I wanted to learn to write better blog posts for my business. I did research and learned that creating a structure and process around your writing in order to make your writing easy, fast and compelling is the way to,

• - beat writer's block,
• - generate many blog post ideas,
• - write quickly (in some cases a blog can be written in an hour or so)
• - focus on relevant, usable content based on search intent
• - understand how to compete in the space of a highly competitive keyword and 
• - give more direction to your entire blog

I have been following a YouTube Channel called, Income School, who have streamlined blog post writing processes to a high degree.  I find their advice really valuable and any of the tips here are lessons learned from watching their channel and applying it to my business. Here are 22 tips to help you to write better blog post content.

High-level direction and the nature of your blog generally:

While not specific to a particular blog post having a firm grasp on what you want from your content creations can be valuable when you are writing a particular post.

• 1. The first thing to consider is traffic:
  Is your blog content on a topic that is popular enough to support your business? One way to answer this is to ask yourself, are other people also making money and selling products in this field? If so then the answer is probably yes. A basic assumption but I like starting from scratch sometimes. If you're happy with the traffic then make sure you are using analytics to measure the success of your blog in terms of specific metrics.
• 2. What sort of seasonality is there?
  You can use Google Trends to understand the search "volumes" of keywords in your niche. This can help you understand if there is seasonality in your field and if so, this will impact your expectations from your content creations. Generally, if your business has a high amount of seasonality then you can expect your content creations to be slower to take off. Access Google Trends here to assess your seasonality by typing in some keywords from your niche. Google Trends.
• 3. Be authentic:
  This means writing some of your own blog posts but also if you can avoid using stock images (people know that they are stock). Even if they aren’t professional level photos as long as they are high resolution then the "authentic" feel of them will win people over.
• 4. Develop a bird's eye view of your blog:
  Asking yourself "What kinds of relevant and useful content would you create if there were no time or budget restrictions?" allows you to be creative and will lead to you be able to create content focussed on being supremely relevant and useful for your reader. You may not be able to execute on it exactly as there are time and budget restrictions in real life but if you can spend 15 - 30 minutes on this you will find that it will pull your content quality up a few notches. In the world of competitive search results writing superior content is a significant and real factor.
• 5. Ask yourself what sites are the pillars in your particular topic?
  You don't want to copy them but you may indeed see some things that you also want to reflect in your own writing. Don't focus overly on this point and don't attempt to copy too closely. Be aware of competition but have your own style and voice. Assuming your search volume is big enough (see point 1 above) then there will be people who gravitate towards your style of content creation.
  With the high-level view taken care of let's look at specifics.

Start with the title of your post and base it on search intent research:

Writing a killer title for your post is important. Why? When your pages start to rank then a great headline will stand out amongst the competition as this is the main piece of text users are reading in the search results.

• 6. Do some Googling around the topic and see what other people are using: 
  You want to stand out from the crowd as I mentioned but also you will see "related search" information in the results and you can use this to understand what peoples search intent is in this topic.
• 
• Caption: Related Search Results in Google: You can see that the "feel" of peoples search intent is around times of the year to visit. Users are possibly trying to understand when the best time for them is to visit or what clothes to bring on their visit in a particular month.
• 7. What types of results are in the search results?
  If there is a lot of video content from YouTube then you may well be writing on a topic which is more easily understood visually and in that case, think about if you should be providing images or even a video instead of or in addition to text content.
• 8. Titles should be 60 characters max:
  As anymore will be truncated (this can change over time so double check this as you are reading this post to make sure this is still accurate - try seomoz.com for a definitive answer).
• 9. Get the main point of the topic but also get the "feeling" of their searches:
  Again, look at the suggested searches, they will give you a little bit of a feel for what people are looking for. The search phrase or keyword exists within a context which can be helpful for you to gain insight into the users' concerns and goals. This video from Income School will give you more of an idea around the "feeling".
• 10. Be clear and definitive, not wishy-washy:
  People will gravitate towards a strong and direct sentence that conveys meaning. Make sure to avoid a "fence-sitting" title or have an ambiguous meaning in it. Importantly, don't don’t deceive them as to what they can expect after clicking through.

