How to Blog Effectively in 10 Easy Steps

To succeed in content marketing, you must learn how to blog effectively. Like it or not, blogging is an important aspect of digital marketing, and if you want to build a solid online presence, you need to be able to blog quickly and effectively.

I know that beginners in SEO or Digital Marketing find it difficult to understand the value of a blog and how it can help a solo blogger or a business grow online, but that doesn’t change the facts.

Many people make a living from blogging, others use it to get higher rankings in search results, and retailers use it to promote their products and online stores.

If you think for a moment about what is actually the Internet, you will realize that a big part of it is just a collection of blogs either in the form of text, images, or video.

Go to Google or Bing and search for any keyword you want, and look at the results.

Most lead to blog posts on personal blogs, corporate blogs, or online publications.

To say it simply, if you can produce good content fast, with the right plan and SEO strategy, you can get your share of those searches despite the competition or difficulties.

This is the exact purpose of this post. This is to help you understand blogging and how to become an effective blogger.

Here are the 10 steps to follow to start blogging effectively:

Step 1: Define your blogging purpose

Why should you blog? What is the purpose of having a blog?

This may sound obvious, but many people start a blog just to have a blog without really thinking about what they want to achieve from their blogging efforts.

Here are a few examples of good blogging purposes:

Blogging for money

This is a popular one. You start a blog, publish great content, get traffic, and then monetize it using Adsense, affiliate marketing, or other methods.

It sounds like a statement coming from the ’90s, but it still works, and it is one of the most popular ways to utilize a blog.

Those who still find it hard to believe don’t forget that this is how HuffingtonPost, Mashable, how, and other great websites started in their early stages.

Blogging for leads

Whether you are selling products or services online (or offline), blogging is one of the most effective ways to generate leads.

Through blogging, you can ‘communicate’ with your potential customers, convince them about the effectiveness of your products or services, and win that sale.

Blogging for traffic

Want to raise brand awareness by generating more traffic to your website?

Ask any expert to answer this question, and you will see that they all agree that blogging is the way to go.

The three examples above cover almost all blogging purposes, but it is important to decide your main goal before starting a blog because this can change your approach.

For example:

• If you are blogging for money, then you need the right tools to concentrate on publishing content related to keywords that can generate you money (‘buying keywords’)
• If you are blogging for leads, you must publish insightful and detailed posts that guide the reader in making decisions.
• If you are blogging for the traffic, you need to blog more often and on trending topics.

Step 2: Do your research before start writing

The content creation process (i.e., writing) is the most time-consuming part of blogging. Before that, and to make writing easier, you need to do your research.

Think of your blog’s topic and search Google using different related keywords.

At this stage, you want to find out what others are writing about the topic, what titles they are using, what kind of content they are using, and generally what Google considers good content for that topic.

Take a few minutes and analyze the results on the 1st page of Google, open the websites in new tabs, and read through the blogs.

Are there any similarities in the content? Do you notice any particular pattern?

Remember that your goal is to improve your blog, and this is the time to start thinking of ways to differentiate your content from what is already published about the same subject.

If you find something you like, such as a particular heading, reference, or point, open a new document and take notes.

Step 3: Choose your post titles wisely (examples)

Now that you have a good idea of what has been written about the topic, your next task is to come up with a title.

Your title ideally has to serve two purposes: it should be catchy so that users will click and read it and SEO friendly so that you have more chances of achieving higher rankings.

This is how I choose my titles:

After I decide the general keywords  I would like to target in my article, I start to search Google for the particular keywords and take notes of the suggestions that Google gives while typing in the search box and the ‘Related Searches’ they display at the end of each page.

I then check the most related keywords in Semrush to determine their difficulty and similar long-tail keywords.

The next step is to narrow my selection to one or two candidates, and then I start thinking about the title.

For example, consider this:

General keyword: “SEO Tips”

Long-tail keyword: “SEO Tips for Beginners”

Article title:”15 SEO Tips for Beginners for higher Google rankings”

Important

The last step before making the final decision is to do another search on Google using the complete title.

I want to find out the type of websites that rank for that title, especially their domain authority (Hint: using SEMRush).

If the first positions are occupied by high authority and really big websites, this narrows the possibilities of my blog post to achieve good rankings regardless of how good I can make my content.

I know that this sounds confusing (the more experienced can understand what I mean), but it is important to invest your blogging time in titles or keywords that will increase your traffic.

If this is the case, I will further tweak the title by changing or adding words so that I will have to compete with less authoritative websites.

Pro Tip: Read How to create SEO friendly Titles for more examples and step-by-step instructions.

Step 4: Create the post outline

Once the title is ready and optimized, you should create the post outline. By outline, we mean to decide on the different headings of the blog post and what each blog section will cover.

Making a good outline from the beginning will save you much time later. All you have to do afterward is create the content for each heading.

It is easier to write 500 words to cover a subheading than trying to write 3000 words with no end.

