8 Crazy-Simple Steps to the Perfect Blog Post
Got blog envy? Want to write the perfect blog post, but don’t know where to start? Here are 8 crazy-simple steps that even a newbie can follow.
Publishing a blog can be an excellent strategy to help freelancers, solopreneurs, coaches, and consultants to grow your audience, build your authority, and get email subscribers. However, writing a new blog post can be a challenge, sometimes. Choosing interesting blog post topics and creating gripping blog post titles can seem overwhelming.
Then there’s the whole effort to actually write the blog post. Ideas for blog post writing can sometimes seem elusive. And, when you hear about people who have a massive blog post ideas list, it can be easy to get discouraged.
Well, when you understand this crazy-simple process I’ll show you, blog post inspiration will come quickly and easily. You’ll nail your first blog post ideas, and be able to quickly create a set of blog post ideas for beginners.
So, the next step is to move on to the process of writing the perfect blog post.
Blog Post Prerequisites
In order to write the perfect blog post, you first need to understand your target audience very well.
First, you must have your target audience well-defined. You do this with a written description for your ideal reader or customer. You should have a separate written description for both your male audience and your female audience (if appropriate). This written description is often referred to as your customer avatar.
You create this customer avatar description by asking yourself questions about your ideal male and female audience members. Here are some examples:
- How old are they?
- Where do they work? What do they do?
- What is their income level?
- What kinds of interests do they have? Personal and business?
- What are some of their struggles or pain points?
- What kinds of obstacles or objections might they have?
- What are their habits, likes, and dislikes?
- What motivates them?
When describing your target audience, focus on what they WANT, not what they NEED. People are overwhelmingly more likely to invest in what they WANT than in what they NEED.
Problems, Questions, And Big Dominos
Now, once you have a strong understanding of your target audience, you can dive into this last prerequisite for the perfect blog post.
Your perfect audience has questions and problems. These questions and problems are critical. When you understand them, and provide answers and solutions, you become very attractive to your target audience. The more you can do this, the more they will come to know you, like you, and trust you.
And, they will turn to you more and more for answers and solutions.
In particular, you want to identify the Big Domino for your target audience. This is the ONE THING that, if you were to provide a solution for, all the rest of their objections or questions would either go away or become meaningless.
Most importantly, questions and problems lead to headlines. Headlines are the driver for any content you create, including blog posts, YouTube videos, social media posts, etc.
Writing The Perfect Blog Post
So, now that you have the prerequisites in place, let’s dive into the 8 Steps to actually write the perfect blog post.
1. Plan Your Blog Post
This critical first step is where you move from the overall set of questions or problems that your target audience faces, down to a very specific topic.
Once you identify a question that you want to answer, or a problem that you want to provide a solution for, you now flesh out that solution. You take several steps to do so.
- You create an outline.
- Then, you conduct any research you may need.
- Finally, you do any fact checking that may be necessary.
When creating your outline, one of the most powerful ways to structure your blog post is as a listicle. I talk more about the listicle structure in this blog post.
As part of your blog post plan, make sure you know how you will monetize this particular blog post.
2. Find The Perfect Keywords For Your Post
Once you have your topic in place and a general outline, your next step is to research the keywords that you plan to focus on with this blog post.
You have two sets of keywords to research:
- Search engine keywords
- Pinterest keywords
Search Engine Keywords
Search engine keywords are important, because they help people find your blog post when they search on engines such as Google or Bing.
One of the easiest places to research keywords for search engines is to use the Google Ads Keyword Planner.
You want to find keyword phrases that have at least 100 to 1,000 searches per month. However, you also want your keywords to have a low or medium level of competition.
One keyword phrase will be your focus keyphrase. Pick this carefully, since you will incorporate it into your blog post title, your subheadings, and throughout the text of your blog post.
You can also select other keyword phrases that you can use through some of your subheadings and scatter throughout the text of your blog post.
Pinterest Keywords
You may not personally be active on Pinterest. However, chances are good that your target audience is. As of this writing, more traffic flows to blog posts from Pinterest than from any other social media network.
