How to Write a Great Post - Successful Blogging

When someone starts a blog, be it on WordPress, Blogger, TypePad or any other type, they mostly want to share information. Nowadays, starting a blog is as easy as A,B,C, literally; A - Visiting the blogging site, like WordPress, Blogger B - Signing up and C - Selecting your blog name/title. After creating your blog, you now want to start creating posts. A post is basically the information you wish share with your readers, many bloggers also like to add in images and videos.

Put Yourself in the Reader's Shoes

This article will look at the secrets of writing great posts for your blog. As I always say, behind every successful blogger is good content, repeatedly written. As an introduction to great blog post writing, here's an everyday tip;put yourself in the reader's shoes. Think of yourself as a member of your target audience. Then ask yourself," what would I want to read?" If you write exactly that, you can never go wrong. I'd love to say that this is my first tip, but that won't do the point justice. Let us call it the Golden Rule of Great Blogging - Put Yourself in the Reader's Shoes.

1. Original Content

While all these tips are important, if I were to say there is one of more importance, it is this: Write original posts. I would not really call it illegal, but in the world of blog, duplicating content is as close to the dark side as you can get. That does not mean that you can not write something from another blog in your post; maybe share with your readers something you read somewhere. To share someone's content, you can just ask the writer of the content. When posting something from another site, make sure you name the writer and link back to their blog, both to be polite and to appreciate the source. Don't copy everything, you can quote a section and give your opinion.

When I say duplicating content is as close to illegal as you can get, am not kidding. Search engines (hint:Google), will sooner or later find where you got your content and that you copy-pasted it onto a post. What Google does is really simple, they just take their magic eraser and remove your post from the top of their SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). How will they know that I was the one that copied and not the other way round? They will, trust me. It's not worth loosing your blog reputation for.

2. Brand your Blog; Choose a Genre/Topic

It really is not a must for you to write about a single topic, but it sure does help. Not only does it help the reader to know what to expect from you, it also helps search engine and content related sites and other bloggers in categorizing your content in there links. Most importantly, it can make you a sort-of expert at a that topic. You can even choose a genre you are not yet awesome at and grow in expertise as you posts more and more material. Over time, when a reader thinks about a certain topic, it is your blog that pops into their minds.

3. Make it Interactive: Through What You Write

In every single decent post ever written, readers that have read the whole post have had a thought or two about it. Try to think about the last time you read through a blog post and what you immediately thought about after reading it. You may have thought "the most enjoyable read ever" or "okay, well that was a waste of my 4 minutes" or "wow, I didn't know this" but just didn't feel like typing down a comment. Now imagine that that was your blog, and that all those reactions just went unnoticed.

When writing your post, try to be controversial, to a point. Try to make the reader think "I must respond to this", just don't overdo it. Remember: the reader can always just close the tab. After giving the reader something to react to (it can even be an excellently written post), make sure there is a simple way for them to respond. Nowadays there are many easy to use commenting systems for blogs, make sure you select a good one. You can even put a simple Like button below the post.

4. Not too Short, Not too Long - Just Enough

Some bloggers write way too little information and others just overdo it. Personally, I sometimes get carried away in a line of thought and end up writing more of an article than a blog post. This can, at times, really bore your readers and at other times it is exactly what the reader wants. If you are writing a review, it's better to write too much information but when sharing a tip, the reader mostly wants you to get to the point. Remember what you are writing about and the Golden Rule of Great Blogging: Put Yourself in the Reader's Shoes.

5. Grammar

This is basically common sense, but am just saying it anyway. Make sure your posts are grammatically correct. A well written post not only gains the respect and favor of the reader, but also makes the blog SEO-friendly (Check the last tip: SEO).

6. Make it Look Nice: Images, Graphics, Bullets

When you first looked at this article and saw the numbering of the tips, I bet you just had to go through them. Now, imagine if I had just stuffed the points into one long paragraph. People like things that look nice, same for blogs. Add a picture here and there, a bullet list, or even a video. Remember, if you embed a lot of stuff into your post your page loading will slow down. Slow page loading is not your friend, use just enough graphics to attract the reader but keep page loading fast.

