Tips To Create & Promote Great Blog Posts

Blogging is a powerful tool and one everyone has easy access to participate. In fact, it's the one thing I wish I would have started over a decade ago. I've put together a quick reference list below to help you in your blogging journey. It includes tips for ideation, titling, and content. 

Blog Ideation Tips

• Stockpile ideas. As ideas come to us, quickly document them in your ideas notebook. I use Evernote to capture and organize my writing garden.
• IDEA Generators: When we need an idea for blogging quickly, try using the Hubspot idea generator. Plug in three nouns and it will generate ideas to consider. Another tool to try is Portent's Content Idea Generator.

Blog Title Tips

• Unique Blogs: Use a unique and specific title for each blog post, and inject emotional words to draw the reader in.
• Title Optimization: Use the CoSchedule Headline Analyzer to optimize our headline title for emotion, power, and length.

Blog Content Tips

• Blog Length: Blogs with around 1,500 words is the sweet spot for maximizing sharability. If for any reason, this isn't feasible for you, consider keeping it short and simple.
• Visual Content: Use images and graphics throughout the content. This helps break it up, allows users to quickly scan the article and provides visual elements to engage the reader. If you don't have a design resource, check out Canva. It helps quickly create great visual content easily.
• Good Beginnings & Powerful Endings: Make sure to start your blog off with a bang, and end it with a memorable takeaway.
• Content Headers: Break up multiple paragraphs with content headers. These help readers scan for what they are looking for and can make longer posts seem shorter while reading.
• Full Width: My preference is to usually make the image and graphical elements full width.
• Labeling: Place the content in relevant categories. Adding blog categories just to try and get more search exposure can backfire and be annoying to readers. The same goes with tags.
• Internal Links: Link associated content to different past pages on the website.

Blog Marketing Tips

• Manual Sharing: When the tools don't automatically share, we can do it manually. I'll usually share my content on Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Google Plus, & Pinterest.
• Syndication Tools: Buffer is one of many social media sharing tools. It allows me to add blog posts and it will automatically share it on Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, And Pinterest.

I've also put together a list of tools I use to make every blog post happen. You can read it here.

What matters more than any tips I provide is that you make blogging happen. If you're paralyzed by all the things that you need to keep in mind, drop the expectations and start simple. The more we do it, the better make it over time.

Photo by freestocks.org on Unsplash