So, you want to make sure that, when your readers share your blog post on Pinterest, your post is well optimized for Pinterest.
Here’s the thing… Pinterest kinda looks like a social media platform. But it is really a super-powerful search engine.
In just a sec (in Step 7) I’ll talk about configuring your blog post for social sharing. When you do this, you’ll want to ensure that your Pinterest sharing tools are set up with the right keywords. This will help your blog post float to the top of the Pinterest search results.
For Pinterest, the most important place for keywords is in your pin title, pin description, image alt-tags, and the first couple of paragraphs of your blog post. Here’s a good video and a good blog post that both talk about this in more detail.
3. Craft A Powerful Blog Post Title
So, now that you have your topic, outline, and keywords, it’s time for one of the most important steps.
You will craft a powerful, gripping headline to be your blog post title.
Your blog post titles should be interesting, to the point, and should convey a powerful benefit. It should incorporate your focus keyphrase that you identified in Step 2.
Here’s one of the best ways to get ideas for headlines to use as blog post titles:
Go to the grocery store or a book store and look at the magazine rack. Take a look at magazines in your subject area and write down the titles you find there. Those will be some of the best ideas to create your own titles.
Interestingly, some of the best headlines are on the tabloids.
Here are some other examples:
5 ______ You Won’t Believe About ______
3 Simple Tricks To ______
6 Secrets For Achieving ______ Without Having To ______
You also want your headline to have a powerful emotional impact. You can use the CoSchedule Headline Analyzer to make sure your headline is strong and powerful.
4. Draft Your Blog Post
When you create your blog post, there are two patterns that work well.
First, you can create a 10 minute (or so) video on YouTube. You then embed that video on your blog post. Finally, you write at least 300 words of text that are a synopsis of your video, and that contain the keywords from Step 2 for search engines and Pinterest.
Second, you can create a text-only blog post. In this case your blog post should be a minimum of 1800 words and a maximum of 3000 words.
Eventually, you will learn how to write your blog text so that it is search engine friendly out of the gate. But for now, just write, following your outline.
Don’t worry about editing or correcting errors. Your objective now is to get the words written.
One thing that I’ve found works well is to draft my outline and a potential blog title several days before I actually write the blog post. This lets my brain work out the details on its own, while I’m doing other things. Then, the day that I sit down to actually draft the blog post, the writing usually flows much more quickly.
5. Power-Up Your Post With Images
Once your blog post is drafted, look at how you can incorporate images into your blog post.
Every blog post should have at least two images.
- A featured image, which will also be the open graph image. Open graph images are designed for when your blog post is shared on most social media channels (like Facebook). It should be 1200 pixels by 628 pixels.
- A Pinterest share image. Your Pinterest share image is the image that your blog readers will use to pin your blog post on Pinterest. It should have a 2:3 aspect ratio, such as 600 X 900 pixels, or 1000 X 1500 pixels.
Beyond the two must-have images, look for images that you can use to maintain the interest level as readers read your blog post. These are images that explain, inform, or entertain.
Make sure that you have the appropriate rights for any images that you use. Most images that you find in a Google search are NOT appropriate to include in your blog.
Here are some places where you can find images:
6. Edit Your Blog Post
Now you’re ready to go back and edit your blog post.
First, take a look at the word count of your first draft. Remind yourself of the number of words I mentioned in Step 4. This will let you know if you need to edit text out or if you need to flesh out some of your topics in more detail.
Next, make sure that you have subheadings every 300 words or so. This helps with the readability of your blog post. And, be sure to include your focus keyphrase in as many subheadings as you reasonably can.
Finally, read your post out loud. Edit any errors you find. Then, read your blog post backwards, from the last sentence to the first. Doing this helps to catch errors that your eyes naturally skip over.
7. Monetize And Socialize The Post
Your blog post won’t make you any money if you don’t explicitly monetize it. And, if you don’t add tools to help your readers share it on social media, it won’t go very far. So, those two aspects combine into Step 7.