Create a lot of blog post ideas at once but don't write all at once:

• 11. Brainstorm many ideas at once:
• If you are writing a lot of blog posts for a client or for your own blog then create a "hit list" of between 10 - 50 potential post titles (as in the above steps 5 through 9) and then come back to them.
  There are benefits to doing this in one session. Firstly, doing these all at once many times allows you to have the focus be the generation of potential blog post ideas and allows you to focus on a theme amongst them all instead of thinking of one idea and then having to immediately also write the content for that idea.
  Secondly, you have now effectively dealt with writer's block as you have many post ideas. No more anxiety and stress thinking of what to write about.
  Write blog posts with a repeatable structure to speed up your writing:
• 12. If you are not an expert then write in a tone which is more similar to a "neighbour":
  For example, "I wanted to find out..." or "I've been learning about" instead of "I do it like this..." and "This is how you do...".
• 13. Write a "short answer" to the question or topic raised in the blog title in 3 or 4 sentences and bolden it:
  This gives search engines a "snippet" to include in search results which they often highlight more ostensibly compared to other results (setting your page out form the crowd even further) but also giving a very quick answer to the user. Now that's useful.
• 14. Put down a structure of subheadings that further develop the topic:
  These subheadings serve to answer the question or topic in a much more detailed way. At least 3-5 are useful here and they will often take the form of the classic how, why, where, what, when type content. Having this structure will allow you not to worry so much about the content you are going to write (you can just fill in the info for each subheading) lowering anxiety about writing a large blog post.
• 15. Subheadings create an obvious and clear structure so people aren’t faced with a mass of text:
  Remember your user wants to disseminate information easily so you should be writing with bullet points where necessary, providing internal navigation to certain sections of the article where appropriate and an organised set of subheadings to make life easy for them.
• 16. Speech to text with Google Docs:
  You can bang out speech to text content really quick. You will need to polish it up afterward as some words are missed or incorrect but it lets you get the bulk of it down without spending a lot of time.
• 17. Word count is very significant:
  Search engines love a lot of text. At least 1500 hundred words but more likely 2000 is a good aim. This does depend on the competitiveness of the niche. It wouldn't be uncommon to have several 3000 - 4000 blog posts as well.
• 18. You will need a large good looking image:
  Try not to use stock if you can avoid it.

Ranking in competitive niches:

How do you know there is a lot of competition? Do some keyword research using Google and see what results are coming up. Are there specific and "on point" headlines that are similar to your topic? What are the sites who are posting these? Are they very authoritative? If all these are true or even just one then you may have a very competitive topic on your hands. On one hand that is great - it means people are searching this area but on the other, it means it is obviously more difficult to become highly visible.

• 19. Focus on the least competitive keywords:
  On top of this hire writers to pump out content on the topic - the volume of articles should help.
• 20. Start a YouTube account or other social media which makes sense for your target audience:
  All those keywords you want to use may not be as competitive in a particular social media as they are in search engines. Go over to your social media of choice and use the same search terms to view the content there and see if you can compete. The idea here is that it may well be easier to rank here than in search. You can create content here that you can still direct over to your website.
• 21. Dedicate an entire site to a particular niche within a topic:
  In some cases, it could make sense to niche down even further to focus on a part of the original topic you are trying to compete in. For example, instead of focussing on "weight lifting for those with back pain sufferers" then you may want to focus on "weight lifting for jujitsu practitioners who have lower back pain". In a very large and competitive area like fitness, this might make sense. Then all your blog content revolves around these 3 things, weight lifting, jujitsu, and low back pain. 
• 22. Give it time:
  Content creation is a medium to long-term strategy. It could take 6 - 12 months to see the results of your blog posting so persevere. If your topic is super competitive then maybe it's more like 2 plus years. Fitness, finance and cooking are examples of very highly competitive topics to blog within.

Conclusion:

Blogging is an art and a science. Formulate a strategy to help make them become less hassle as well as reduce writers' block. What other tips do you have for blog writing? Leave me a comment.

Sources:

Income School is a YouTube channel and most of the inspiration for this post has come from them. They are very creative and knowledgeable in the field.