As one of our most popular posts of this past year, this recipe for a quality blog post has been updated with a few additional spicy ingredients.  Take a look and let us know how it tastes now.

Creating a great blog post is like cooking an amazing dinner. With just the right combination of ingredients added in just the right amounts, diners keep returning to the same restaurant for their food. The same holds true with your blog audience; if you put the right blog recipe together, your readers will bookmark and start to rave about the blog posts you are cooking up!  In order to help you stand the fire in the proverbial blogging kitchen, I want to share my secret recipe for quality blog posts:

  • Mouth-Watering Title — This is the first thing that your readers will taste; whether they found your post on a search engine or they noticed you updated your site on a social media page is the title. The title must entice the reader to click on your post (just like the smell of the food must seduce the diner to order the food). Avoid bland or vague titles and go for the gusto with descriptive and/or borderline inappropriate titles. After-all, if it grabs the readers attention it has done the job, right?
  • Clean Plate Layout — Just like how a delicious dinner is placed purposefully on a clean plate, the blog post must also have a clean layout. Remember that the article you are posting is online and not in a book which means that people want to glance at what they are getting prior to actually fully engaging with the content. In order for them to successfully and efficiently accomplish this, your blog post’s layout needs to be clean and easily scanned by your audience. You’ll notice that I utilize bullet points and bold text within this post to help you scan through the post and pick up the general theme, but there are several other variations to this as well.
  • Delectable Content — A cook would be offended if someone ordered their food and didn’t eat at least the majority of the meal. The same theory with how I write my blog posts; I want you (as the reader) to soak up as much content as possible to make you better in your business. My suggestion is to not publish fluff pieces unless completely necessary, but to take the time and effort to make your content stand out. Remember, you want your audience to come back for seconds so make sure your post is remembered!
  • Spicing It Up Your Way — Chefs establish a great following by throwing their own unique spices into their meals; you must do the exact same thing when it comes to how you blog. A blog is a conversational piece and should be treated like one (unless you are a direct news source which should be held a bit more objectively); bring your personality and your opinion to your blog which will help readers understand who you are and where you are coming from. This will also help you develop a strong readership and people that will become your own indirect marketing campaign.
  • Fully Filling Post — When you leave a restaurant, you want say, “Ahhh…that was great”, and not go to another restaurant because it wasn’t good enough. After a reader experiences my posts, I don’t want them to have to search for more information…they should be full of knowledge from that post and asking me for more information!  So, leave no room for error in your posts, leave no stone unturned, no grammatical errors, no spelling errors, and certainly be accurate with the information you publish.

Now that you have the secret recipe to cook up a quality blog post, I want you to take the information you have learned and apply it!  Remember that you want to start out by seducing the audience with the title of the post, ensure that the reader can scan through your content quickly and efficiently, create quality beneficial content, add your own personality and opinion, and leave no room for error. If you are able to tie in all of the ingredients to the recipe, you will have a great start to each and every post you create!

Need Help?

If blogging is something that you are interested in but don’t know how to get started, contact us today to schedule your free marketing analysis.

Sources:
“The Essential Step-by-Step Guide to Internet Marketing”-E-Book
SlideShare.net
Image Source: HubSpot, “The 2011 State of Inbound Marketing”, E-Marketer.com