The Essential Ingredients for Writing a High-Quality Blog Post

The first step is knowing your target audience.

Most companies now understand the importance of high-quality content for a blog. Search engines rank higher any content that is well-written, well-researched and relevant to the blog. But what exactly factors into writing a high-quality written blog post? What are the necessities? We'll tell you below.

See also: 5 Ways to Make Your Content More Original

1. Know Your Target Audience

Before writing a blog post, you need to know your target market. The readers of a blog are often in a niche that is looking for information pertinent to an industry. A good post speaks to the readers of that blog and no one else. By understanding the needs, wants and problems of your particular audience, you can create posts that are useful for them.

2. Valuable Information

People read blogs for a variety of reasons. For the most part, they want to learn something new that can help them in their businesses. A post can change a reader's mind about an issue, inspire him to try something new, or teach him how to do something better. Whatever you write about has to be interesting and meaningful to the blog's readers.

See also: How to Make Sure Your Content's Quality is Suitable for Google News

3. Comprehensive

Blog posts are often conversational in nature. You want them to be easy to read and understand. While you are trying to educate your readers, you aren't writing a scholarly document. Keep it light, but informative to keep readers engaged.

4. Readable & Succinct

Word length is also important. A good rule of thumb is to write posts of 400-1,200 words. This range gives you enough space to adequately cover a topic. However, you should keep your post blog as short as possible while still providing complete information about your topic. Here is an example of a 400-word post on, "can dogs eat almonds?", and a ~1200-word post on HeidiSQL, a popular SQL developer tool.

See also: 5 Ways to Turn Your Audience into Content

5. Authoritative Sources

Research is necessary for quality blog posts. To provide the highest quality information, you should only use authoritative sources such as universities, government agencies, trade associations, research studies, and other expert material. Any opinions you offer should be backed up by citing relevant sources (see also: Using Expert Interviews to Develop New Content).

6. Easily Scannable

With so many things vying for our attention, it's essential to make a blog post scannable. This allows the reader to quickly look over a post to get the gist of the article. The best way to make a post scannable is with descriptive subheadings throughout the post. Bullet points are also helpful, but not necessary.

See also: How to Measure the ROI on Your Blog Content

7. Proper Formatting

Formatting is also essential for quality posts. Each post needs a short introductory paragraph that gives an overview of the post topic (see also: 8 Key Qualities of Excellent Web Copy). Each post also needs a short conclusion that summarizes what the post was about. Short paragraphs also make a post easier to read and subheads are a great way to segment dense paragraphs.

8. Call-to-Action

A call to action (CTA) is important for blog post. It tells readers what to do next. A CTA can be to leave a comment, answer a question, share the post, or visit a website. CTAs keep the conversations going or keep readers involved with your company.

Content is now one of the best ways to market a business. For many small business and large corporations, blogging is a part of content marketing. By providing high quality blog posts on a consistent basis, a company increases it readership, and, ultimately, its market share.

To Read More About Content Quality See Below:

The Power of Long Form Content in the Age of Short Form Content
How to Make Sure Your Content's Quality is Suitable for Google News
What the New York Times Can Teach You About Quality Content

Photo Credit: Podknox via Flickr.

Published by Nicole Karlis on Wednesday, April 30, 2014 in Content Marketing, Seo, Writing.

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