It’s not a secret blogging is the best way to interact with your audience today. Whether you have a big enterprise or just a personal blog to share your hobby, the main thing for you is writing a good blog post, eye-catchy for your readers. Plus, you should create a blog post with a good structure to let people know about that important and useful information you are going to share with them.
This article will tell you about creating a blog post, ideal for your audience, in terms of cooking a yummy rainbow cake; it will reveal all ingredients and recipe of cooking a tasty (and texty!) blog post. So, wear your Chef’s hat and repeat carefully!
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Every blog post has its structure. There is no ideal formula, but I’m going to tell you about its most important and necessary elements. Just follow my advice, and we’ll make our blogs better and more delicious for our readers. Do you consider your blog posts ideal? Well, let’s check the list of ingredients (elements) every ideal blog post should include:
Write a headline that will help you attract your readers’ attention. Taking a look at your headline, a person decides whether he wants to continue reading your text. Copyblogger statistics tells that 8 out of 10 people will read your headline but only 2 out of 10 people will read your whole blog post.
Looking at our infographic, we see that our headline is an appetizing cherry: when you see it, you want to eat a piece of this cake.
There are many recipes of writing headlines. To make a long story short, I’ll outline the most important moments:
After we’ve learned the main principles of writing headlines, let’s try to write it actually. To come up with the best idea, use brainstorming: write at least 25 variants of your headline. Sure, you’ll write common and banal headlines first, but sometimes we need to get rid of bad ideas before we come up with something really worth writing.
To come up with a good headline, you can also use Online Headline Generator: it will give you more than 600 titles for less than 15 seconds. You’ll just need to choose the best ones.
After we’ve determined the list of the best headlines, we’ll have to choose the one. Use Emotional Headline Analyzer to choose the headline with the best EMV (Emotional Marketing Value): emotional impact to a reader with the help of a text means success.
And before moving forward, I recommend to take a look at 35 Headline Samples From The A-List Bloggers where Jerry Low has perfectly described the tricks such well-known bloggers as Neil Patel, Brian Clark and John Morrow use for writing headlines of their works.
Our headline is ready!
Sprinkle the main idea of your post before writing the story itself. Take a look at our texty cake: we’ve sprinkled it with colorful topping. Doesn’t it look delicious? Introduction is the second main element of a good blog post, that’s why it should be attractive and have a hook to make people interested in reading your post.
Using subheadings is appropriate every time you want to tell your readers something important. It’s as important as adding some raspberries to a pink pie shell of our rainbow cake. Subheadings improve the structure of your text and help you organize your thoughts.
If your text has many elements – use lists to make it easier for your readers to scan your post visually.
“Use subheadings and lists to section your content for better perception” – Click to Tweet
Visual and interactive elements in your blog post are very important, as they can be used to tell people about something that’s not easy to express by words. Images and videos are the most delicious ingredients of our texty cake which let us create and use content in a way where a simple text will never work. People love visual effects because they do not usually have patience and time to read very long articles.
“Your blog post’s readers will prefer videos and images to a text as they’ll tell more info than words” – Click to Tweet
Let’s be philosophical a bit… When you bake a cake, what ingredients do you choose for it: good or average ones? I am sure you choose good ones because you do not want to poison your friends with this cake. And if your friends ask what ingredients you used to bake such a yummy dessert you would tell them about products and their manufacturers for sure.
Blogging works the same: when you use relevant links to authoritative resources – you build and improve your online reputation among readers. If your article provides useful information with good links readers can add it to bookmarks and use it again and again.
And if your website provides links to weak and rubbish resources, wouldn’t it be a sign for your readers that your own website is rubbish, too? To avoid this, follow a simple rule:
“Linking to other high-quality websites will earn more trust from your readers” – Click to Tweet
Another good way to make your cake more delicious and generate your content effectively is adding relevant quotes and giving a chance to share them in Twitter. Derek Halpern wrote about such an experiment, telling about his fellow blogger who tested out this method and noticed that 800 people clicked his “tweetable” link.
If your blog contains many quotes, I would recommend you to try a good WordPress plugin from TodayMade or use such an instrument as ClickToTweet: it lets you make tweets from any posts and check the number of clicks.
If you have 1-2 quotes only, I would recommend you to do it by hand in order not to overfreight your website with plugins. It’s not difficult to do, and you don’t need to be an HTML guru to succeed.
For example, let’s make the following quote for Twitter:
“When you provide a quote to share, you give people what they want to share exactly” – Click to Tweet
When you click a “click to tweet” link, that’s what the URL will look like in your URL bar:
https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=When+you+provide+a+quote+to+share%2C+you+give+people+what+they+want+to+share+exactly+-+http%3A%2F%2Fgoo.gl/uiz7uv
As you can see, it’s quite easy to build such an URL. It has three parts:
Short links are possible to create with the help of Google URL Shortener.
You should also remember that not all formats are available here. Use definite codes to get right symbols:
After this, you will simply create a link in your WordPress editor, and it will look like this:
<a href="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=When+you+provide+a+quote+to+share%2C+you+give+people+what+they+want+to+share+exactly+-+http%3A%2F%2Fgoo.gl/uiz7uv" title="When you provide a quote to share, you give people what they want to share exactly">Click to Tweet</a>
Congratulations! You’ve done it! Our cake has become more attractive and delicious.
Eating up the last pie shell of your cake, try to make a conclusion and add a call to action. Yes, do not forget asking your friends if they liked the taste of your rainbow cake! Speaking about blog posts, you can ask your readers to share your article in social media for example, to comment, to subscribe to your newsletter, etc.
As a bonus, I suggest you to save this mini checklist of a delicious texty cake from a chef:
Bon appétit! : )
This was an ingenius idea to compare food with blog posts. Writing an effective blog post that catches the attention of the audience. Headlines will always be the most important part of a blog post. Other than that, the formatting of the post is equally important.
Most bloggers make the mistake of not properly formatting their blog post. As a result, the post looks clumsy. Having a good looking content is equally important other than having a good looking blog.
Thanks for sharing these valuable tips.
Hi, Emily! This is a well-written article. I appreciate the included tutorial about click to tweet links. The illustration is well made and simple! Thanks for sharing it with us. Pinned!
Much thanks to you for your insights. I have bookmark this page for my future reference.
Everything is very open with a clear description of the issues.
It was truly informative. Your site is extremely helpful.
Many thanks for sharing!
This is simply amazing, cake + content + great design. Well, now I’m interested in hiring a graphic designer. 😉
Wow! The cake is awesome!
BTW, if you like the click-to-tweet concept you should definitely try TweetDis plugin.
That will be another tasty ingredient for your cake.
Your visual is definitely awesome. Sharing willingly!
Hey Emily
This post is wonderful and containing every important point that makes the post perfect.
Thanks for creating this delicious infographic.