Blog posts are a good way to drive organic traffic to your website. People are always googling things and trying to find answers. If you can create a good piece of content that answers their questions it establishes trust and it establishes you as an authority with that person. This can be very valuable if you’re trying to sell a product or a service. If you’re someone that has never written a blog post before it can be difficult to write a concise piece of work, that’s both professional and engaging. This article will give you some tips that you can use to write an effective blog post and help you start generating traffic to your website:

1) Figure out your audience

The first thing you need to do is have a clear target audience. Ask yourself things like what positions am I targeting (CEO, CFO, Senior Manager, Analyst), how old are they, what are their concerns and how do they think. You want it to be as specific as possible so that you know how to approach them, if your target audience is senior management they are going to be more focused on high level concepts and business related issues such as compliance, performance metrics, audit etcs while if you’re target is analysts they will be more focused on operational level details.

2) Do SEO research

It’s important to understand what type of traffic you want to drive to your website. This includes understanding what keywords or keyword phrases you want to rank for. If you’re a consultant that specializes in PIPEDA or HIPAA for example, you may want to rank for “PIPEDA security consultant Toronto” or “ HIPAA security consultant in New York”. You want to have a clear idea of what type of searches you want the blog posts to rank for and include those within the posts, the title, the blog posts url and the SEO descriptions. As you can see in this post I’m targeting how to write cybersecurity blog posts and that is shown throughout the post.

3) Know you main points

You want to lay out your article based on your main points. This way it’s easy for your readers to follow along and if someone wants to skip to a certain part it’s easy for them to do so. A simple way to lay it out would be:

1) Introduction
2) 3-5 main points (each in their own paragraph)
3) Conclusion

This would be a little different if you’re making a list or something more detailed but generally this is a good way to layout your blog posts and you want to make sure each main point has its own title so people know what each section is about.

4) Keep it 500-1000 words max

You don’t want your blog post to be so short that people don’t find it valuable and you don’t want it to be so long that people lose focus before they get through the content. 500-1000 words is usually a good sweet spot where you have enough words to get your point across before people’s minds start wandering. It’s also important that you lay your blog post out with titles and subpoints so that people can find the parts that are of the most interest to them quickly. Not everyone wants to read the entire article.

5) Use pictures to explain your points

There’s a saying, “a picture says a thousand words”. People naturally like to look at pictures more than they do text so add some infographics into your blog posts. It makes it much easier for readers to stay engaged and it can be used to emphasize a point or explain a concept that may be hard to conceptualize in their mind.

6) Add videos for complex topics

If you are speaking to a very complex topic then you may want to consider using a video to explain the topic rather than writing hundreds of words to explain it. I would suggest giving a high level answer and then put a video underneath the explanation so that the reader can get a more detailed explanation if they want. Most platforms allow you to embed videos so that the user can watch the video without leaving your website.

7) Assume your readers know nothing

Even when you’re speaking on very technical topics it’s generally better to assume that your reader only has a basic understanding of the topic and take time to explain everything that isn’t common knowledge. This way anyone that looks at your article will be able to understand and follow along. If you don’t do this and you explain things using industry jargon or complex language you will probably lose some readers that don’t understand what you’re saying.

8) Consider hiring a professional

The last tip is to consider someone that writes blogs professionally. Most likely they will be able to make a better post, which will drive better traffic than you could do yourself. Some people may consider this a waste of money but it will save you time that could be used to do something else and it will probably get you a much better product than if you wrote it yourself. Web content like blogs are one of the best ways to get organic traffic so it’s worthwhile to invest in someone that can do it well. 

If you would like to have me write web content for your business, you can get in contact with me here.