Creating blog posts are probably the single most important thing you can do for your company’s brand. A blog can go a long way to establishing your authority and drive targeted traffic to your business’ site and boost conversions. So how to write a blog post for your brand that grow your organic traffic quick.
Quality content is rated the No. 1 most important factor among all bloggers.
Professional blogging, however, can be quite the challenge if you don’t know what you’re doing with regards to how effective it is. The goal of a business blog is to attract readers from all over the web — google readers who want to learn more about what you know.
Your goal should be to inform these bloggers but also stand out in ways that build credibility and authority (through thoughtful insights) or just get them talking through sensationalized headlines, controversies and controversial topics.
Blogging is by no means an easy undertaking but we’ve got all the right strategies for making sure people remember you!
If you have a process or a checklist to guide you through all the necessary steps — from pre-writing to post-publishing — your company can create not just quantity but also quality content. It’s not enough to put out a blog post every now and then. To position your company as an industry leader, you need to consistently publish quality content.
Here’s how we use our blogging process at ContentPro, taking care of everything from blog creation and publishing to promotion and beyond:
Step-By-Step Guide – How To Write A Blog Post For Your Brand
Step 1: Find the Right Content Ideas
A company / brand blog will never get off the ground if you choose a topic that isn’t relevant to your customer’s interests. So, conduct market research before you begin writing or posting content to find out what your audience is interested in reading.
There are number of ways you can do this, including:
- What is trending in your industry and focus on it. To find the trending topics, you can use Google trends / Exploding Topics.
- Check your comments / client feedbacks, try to provide solution.
- Look at what people sharing in social media platforms.
- Analyse your competitor pages and understand why some posts doing well by using tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush.
The real key here is to try and think of blog topics that will provide value to your readers in some way, whether that’s through sharing industry news, or educating them about something.
Step 2: Brainstorm the Topic In-Depth
Once you’ve picked out a good topic for your blog, write down the subtopics that you would like to discuss or include in you’re your blog post. Make sure to allow yourself to be free. Don’t overthink the writing and don’t worry about refining the language just yet. Think of this stage as a place where you can capture your ideas, whatever they may be as long as they relate directly or tangentially to the subject at hand!
If you are a solopreneur and have no team to brainstorm, try using mind map tools like Miro. Capture ideas easily with simple mind mapping your thoughts into organized way.
Step 3: Develop the Article Outline
Before you start writing your blog, it will be really helpful for you to organize everything in an outline format. It’s one of the most vital part of learning how to write a blog post. This helps you visualize the structure of your blog post and notice any gaps or holes. Put your headings into a hierarchical order, listing all main points first, followed by subpoints if necessary. You can move the headings around until they make sense *to you* and are set up in the best way to help deliver information to readers.
We at ContentPro use tools like Frase to find the perfect blog outline for our clients. Having a well in-depth outline can help us to outperform our competitors in SERPs for better.
Here’s a Example of how an article outline should be,
Step 4: Research
Taking your topic and turning it into a keyword can help you rank better. You want to catch the attention of people who are looking for your product or niche. Make sure to stay on top of current trends in the market so that you can outrank your competition by standing out from the pack. Make sure to find a low competition keyword so you have a better chance of ranking fast in Google and other Search engines.
Knowing what’s already available to your target audience can help you uncover new facets of the topic that have not already been discussed by someone else. It can also help you figure out what format and/or tone to use in your blog, depending on what you already know from prior research!
You can use tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush for this purpose, they both great tools for doing keyword research and understand the topics better from audience perspective.
Also, you can do try the most popular Answerthepublic for finding topics that will help your content research faster.
Step 5: Writing First Draft
Now that the initial legwork has already been done, it’s time to start fleshing out the first version of the blog content. As you work on what your first draft looks like, remember that consistency and details are key!
- Don’t obsess over word choice and grammar during your first draft of the outline, which can be fixed later.