Monetize Your Post
Affiliate products are one of the easiest ways to monetize the perfect blog post. Be sure to add any affiliate links, along with your affiliate disclaimer. Your blogging platform may also have a monetization framework included. Make sure that you have joined it and that it is enabled for your post.
Set Up Social Sharing
Once your perfect blog post is monetized, you want to set up social sharing tools and buttons so that your readers can share your blog post on social media.
Each blog hosting platform has a different way to do this. On Medium, for example, social sharing is pre-configured by default. On WordPress, you need to install a plugin and configure it.
Facebook And Twitter
Make sure that your featured image matches with the ideal image size for both Facebook and Twitter, as described in step 5.
Upload the Pinterest image you created in Step 5. The Pinterest image is often placed at the end of the blog post text.
Some social sharing plugins allow you to create in-depth settings for your Pinterest image. Create the Pinterest title. Go back to the list of Pinterest keywords you researched in Step 2. Pinterest allows a pin to have up to 500 characters in the pin description. You want to use as many of those 500 characters as you can.
Write a description that is rich, and filled with all those keywords that you researched. If you need to, you can add a couple of keywords at the end of the description, separated by the “|” character. And finally, add one or two Pinterest hashtags.
However, if you don’t have the ability to configure Pinterest in a plugin, all is not lost. You can also make this Pinterest title plus description as the alt-tag for your Pinterest image.
YAY! At this point you are ready to hit the Publish button on your blog post and make it go live.
8. Promote Your Blog Post
This is where the rubber meets the road for your perfect blog post. And, it’s a step that many people don’t really pay enough attention to. Yet, it’s the step that can make all the difference.
Your blog is one of only two assets you own online. But unlike your email list, your blog post doesn’t automatically jump into the hands (or inboxes) of your audience. You need to promote it, and let your audience know your blog post is there.
So, here are the key ways and places to promote your blog post.
To Your Email List
Your email list is your most valuable asset online. So, you should absolutely promote your new blog post to your email list.
Your email list and your blog support each other. Sometimes you use your blog posts to get email list subscribers so you can sell to them via email. And, sometimes you use your email list to send people to your blog post so you can sell to them there.
The fact that you just published a new blog post is a great way to use one of the “5 Types of Emails to Bond and Build Trust with Your Email List.”
Also, if you have been building a list of Facebook Messenger subscribers, you should also consider sending a broadcast message to them, and let them know about your new blog post.
Your Social Media Profiles
The next powerful place to share your blog post is on your own social media profiles. You want to do this using the social sharing buttons right inside your published blog post.
Why?
In this way you get the social shares count to start incrementing. Once people visiting your blog post see that other people have already shared the post, they are much more likely to share it themselves.
If you have a business Instagram account with at least 10,000 followers, you can also share your blog post as a story, with a hyperlink directly to your blog post URL.
You may also consider using paid ads to boost your Facebook page post or your Pinterest pin to your audience on those platforms.
In Select Facebook Groups
Facebook has recently indicated that they will be emphasizing Facebook Groups in the future and de-emphasizing fan pages. So, this strategy is one you’ll want to pay attention to.
You should belong to 10–25 Facebook groups that are related to your subject matter, and that allow you to periodically post your blog posts to the group.
For each group, post an update with information about your blog post.
Be sure to make the text description of each update for each group different. And, space your updates out through the day. This is important to help keep you out of Facebook Jail.
By Commenting On Other People’s Blog Posts
The final blog post promotion method I’ll mention is that you can comment on other people’s blog posts and include a link back to your own blog post.
This used to be a strategy that worked for building inbound links to your post for search engine optimization purposes. It does NOT work for that goal anymore.
However, this is still a legitimate strategy for promoting your blog post and getting exposure to a broader audience for it (and you).
I will caution, though, that there is a right way to do this and a very WRONG way to do this, as well.
If you want to read more about the right way, read this blog post by Sujan Patel, Right Inbox co-founder.
And, there you have it… the 8 crazy-simple steps to the perfect blog post. By following these steps every time you create a blog post, you’ll end up with a rock-solid post every time.
And, you’ll be well positioned to have that blog post be an asset that generates leads, email list subscribers, and sales, potentially for years to come.
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