Just take a look at Simon Sinek’s TED talk about the power of “why”. It’s 20 minutes of pure gold (seriously, go watch it) about why we need to lead from a place of “why” we’re doing something, not how we’re doing it or what we’re doing. His diagram looks like this:

Blog content strategy: Start with the Why

For example, I have a blog for my freelance work. My primary goal is to generate leads for my services, with secondary goals of educating prospects on what I do and building a brand around my name.

Be specific with your goals. Simply saying “get more traffic” isn’t enough. You need to include how much traffic you want and in what timeframe. A better goal would be “Increase sales by 15% in three months”. Very specific.

Step 2: Perform some target market research.

Let me ask you something; Have you ever taken a shower and you just couldn’t quite get the water to the right temperature? It was lukewarm, so you turned it juuuust a hair, then it was scalding hot?

While frustrating, it shows you how a very small amount of effort can cause something to go from lukewarm to hot. You’ve heard this before – it’s called the extra mile.

Successful blog posts follow the old Problem Agitate Solution (PAS) copywriting principle. They begin by introducing the root problem reader’s are facing. Then they agitate those problems by digging into the symptoms and pain points. Finally, they present a solution (whether that’s an idea, tip, hack, or simply positioning their product/service as the solution).

But, you can’t do that effectively without understanding (1) what you’re readers are trying to achieve, (2) what’s preventing them from doing it, and (3) what’s going to happen to them if they don’t achieve it.

Find the answers to those three questions (using surveys, interviews, etc.) and you’ll be able to create blog content that does a hell of a lot more than just rack up social shares. Brad Smith

Step 3: Come up with topic ideas and keywords to target.

Keywords are the bread and butter to an effective blog content strategy. Without them, you’re going to be hard-pressed to rank well on search engines. Without ranking on search engines, you’ll have an even harder time getting a lot of consistent traffic.

Of course, there are plenty of other complications like page load speed, time spent on page, and (for Bing, at least) the number of shares the article received. But, if you master the three things above, you’ll be on your way to the first page of Google.

Keyword research is a great way to come up with new ideas and opportunities for content, but SEO should not drive your entire content strategy. It should factor in, but not fully control, the topics and message of your content. You may find an opportunity for a specific keyword, but you should then combine that information with your knowledge of your target market and personas to write the best possible content. Cara Hogan

I wrote a blog post about the book “Crossing the Chasm” and applied the lessons of that book to various startups. The SEO for Crossing the Chasm is impossible because it’s a hugely popular book. So, Amazon and a number of links associated with the author are always going to be first.

However, that post was hugely successful and garnered a lot of traffic simply because it gave practical and real-world examples for startup leaders to understand a specific concept within the book. So, when you google “crossing the chasm” the book is always going to be first, but if you google “startup crossing the chasm”, my post ranks #3. Cara Hogan

Step 4: Create a blog content calendar.

A content calendar keeps you on track and creates a system to ensure your content is always top-notch and published on time. The best calendars also have social sharing and email marketing info baked in to make things organized and easy.

To help explain the importance of this step and how it plays into your overall blog content strategy, I asked Cameron Conaway, an investigative journalist and content marketing manager at Klipfolio, his thoughts on creating a content calendar. Here’s what he told me:

It allows us to make real-time updates, organize all content assets, and have end-to-end visibility into who is working on what, when each piece is due, and which persona and stage of the funnel each piece of content is for.

This allows us to go from half-baked idea to pitch to “Yo Editor”—a column we created where a writer can @ their editor if they’re stuck or ready for an edit on their first draft. Cameron Conaway

Source:

https://firstsiteguide.com/write-content/
https://neilpatel.com/blog/how-to-write-blog-post/
https://themeisle.com/blog/blog-content-strategy/
How to Create Blog Content

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