- Stay focused on what will provide the most value to readers, whether that be tips, checklists, case studies, statistics, etc.
- Being open to doing more research as you write may help you come up with new ideas about how to make this blog even stronger!
Use Grammarly for your draft writing, it help you be productive and improves your speed.
Step 6: Use Compelling Images / Stock Photos
After you have written your very first draft, take a step back and look at the blog from the readers’ perspective – who are they and what do they like? What can you cater to meet their demands! And this is including your visuals.
Write down all of your visual content ideas for your blog and feel free to include anything from relevant stock photos or custom images to infographics or even videos related to the topic you will be blogging about! But remember that it’s important that you incorporate more than one kind of visual content in order to grab the attention of a wider audience.
Places like Unsplash and Pexels where you can find the free high quality stock images for your blog. You can also use Canva to edit the images with your brand watermark if you want.
Step 7: Review and Finalize
In order to have a better understanding of the audience you’re trying to reach, it would be helpful to re-read some columns over again and see if there is anything you can do differently or perhaps something you missed.
Here are some questions to ask yourself:
- Does it have the flow from start to end?
- Is it helpful for readers to learn something new?
- Is it have consistent tone throughout the blog?
- What are the call-to-action you added here?
- Will I share this article to my friends?
If your answers to these questions are “no,” rewrite or edit the content until you can confidently answer “yes” to all of these questions. Don’t give up!
Step 8: Optimize for SEO
When your blog is ready to be published, generate metadata for the piece and make sure that it includes a short SEO friendly title, which ideally can fall between 64 and 72 characters (it could of course be longer but these are Google recommendations), combined with tags that summarize the content in a few words – no need for complete sentences since search engines will display these instead on websites next to your written article.
Use your main and sub keywords in title, sub titles, in content. Alt text and meta data as well. Don’t forget to choose your blog category, and add tags for better organized. This will improve your on-page SEO score better.
A poorly optimized blog can mean that your content doesn’t get seen by the audience you’re trying to reach. Google won’t see it, and search engines won’t rank it well. It can be frustrating looking at a high number of uniques and zero matching backlinks after all the hard work that went into writing the post in the first place!
So, do take your time on this part, update it as much possible.
If you have blog, then you sure need a best seo plugin to help you with this process, use plugins like RankMath, Yoast – these are 2 best SEO optimization plugins that can help with your blog.
Step 9: Add Links
Links, both internal and external, are an incredibly vital a part of a blog artilce. They not only improve the visibility and ranking of your website in general, but also help your readers navigate your site more efficiently. Plus, Google loves them if you’re trying to have a strong SEO strategy!
Internal links can be considered as links that are linked within the body of an HTML document.
External links would be links that redirect your audience to another URL once they have clicked on it.
This can done manually by adding it in the blog, it adds so much value to the users and reduce your bounce rate / quick existing from your site.
Step 10: Publish Your Article
Once you click “publish” or “schedule,” check the blog to make sure there are no typos, spacing issues, headings that don’t look quite right, subtitles with improper formatting, or images that appear blurry. If there are any problems with your content after it has been published online please take the time to go back and change those things before moving on. This will ensure there is no issue when more people read through your content after its publication!
Your blog is live! Now, it’s time to take some post-publishing steps to make sure that you and your audience are getting the most value from your material. To do this, You start promoting your new blog content in various ways like sharing in social media, email, forums and also submitting your article to search engines (Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Console) so that they can re-index it faster.
Bottom Line
Using this ContentPro Checklist to guide your brand blog can be integral to developing blog content that will:
- Rank well in search engines and improves site traffic
- Gain more engagement from existing clients to your product / service
- Bring you new customers/ clients to your platform
We encourage you to use our ultimate blog publishing guide, and grow your brand. Also, we are happy to hear your experiences with blogging in the blog comment section below.
Also, we love for you try our ContentPro Blog Management service we offer for brands around the world, saving hundreds of hours for founders like you. So do send us a message if you really want to save your time and cost.