By Karen Barr
Crafting Successful Blog Posts
Crafting successful blog posts requires more than excellent writing skills. It’s about having a content marketing strategy. Think about how each post impacts your audience and, ultimately, your sales.
Blog posts foster engagement, helping you connect with your readers. By frequently posting educational, informative and entertaining blog posts, your company becomes a trusted authority in the topics you write about. Read Why Blog for Business.
So, what is the key to crafting successful blog posts?
Analyze Your Best Blog Posts
Okay, statistics fans! It’s time to check out your top-performing blog posts.
Open Google Analytics. Over the last six months, which posts have brought in the most traffic? Dig a little deeper. How long does each visitor spend reading these posts? Make a list of your top blog posts.
Explore Related Topics
Make a list of topics that relate to your top-performing blog posts.
As a restaurant owner, you may find that recipes you post on your blog are what people click on and read the most. Find time to craft more of them. Along with enticing photographs, of course!
Continue to write about whatever topic resonates most with your customer base. Expand on the core idea. Explore it from a new angle. Make one post into a series.
Include links in the new posts to the original high-performing blog posts. The longer your readers stay on your website, the more likely they are to buy.
SEO and Keywords
Go back to your successful blog posts and identify the keywords that brought traffic to your website. Create a list. Now brainstorm ideas around these keywords.
You can also string together these keywords and create long-tail phrases of up to 10 words. These phrases attract people who are looking for exactly what you are selling.
Let’s say you are selling sundresses. You’ve decided to write a post on how to style sundresses. If you try to rank for the word sundresses as your keyword, you can imagine you will be up against lots of competition. Turning this into a long-tail keyword will help differentiate what you are selling.
- Sundresses
- Knee-length sundresses
- Knee-length floral print sundresses
- Knee-length red floral print sundresses
- Knee-length red rose floral print sundresses
See the difference?
Leverage Different Formats
If you have been reading my blog since the beginning, you’ll know I am a fan of repurposing blog posts. It saves so much time!
If you haven’t already, convert your most successful blog posts into different formats. Turn your best blogs into:
- A downloadable e-book
- A quiz
- A cheat sheet
- A microblog for LinkedIn or Twitter
- A podcast episode
When a blog topic resonates with your audience, continue to run with it.
Ask Your Customers
Send an email to your customer list. Ask them what they would like to see you write on your blog. Customers love giving feedback! This may lead you to blog topics you hadn’t even thought of.
Also, take note of the questions customers ask you about. It will give you plenty of insight. When you become an expert in your field, you can forget the basics.
I write about content marketing, blogging, and email marketing on my blog. One of my customers asked, “What is email marketing?”
As a marketer, I thought my customers already knew the answer. This inspired me to write a blog post about this topic immediately.
As a marketer, I thought my customers already knew the answer. This inspired me to write a blog post about this topic immediately.
In Conclusion
Successful blog posts require excellent writing skills and a content marketing strategy. For strategy, look to your analytics, SEO, and keywords.
Ask your customers for input. After all, they are your readers.
Remember to build upon your success by leveraging different formats from your top-performing blog posts.
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