How to Write an Effective Blog Post

Perhaps the best and worst part of today’s online landscape is that everyone, or almost everyone, is a blogger. If you’ve found your way to this post, for example, you probably have at least some level of interest in creating compelling content that’s just as interesting to your readers as it is to you, whether it be business oriented, journalistic or personal. But, according to recent blogging statistics, so do about 6.7 million other web users in the United States.

Below are some ways to use your blog’s niche to your advantage, maintain post consistency and package posts to be shared. This is a list of tricks to making your post one to be read out of millions.

1. Write blog posts about what you know.

Your post should be built on a foundation of what you’re good at and what drew visitors to your site in the first place. A particular theme, topic or voice that readers can learn to expect and will eventually come back for should be made with readers in mind and based on the specificity of your function on the web.

What are you doing here and why should readers care? Do you manage a business blog? What type of business and exactly what aspects of it? Narrow the subjects of posts so you can delve deeply into your niche and offer readers specific information that they might only ever find through your site.

2. Stick to you your blog niche.

When you write a post in accordance to your niche, it becomes easier for you to create content tailored to your blog’s readers, which increases that post’s sharing potential in the long run. The opposite becomes true when bloggers lack a topic or stringing theme among posts and publish them on a variety of subjects.

When that’s the case, each post may only appeal to a portion of your readers, which results in fewer readers getting through a post and even fewer of those readers actually sharing it with others.

3. Make it pretty, and be a little strategic.

A post is always more successful when accompanied by a related image that makes it seem more credible to readers and provides increased potential for backlinks. Posts should also be broken up with logical line breaks that help to maintain your readers’ interest, even through long pieces, and appear the most visually pleasing.

Be sure and utilize your social media outlets! Google +, LinkedIn and Pinterest work wonders for our Design Blog. For instance Pinterest drives 32% of this blogs traffic with our custom images and free giveaways.  — Matt Valvano

Similarly, consider utilizing a website statistics service like Google Analytics to monitor your blog’s traffic and understand which posts are most successful and why. Note that the universally best times to post are on Monday and Thursdays, and usually between 7 and 9am.