It’s quite frustrating when you publish a blog post, but no one reads it. If you are in the same situation and want to step up your game? OR do want to let your freak flag fly? Then stay tuned.

Blog writing is an art that takes a reasonable time to be mastered. You can’t achieve the milestone on day one. It requires learning and practicing over and over again.

It’s tough to encourage people to read a boring article. You have to organize your blog post nicely so that it looks great and people can find it interesting and feel good while reading it.

With that said, I will be showing you how to write a blog entry and a blog writing format that you can incorporate into your post to make it look organized, compelling, and readable.

Let’s begin with the 5 most important ingredients that a successful post must have.

The ingredients…

• Hook
• Title tag
• Paragraphs
• Images
• Conclusion

Let’s talk about each of these…

5 Things About writing blog Posts Your Boss Wants to Know

 

1. HOOK

You have 8-9 seconds to capture the readers and encourage them to read your article. In fact, people don’t read more than 20% of your blog post if there is nothing special. So, it’s important to include something that compels people to continue reading.

According to NNG (Nielsen Norman Group ), only 28% of words in a blog post are read by the average visitor. They have plotted a graph that confirms that people spend only 4.4 seconds per 100 words. It means a 500-word article can’t handle readers for more than 20 seconds.

 

People often read your introduction to know what your blog post is all about. But how can you come up with an intro that makes people read the rest of the post?

Important points worth remembering

•  Include some interesting facts, statistics, a real story, or something surprising to make your blog intro appealing.
• Don’t reveal your secrets or surprises in the beginning. Because people will leave your page after knowing the secrets.
• Ask a question – A question makes people curious and encourages them to keep reading your blog post.
• Ask questions that entice people to know more. For example, ‘do you want to generate backlinks?’ is an obvious interrogation. It won’t surprise people anymore. Instead of that ask ‘Do you want to know a secret for getting genuine backlinks.

2. Use a Compelling Headline

Writing a compelling title tag could encourage people to read your article. A persuasive POST title helps to increase CTR (Click through rate) resulting in a rise in ranking. Most new bloggers ignore it because they think that the headline doesn’t play any role in creating a successful blog post.

But I can show you how it affects user intent. See the example below.

A screenshot from Google search result “best SEO tools”

Which one you would prefer to click? I believe that you would select any result except the last result.

Due to the ugly title formatting, most users ignore the last result. However, it might be a detailed post. But because of bad title formatting, no one is going to click through the post to see what’s inside.

TIP:   By keeping the first character of all words uppercase, and adding some alarming words in the last Google result (from the above screenshot), you can increase the CTR significantly.

 

Let’s look at a few more rules that you can apply to your TITLE to make it look professional and enticing to click.

##1. Include the numbers to grasp the people’s attention

Include the numbers at the start. For example, ‘5 untold secrets about blogging.’

Your title should be such that people can’t stop clicking on it. By adding context words in your headline, you can make it more appealing.

Here I have used an odd number instead even one?. But why? Because an odd number creates visual interest and is always used by magicians, and marketers to grasp attention. Our mind considers odd numbers as a specific pattern.

Including numbers or statistics in your title tag is an efficient way to make it more enticing to readers. Headlines with numbers increase social shares.

##2. Use words that catch the people’s attention

Here are common words that you can use in the blog post copy to grab people’s attention.

• Free
• Case study
• Secret

A good lede could work well when it comes to compelling readers. A lede is a short intro to your entry blog post. It contains 30 to 50 words. If readers catch your point while reading your lede, they will continue reading your article.

According to statistic brain, in 2000 people’s average attention span time was 12 seconds which is reduced to 8.25 seconds in 2012. It shows that people want immediate attention. If your entry blog/ lede is not such, your post is not going to reach potential readers.

 

##3. Use alarming words in your headline

Readers respond to words that are alarming. Researchers say that a wandering mind works with more power than normal. Alarming words do the same, they make up your mind and generate strong impulses.

Find potential words from here – 317 power words that will make your blog post successfully implied.

 

##4. Include a well-known entity in your headline

It can make your post title more engaging.  You can either include remarkable words or a celebrity’s name. This is so a powerful tip to optimize your TITLE or headline to make it intriguing.

 

##5. Your Title should contain 6 to 10 words

The short headline doesn’t make any sense. Because they are less specific and readers can’t pick up the context. So, here the point is that include at least 6 to 10 words which makes it more intensive and specific.

For example, If I write about ‘WordPress’, then my title may look like –“10 common WordPress login issues that you must know” which is more powerful than writing only two words “WordPress errors”.

 

3. Breakdown your content into Paragraphs

You might be thinking why your paragraph should be short.

There are three reasons –

• Easy to understand
• Boost readability
• Skimmable
• Looks neat and clean
• More engaging for visitors

4. Images

As you already know that a picture says a thousand words, so adding images to your article makes your post more attractive, and Increases social shares, and referral traffic.

Also, optimize your content for both readers and search engines because Google considers ‘USER-BEHAVIOR’ as a ranking factor. Adding a media file to your post can literally make people spend more time on your post.

A post without visuals/images/infographics can discourage visitors to leave your page too early. When Google notices this behavior, it is considered a negative signal and affects your bounce rate and decreases the ranking as well.

 

5. Organize your blog post

No matter how much compelling your blog post is, everything is wasted if your blog post is not well-organized. Break your content into sections so that readers can easily navigate and understand what you actually want to convey through your post.

Here is a checklist to organize your blog post

• 1st section: write a short intro that encourages readers.
• 2nd section: Tell your readers what they are going to learn. For best results, you could include a table of content.
• In the next section, you must start writing your body text.
• 3rd section: break down your content into subheadings and paragraphs
• 4^th section: make a worthy conclusion.
• Finally, do thorough proofreading and editing.
• Don’t forget: URL optimization, image optimization, including subscriber bar, headline optimization and featured thumbnail, etc. (How to increase CTR by optimizing meta description)
• Make your permalink short and include the focus keyword in the permalink.
• Use the wp-smash plugin to compress the images.
• Integrate a suitable featured image.
• By reading above you can optimize your headline.
• Include a few tags.
• That’s it!

Conclusion

A successful blog post keeps readers engage. If you want to make your readers happy, then give them what they want.

I’ve uncovered most of the topics here. But it is not the end; you need to dig deeper and make your blog-post copy look compelling and visually appealing. I hope you get the point.

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