Writing a First Blog Post In Three Simple Steps

Blogging is a key for creating a successful startup company. Having a smart strategy means that outranking giant companies in Google search results is absolutely possible.

Today, small companies with a smart blogging strategy can compete with top players in the industry. The number of published blog posts per month have a strong impact on inbound traffic.

Once your inbound traffic increases, you’ll be able to capture lots of emails and of course, increase the number of customers.

Dorie Clark, the author of Stand Out, has explained how the number of blog posts is important:

One post, or 10 posts, or 100 posts probably won’t make much of a dent in raising your profile, or your company’s. But 300 or 500 or 1000 will, and very few people are willing to commit to that.

In this blog post, I’ll explain to you how to write a first blog post, and set up your content marketing process.

Specifically, everything is summed up in three simple steps:

• Generate ideas
• Create a structure of blog post
• Write a post

Let’s learn!

Step #1: Generate Ideas

It all begins with generating ideas for blog posts. Here, you need to figure out what you’ll write about. Writing a quality blog post isn’t so easy.

It takes lots of time and efforts. For example, I spend around 10 hours in writing a blog post about email deliverability.

I’ll start with Quora, but you can use different tools for generating ideas as well. Imagine that you work in Digital Marketing industry.

Specifically, let’s say that you’re searching for some valuable ideas in Social Media Marketing niche.

The first step is to open Social Media Marketing topic, click on Answer, and check if there’s something interesting.

Here’s the photo.

Based on the questions above, maybe you could write the following blog posts:

• What Is a Good CTR For Facebook Ads?
• 14 Best Email Subject Lines You Have To Try

As you can see, these ideas are very related to the questions from the photo.

The whole concept of generating ideas on Quora can’t be simpler. You only have to browse questions and pick something promising.

However, you don’t want to write blog posts about topics that are too competitive, so I’ll show you how to pick those that are easy to rank.

But before that, let’s see how to generate even more ideas with UberSuggest.

I searched for long-tail queries related to Social Media, and here are some of them.

For example, Social Media Listening Tools has a search volume of 1,000 and CPC of $15.13 which means the phrase is very profitable.

With this idea, you can write the following blog post: 24 Amazing Social Media Listening Tools. I’d suggest you add potential titles in the spreadsheet since you’ll find really a lot of ideas.

Adding a number in the blog post title will lead to will higher CTR in Google SERP. Adding magnet words will also increase a CTR.

You might notice the screenshot above has a column competitive. That’s actually my estimate if that blog post is necessary to write.

I did it with a little help from Ahrefs and Moz metrics. In order to check competitiveness, make sure that you have installed MozBar and Ahrefs SEO Toolbar extensions because that’s how you can check if it’s hard to rank or not.

For example, if you search for What is a good CTR on for Facebook Ads you’ll see the following search results.

Notice how the first result has 0 backlinks. The next result has 5 backlinks from 3 referring domains, and so on.

According to Moz and Ahrefs extensions, it appears that the first-positioned result the following metrics:

• DA: 34
• PA: 14
• DR: 48
• UR: 9

The second position result has a bit better metrics:

• DA: 89
• PA: 47
• DR: 79
• UR: 15

Page Authority and URL Rating predict how high will pages rank, and Domain Authority and Domain Rating predict how high will domains rank.

In other words, your goal is to find a phrase with a solid search volume and a low competition.

If you search for Link building, you’ll see that top results actually have +70 PA which means it’s almost impossible to outrank top results.

Also, search intent and relevance mean a lot because sometimes you can even outrank a page with a high PA/UR.

That happens when your article is more relevant to users. However, these are not the only ranking factors.

In fact, there’s a research that claims 95% of pages needs at least 900 days for the first position.

Simply said, blogging consistently is definitely important since you won’t see so much in the beginning.

Queries with a large search volume is definitely harder to outrank because lots of people are optimizing for those terms and they’re also investing huge amounts of money.

Here, you can see why I quoted Dorie Clark in the introduction. Once you write lots of blog posts, you’ll see how traffic goes up.

Step #2: Create a Structure

Creating a structure looks so easy:

1. Think what are your potential subheadings
2. Write them
3. Move on

Well, that’s just how it looks, unfortunately, things are a bit more complicated.

Firstly, you have to know that the usage of long-tail keywords in subheadings is very useful.

Long-tail keywords tend to have more commercial intent (higher conversion rates) while having a lower competition.

If you’re not sure how to find potential long-tail keywords, here’s what you can do. Let’s open Keywordtool.io and search for long-tailed keywords related to Facebook CTR.

