The 5 Essential Elements of a Good Blog Post

The 5 Essential Elements of a Good Blog Post

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You might have read that having a blog on your website is critical if you want your site to be a big success. Regular blog posts can help you establish yourself as an expert, can help with search engine optimization, and can give people a reason to return to your site regularly.

A lot of website owners hire professional writers to help them with content creation. However, you may find that you are better off writing your own blog posts. If you do choose to write your own blog posts, make sure that you include these five essential elements.

1. Exciting Headline

One of the main things that will determine whether or not people will actually open your blog post is the headline. If it’s boring, people might lose interest before they ever even open the page or scan the post. If it’s interesting, however, people will be more excited about reading what you have to say.

You do not have to write your headline first; instead, you can wait until you have finished your post. Then, you can look at the direction that things went in throughout your writing to come up with a good headline. It doesn’t matter if you craft it in the beginning, middle, or end — regardless, you should make sure that it’s interesting and intriguing enough that people will want to read your post as soon as they see it.

2. Perfect Introduction

Don’t just jump in with both feet and start writing. First, you will need to add a good introduction to your blog post. The introduction helps set up readers with any background information that they need to know and can give them a better idea of what the blog post will teach them. Your introduction doesn’t have to be — and probably shouldn’t be — overly long. However, it should be there, and it should be interesting.

3. Ample Information

Don’t just blab on in your blog post. Once people see that your post is filled with “fluff” and not much real information, they’ll probably click away. The truth is that the internet is filled with enough blog posts that people don’t have to read the ones that don’t provide any value.

Realize that this is your opportunity to really shine and to really show your readers that you know what you are talking about. It can help you gain respect for yourself and your business, can share the importance of your products and services, and can provide your readers with helpful information that they don’t already know. Don’t waste this opportunity on surface-level, filler information. Instead, really dig deep, and add in lots of information. Readers should feel like they have learned something and really benefited from reading your blog post when they are finished. This is what keeps people coming back and is what encourages people to share the posts that they read with others.

4. Subheadings and Bullet Point

A long page that is filled with barely-formatted text is not a win for most blog posts. People get overwhelmed and bored easily and often like to scan rather than feel like they are sitting down with a novel. Plus, more and more people are now using mobile devices to access the internet and read blog posts, and plain blogs can seem even longer on these devices. You don’t want to scare your readers away by making them feel like they are in English class all over again.

One of the best ways to combat this is to break up your blog posts with subheadings and bullet points. Subheadings can be used to break up and call attention to separate ideas. If your readers were to only read your subheadings alone, they should still have a pretty good idea of what you are talking about.

Bullet points are great for adding lists or small details. They add visual interest to the page, and they also break down valuable information and make it easy for this information to be found and read.

5. Pictures

You may not want to take pictures just for your blog, but this does not mean that you shouldn’t add photographs to each of your blog posts. There are a lot of services out there that allow you to purchase rights to stock photos for very low prices. You can even find these photos for free, although your selection will be a bit more limited. Look for at least one or two photos for each post; just make sure that you have the right to use these images since you can get in trouble for using copyrighted images for your purposes.

Adding photos is smart for a couple of reasons. First of all, photos grab attention — this is true both on your blog and when people are sharing your blog on social media. Photos can also be used to link to your page from social media sharing sites.

Also, they add quite a bit of visual interest to the page. As mentioned above, a long page of plain text can be quite boring and unappealing to your average blog reader. If there are a couple of nice pictures thrown into the mix, however, the page will look a whole lot better.

Much success,

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