How to Write an Effective Blog Post

You have your website; so what’s next?

You have your website: you have written content for it and now you feel your work is done – right? Wrong! You need to keep working on it – a great website is always a work in progress and the best ones get updated as regularly as possible. At Sokada, we are just as guilty as anyone else at not adding new information to our own website, it is all down to the number of hours in the day and you can always be busy with something else.

But here we thought it would make a nice little Friday afternoon blog, to give you some tips on how to write an effective blog post for your own business. One that will help to inspire your clients as well as potential customers, keeping people on your website longer and encouraging them to pick up the phone or email you.

How do you get inspiration?

Well the best thing to do is write about what you know. Don’t try to cobble something together based on other articles. Writing about what you know means that you will write with passion and keep your article interesting. Think about what is current, what is happening in your industry and what people will find interesting to read. Is there an event coming up that you can talk about; a new product coming out; a change in circumstances or perhaps something you just want to chat about.

Whatever it is, spend a bit of time researching it to get your facts right as well as be informative for your audience, but always write about what you know.

How to start writing your blog

Write yourself some key points first, think of your blog post as a “short story” and what the message is that you are trying to get across.  Is there an effective start, middle and finish to your post? Write some notes and points that you want to make and then elaborate from these.

1. Make your blog post interesting, to keep people reading
2. Think of a title that people may be searching for online, to encourage them to find you
3. Don’t write too much text – long blog posts can make people switch off. If you think it is going to be too long, then make it a series of posts. Probably between 300-800 words are ideal
4. Use paragraphs for readable amounts
5. Include some relevant images to break up the page
6. Add in some short titles that will draw people to read further
7. Don’t make each paragraph too long – this will make your customers switch off!
8. Use bullet points to highlight a list of things to do
9. Add links to other pages within your website to encourage people to venture further
10. Add external links if you are referring to a different company, but make sure you always set it to open a new page so the reader doesn’t lose your website
11. Use your keywords to get seen online
12. Don’t forget to share your blog post on social media. That way you will grow your audience further

Keep trying; don’t give up!

These are all great ideas and points you should adopt for any blog post you are writing. It can be a challenge knowing how to write an effective blog post and these will be a good start on getting you seen better online. Some blog posts will be extremely technical, but always try and write for your industry in the format your readers will accept.

So get started. It is said that everyone has a book in them – make this the start of your own chapters…

If you still don’t feel that you are able to write your own blogs, then please contact us at Sokada and we will chat with you about the options you have for writing blogs and other content, to ensure your website is consistently updated with new information, news and products. This is vital to make sure Google keeps going back to your website and crawling through it.

Good luck with your writing!