Within a couple of seconds, I found one interesting phrase - Facebook CTR definition. Defining CTR seems logic even without this tool, but I’d always suggest using tools because sometimes you’ll find valuable phrases.

Furthermore, search for What is a good CTR for Facebook Ads on Google, and scroll down for the related searches. [caption id="attachment_1927" align="aligncenter" width="632"]

Related searches[/caption] So, maybe you could incorporate the following terms in your article (subheadings):

• Average CTR for Facebook Ads
• Facebook CTR Benchmarks
• How to calculate a CTR on Facebook

You don’t need to write exact phrases because Google understands synonyms and related variations. Now, let’s see our potential blog post structure.

Of course, these are just three headings, so you’ll need to find at least two or three more since I guess there won’t be too many words in first two headings.

To me, it seems logical to share tips on increasing a CTR after you write about benchmarks. Stats are just stats, so everyone should check his own.

Furthermore, when marketers usually talk about CTR, they probably think about ways of increasing it, therefore maybe one of the subheadings could be How To Increase a CTR?

This is what makes your blog post more relevant because you have a formula, benchmarks, ways of increasing a CTR, tips on checking your own CTR, and so on.

Here’s what final blog post structure might look.

However, the job isn’t finished yet. What I often do is finding useful benchmarks, studies, and images related to the each subheading and blog post generally.

I always open Google Images and search for images that I could add to my blog post. For example, if you search for facebook ctr benchmarks, you’ll see the following images.

One of those images can be added in the benchmarks subheading. Whenever you take someone’s image, you have to link to the source.

This way, you won’t have any legal troubles - sites whose images you take will be more than happy.

Why?

It’s because when you link someone, his Google ranking will increase. As for me, I’d like that as many as possible bloggers take my images and quote me. In other words, you should always create linkable assets in your articles.

As example, I created magnet words photo that you could see above, so I hope other bloggers will use it as a source.

Step #3: Write a Post

Writing can begin once you created a structure. Here, I’d like to give you bits of advice on writing top quality articles.

Firstly, make sure your blog posts is easy to read. In fact, some people claim that writing readable articles is one of Google ranking factors.

That has never confirmed, but even if it’s not a direct factor, then it’s definitely indirect since readable articles tend to have lower bounce rate and better UX.

The photo above shows results of readability test. I made the tool called Readability Grader which you can use to grade articles.

Content marketers say that you have to write blog posts in a way that even kids in the 5th grade understand it.

Furthermore, you should always use I & You when you write a new blog post. This way, you’ll make your posts more personalized and people will find themselves in your articles.

Also, your writing style can’t be formal. In other words, use shorts like the following:

• He’ll
• She’s
• I’d

You’re not writing an essay for a school homework.

I don’t know if your English is a native language, but even if it is, you should always use an app like Grammarly because sometimes you’ll make a mistake that you don’t see.

Every blog post on this blog has been checked in Grammarly. Next, counting a number of words is also important since in-depth articles are always more interesting and useful.

Personally, I mostly write articles more than 2,000 words. Counting words in Google Docs is pretty simple. Just press CTRL + SHIFT + C and you’ll see something like this.

Writing long posts tend to rank higher, so that’s another reason why you should write in-depth articles.

Also, when you write longer articles you can expect more shares on social networks which means longer articles also increase social traffic.

Everything mentioned above will lead to more backlinks. I’m not sure how much are you familiar with SEO, but backlinks are still the most important factor.

Adding lots of images will make your blog post more attractive. Here, you can add images from stock sites, or you can make screenshots.

As for stock sites, most of them are too expensive which often isn’t acceptable to startups. Anyway, there’s an awesome site - PixaBay.

On PixaBay, you can find almost everything you need for blog posts.

Next, if you wish to add screenshots in your posts, you could consider installing a web browser extension called Nimbus. It’s available both for Google Chrome and Firefox Mozilla.

The next advice is writing only a few sentences per paragraph because this will also make sure. Also, don’t let having more than 10 - 15 paragraphs without an image.

Conclusion

Blogging should be your important source of traffic since there’s nothing better if you don’t have enough money for paying few dollars per click.

The best combination would always be blogging and investing huge amounts in link building and promoting your blog posts - this will help in long-term traffic.

Writing your first blog post won’t be easy and it will take some time, but once you get used to it, it will become easier.

I used to spend few days on writing ONLY ONE blog post, but today I just need one couple of hours. If you have any questions, let me know in the comments section.