What Makes A Good Blog Post (From The Blogger's Perspective)

What makes a good blog post? - In the last blog post, I talked about this topic from the point of view of a blog reader. I covered the aspects that make a good blog post from a reader’s perspective.

Make sure you read it > What makes a good blog post from the reader’s perspective?

But as I said in that post, it is not just about the reader (although the readers are given more weight) - it is also about the poor hard blogger who creates that blog post (hey, that’s you!).

You know the blogger is not out there creating and publishing “good” blog posts just for fun - there’s some serious business behind it. The blogger has mouths to feed and bills to pay. He/She needs money.

And he/she is perhaps blogging for his/her business purposes. So from the perspective of a blogger, what is a good blog post?

A good blog post, from the perspective of a blogger, should get the job done. It should convert. It should fulfill its purpose.

If a particular blog post was written to capture email address of visitors, a good blog post should have done that. If it fails to convert casual readers into subscribers, the post is not good - it has failed.

If a blog post is written to convince a reader to buy a product, it should generate sales; else its a fail.

So how to write a good blog post? What are the elements or characteristics of a good blog post? Here we go!

Killer converting title

No matter what boring topic you write on, you can make it interesting by having a killer title. I call it a “converting” title coz it only wins when the reader or the casual browser of the internet decides to click on the title and actually read your blog post.

The purpose of the title is to “convert” the casual browser to a reader of your blog. Your title should just do that job. Nothing more is needed.

Such a killer title is an absolute part of a “good” blog post.

A hooking introduction

What will your blog reader read when he/she first lands on your blog post? The introduction.

If the introduction is boring or if it drags feet about finding the “right” direction, your reader will most likely bounce off!

The intro should be interesting enough to hold the attention of the reader for more than 2-5 seconds at which point readers usually bounce off if the content is not interesting.

Interesting doesn’t mean you have to be entertaining, although that would work too.

You can be interesting in a number of ways - one of which is to highlight the severity of the problem or issue in question. You can explain how bad it will be to not to fix it and then provide tips to fix it!

Or you can precisely explain how it feels to live with a particular problem or an issue. This kind of introduction will kindle interest and will make the reader to stay on and continue reading your post.

The intro has only one purpose - to make your reader read the rest of the post.

A meaty post

Not to mention quality comes first when creating blog content and anything less meaty cannot be called “good”. Make sure your blog post contains all the goodness and some more.

While a meaty post will be “certified” as good by the reader, it is good on the part of the blogger too coz that will help the reader stay longer and take some positive action - talk about impressing your reader!

Call to action

With every blog post, you ultimately want your reader to take some sort of action. It could be one or many of the following:

1. Leave a comment
2. Share you post in social media
3. Subscribe to your newsletter
4. Buy your product

and so on.

What most bloggers miss out is here - they simply don’t explicitly tell the readers what they want them to do. There’s nothing wrong in giving more clarity.

Adding a newsletter subscription form at the end of the post is a good way of telling your readers that you want them to subscribe to your list.

Or you can ask them explicitly at the end of the post, to share the post in their social circle or to leave a comment.

Believe me, most readers simply don’t know what to do next and in that moment of emptiness, you could hit it right if you manage to include a proper call to action!

Don’t be shy to include one or multiple call to actions in your blog posts.

But just make sure that you don’t go overboard and annoying. Also don’t give too many options to your readers; chances are that they will take no action if you give them too many things to do!

Track conversions

You will never know if something has worked out or not until you track it. You will never know how your blog post performed until you track your elements of success.

I cannot give you a tracking tutorial here coz it depends on what you want to track. If you want to see how your blog post performed in terms of traffic you need to go to Google Analytics.

If its about sign ups, again you can set up specific goals in Google Analytics. If it is a guest post that you want to track, that can be done via the “referral traffic” module of Google Analytics.

Make sure you monitor the performance of you blog posts very closely. This will help you eliminate any mistakes you are doing and will help you do more of what works in relation to conversion.