7. Search Engine Optimization

For many, this is the most important part of great blogging. I put it as my last tip as it involves a bit more to accomplish well. Search Engine Optimization, SEO, is making your blog search engine friendly so that it appears on the first pages of sites like Google, Yahoo Search, Bing, you get the idea. There are as many SEO tricks out there, as many are there are "experts", both bad (black hat SEO) and good (white hat SEO) and some that just border on myth. In this article we are going to look at some good honest SEO tricks that will, as a matter of fact, improve your result rankings.

-Title of the Post: For some it is the first thing they write in a post, for others the title is the last thing they put in. For the search engines, it is one of the most important parts of your blog post. To maximize on this, make sure that your chief keywords are at the beginning of the title. Especially if your blog url also uses the title.
-Keywords: I have read some posts out there on Search Engine Optimization that say "the secret is lots of keywords. Litter your post with keywords, yeah, just stuff 'em in there!" Don't, seriously. Search engines run algorithms that find blogs that pack posts with keywords and punish them. I am not saying use few keywords. Confusing? Okay, here's what you do: Use the keyword around three times in your opening paragraph and maybe twice in every paragraph after. That is enough keywords. Simply put, make sure it doesn't look unnatural - you can use other forms of the word.
-Images and Video: It is a brilliant idea to use images in your posts, but an even more brilliant idea to tag those images. Images and Videos are pleasing to look at and draw in more readers that some really important information in a long text paragraph. The only problem is that search engines can not really read images, not yet anyway. Adding tags basically means adding a description to the images.
-Backlinks: This is one of the best ways to improve your PageRank (a good thing). Backlinks are links that from other websites that point to your blog. There are a lot of ways of getting backlinks, including buying or cheating. You do not have to resort to that. There are many other cool ways to get awesome backlinks and I am going to share some. The first and greatest is EzineArticles; this is the best and fastest way to get a respected backlink to your blog. Just write an article and add a link back to your blog. Like this article has a link, at the bottom, back to my site. Another way of getting backlinks is joining StumbleUpon, Digg, basically the whole lot of bookmarking sites, and after every post, bookmarking it in all of them. You can also post comments to other blogs and just be lucky enough to get one with do-follow comments. Another way of getting quality backlinks is through writing a guest post. Just find a big blog you like, similar to yours and email for a chance to guest-write. Then just like in EzineArticles, backlink back to your site.
-Using Appropriate Heading tags: In many blogs, a lot of people write about important topics in a single post but forget to show the search engine what is important and what is really just another sentence. Google about , or tags on the blog platform you are using and how you can efficiently use them to show relevant parts of your post.
These are mostly SEO tips for when writing a post. When it comes to Search Engine Optimization, you are are good are you are updated. Regularly check for new SEO tips and tricks, but remember to keep it honest.


I've found this article on ezinearticles, it seems quite good to me and that's why I've posted it here, hope you like it...

Article Source

 

And write something unique and revolutionary. That's the best!

 

Think traffic also suggests writing Epic Shit to garner more traffic.

How do we define what's epic shit? I guess putting out the best thing that can come outta you.

Steve Pavlina writes pretty awesome epic shit

 

Healthy information. Must implement that soon.

 

Wow, good thorough post. I will pick up these tips for my next blog post!

 

One of the most important keys to blogging success is providing exceptional content. Follow these five tips to make sure your blog posts not only get read but make people want to come back for more.
1. Choose the Appropriate Tone for Your Blog.
2. Be Honest.Blogs that are written in an honest voice and truly show who the writer is are often the most popular
3. Don't Just List Links.Blogging is time-consuming, and sometimes it can be very tempting to just list links to other online content for your readers to follow.
4. Provide Attribution. Don't risk being accused of violating copyrights, plagiarism or stealing content from another blog or website
5. Write in Short Paragraphs
The visual appeal of your blog's content can be just as important as the content itself. Write your blog posts in short paragraphs (no more than 2-3 sentences is a safe rule) to provide visual relief from a text heavy web page.

 

Good read. We can learn lots of information on your post. Thanks for sharing.

 

Thank you very much for your tips. I have a little experience in this sphere. Your post helps me to systematize my knowledge and experience