Depending on the post length, you can have different headings, ideally for every 500 words.

This also makes reading easier, especially for those who like skim reading.

Step 5: Write the introduction

A Greek philosopher once said, “Well begun is half done,” and this is true when it comes to writing the introduction of your blog.

Once you write the introduction and get the ball rolling, the rest goes faster and smoother (provided, of course, that you know your topic and have a good idea of what to write in the body of the article).

When I write introductions for my blog posts, I try to keep them short (2-3 lines) and explain what the post is about.

I know this is not my strongest point, but I try to improve by continuously experimenting with different ways of writing the introduction.

It definitely takes a good amount of my time, but once the introduction is ready, the body of the post is easier to write (especially if you have created a good outline, as explained in step 4).

In your introduction, add your keywords (or related keywords) in the first 160 characters of the post without keyword stuffing or making unrelated sentences.

For example, look at the introduction of this post and notice how I added my target keyword, “how to blog effectively,” in the first sentence.

I also tend to use parts of the introduction as the meta description of the page, so the time it takes to write the introduction serves this purpose, too.

Step 6: Size does count (post length)

Size does matter. Many studies and surveys show that longer posts perform better in search and social (they are more shareable and likable) but also in different publishing platforms, e.g., LinkedIn posts or BuzzFeed.

Many people ask, ok, the longer, the better, but how long should a blog post be? The simplest answer is to search Google for similar articles and count the number of words of each blog post that appears on the first page of Google.

This may not be a scientific way to determine the ideal word length for your topic, but it’s an easy way to determine what Google wants.

Calculate the average number of words and make yours longer and more insightful, provided that it makes sense and you have something more to say to add value to the content.

Step 7: Learn the basic on-page SEO principles

SEO is a huge subject, but when it comes to article writing, you don’t have to be an SEO expert to understand the basics.

All you need is to be familiar with basic on-page SEO concepts.

On-page SEO is nothing but a set of rules you can apply to your content to make it friendlier to search engine bots and users. Things like:

• Titles less than 60 characters
• Descriptions between 140-150 characters
• ALT tags for images
• H1 tag for the page title and H2 and H3 tags for the headings
• Set a Canonical URL for the page
• Well-formed permanent URLs
• Fast loading pages
• Mobile-friendly content
• Internal linking
• Structured Data Implementation

are important to get your content indexed and understood by search engines.

Step 8: Beautify your work

You created a catchy title and wrote a nice post; what’s next? Your job is not finished yet.

Throwing words (even if they are quality words) on a page will not get you far. You need to make sure that your posts look good, too.

Use bold and italics to highlight important points, make subheadings bigger, make links easily identifiable, add images where applicable to show statistics or highlight a point, and add external links to help users learn more about a subject (or verify a statistic or study).

All these small things can make your posts easier to read, more professional, and more social. They can even keep readers longer on the page and actually read the article since they like what they see.

Step 9: Get your blog noticed

Let’s face it: You cannot be a successful blogger or run a successful website if no one reads, shares, and comments on your posts.

It’s a bad feeling to spend hours preparing a post and have it end up in the Internet recycle bin. What can you do about this?

The encouraging news is that there are proven ways to get your blog noticed.

You can use advertising, social media, guest posting, content distribution, email marketing, and many other methods to get your handwritten masterpiece in front of many eyes.

Don’t consider blog promotion optional; it is something you must do as part of your blogging process.

Unless you already have a large readership and followers, no one will care about your new post until you post it on their screens.

As soon as you hit publish, create a list of actions to perform like:

• Share the post on your social media business pages
• Share the post (multiple times) on your social media pages
• Advertise it on Facebook (use Facebook ads)
• Advertise it on Twitter (use Twitter promotion ads)
• Submit it to stumble
• Inform other fellow bloggers by email that you have published a new post.
• Update your Android or iPhone app and notify users
• Send out a newsletter to your email list

Step 10: Build consistency

Consistency will help you create results (i.e., traffic) to your blog faster.

I am not very consistent in publishing new content for this blog, and that’s why traffic is increasing at low levels. However, on other blogs that I have done on a steady basis, traffic has gone to more than 400K visits per month.

There are some rules related to how frequently you should publish new content, but as a general guide, websites or blogs that are updated with fresh, unique, and relevant content perform better (in many aspects) than other websites.

Search engines and social media platforms are constantly searching for new content (this is what their readers want), and providing them with what they want increases your chances of getting noticed either organically or socially.

Final thoughts

Blogging is a vital process in Digital Marketing. Users, search engines, social platforms, and content networks constantly need new content.

Good content takes a lot of time to create, so it is important to be in a position to produce it quickly. If you cannot do it quickly, the costs will be high (even if you are only counting your own hours) and make it a non-profitable task.

I described above the 10 steps I follow every time I write a new post to make my blogging effective, and I hope they will help you do the same.

Drop a comment below if something is not clear or if you need more clarification about any of the points raised in this article.