What You Need To Do For Every Single Blog Post

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Whether you’ve sat down to write your first or your hundredth blog post, there’s some basic rules that you need to follow.

Writing blog posts isn’t just about good writing. Yes, great content is something you need to focus on (it is after all, the top factor I suggest working on in this post), but there are multiple other factors that you need to consider when it comes to making your blog posts successful.

So, if you’re new to blogging, or worrying that your blog is failing because you aren’t seeing the traffic you want, be sure to check out these tips below to get your blog on track and creating blog posts which will get read.

1. Create great content

First things first. And hopefully this first point goes without saying. But you need to make sure that your content is great before you hit publish on your blog post.

This includes making sure that your content is:

• Well researched
• Accurate
• Meets the reader’s needs
• Spelled correctly
• Free from grammatical errors
• Laid out well (think about breaking chunks into smaller paragraphs, use bullet lists, and break up text with images)
• Including headings which make your post easy to read (bonus points if you include a table of contents!)

Spend your time on this first step. Your content is what people are arriving at your blog post for, after all. Yes, everything is important, but without great content, people won’t stay on your page and read your post, or come back for further advice, information, or tips in the future.

Make sure you plan your blog post

I’ve seen a lot of posts in blogging groups of people saying that they have up to 30+ drafts for blog posts which lie unfinished. A lot of the time, unfinished posts are down to poor planning.

And I get it. You have an idea, you start writing, but then your inspirations runs dry. Try and be disciplined with yourself and rather than having loads of unfinished posts, plan them properly so that you can get them finished and published.

When it comes to planning your blog posts, here are some things to consider:

• Your beginning – I usually write this at the end. In your introduction you want to be telling people what they will be reading about so then they can make up their minds if the post is for them
• Your middle – decide what you’re writing about. Why are you writing about this topic? Who is this post for? What internal/external links will you be using and why? What type of post are you writing? Is it tips? Hacks? Information?
• Internal and external links – more on this later, but you should have a rough idea of links you could be using within your post from the outset
• You end – what is your wrap up? How are you going to know when your post is written and what you wanted to write has been written?

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2. Use relevant keywords

Using relevant keywords is key (no pun intended!) to your blog post. I find my keywords by considering what my readers are most likely to be searching on Google. I then use tools such as Ubersuggest from Neil Patel as I find this easy to use.

What I like about this tool is that Ubersuggest tells me the search volume and SEO difficulty for the keyword I’ve entered. I can then play around with keywords to figure out which ones are easier to rank on search engines for, and how many people are actually searching for those terms.

3. Put your keyword(s) in your blog post’s permalink

Your post is more likely to rank better for SEO purposes if your keyword(s) appear in your blog post’s permalink. There are several ways in which you might want to do this. My personal tactic is to have the blog post appear in my permalink, pretty much in its exact format. Other bloggers just use the keywords in their permalinks. Finally, others go for a hybrid version and use a paired down version of their blog post title, making sure that their keywords are included.

Whichever format your go for, make sure that your permalink contains your keyword(s) to help boost your SEO.

4. Use images

People like images, and they don’t like facing great walls of text. Experts seem divided on the exact number of images you should use per blog post, but the message from all of them is loud and clear:

Use as many images as you can, and are relevant to your post.

You’ll get into your own rhythm of how many images you like to use in your posts. One thing I like to do once I’ve written my post is preview it. Where I can scroll down the page and just see a giant wall of text, I’ll go back and add an image or screenshot to break up the page.

Not sure where to get images from? If you don’t have the time or creativity to create your own imagery, my favourite go-to’s are:

• Unsplash
• Pixabay

5. Put alt tags in your images

On the note of images, make sure that you put in proper alt tags. Alt tags tell people what the picture is about, something which is particularly useful if you have readers using devices which read the internet page to them because of hearing issues.

Your alt tags should describe whatever is going on in the picture, with a keyword or two thrown in to boot. But again, alt tags are not the place to keyword stuff. Google will figure this out, the algorithm has been developed and developed over and over again over the years and has got very wise to those who try to sneak keywords in where they just don’t make sense to have them.

6. Write a meta description for your blog post

How often have you been on Google and dismissed a site just because the description didn’t tell you what you wanted to read? Most often, people use their blog excerpts as their meta description, which ultimately gets used on search engines.

You want your except/meta description to include your keyword(s), and a call to action. But you don’t want to keyword stuff, or seem too click-bait-y. It’s a fine balance, but essentially, you need to summarise in 160 characters or less what your post is about and what it can deliver to your potential reader. You need to make people want to click on your link when it comes up on a search engine and follow through. And a killer excerpt/meta description is likely to help them do just that.

Plugins such as Yoast and AIOSEO are great for this type of thing. They will assess your meta description and tell you how you can improve it. It might be that they assess it’d be better to shorten your description or add in your keyword. Whatever they suggest, writing meta descriptions takes practice. Have a look out and read through the meta descriptions which appear next time you Google something to give you an idea of how you could be writing yours.

7. Have your affiliate disclaimer somewhere obvious

Make sure that your blog is legal and have your affiliate disclaimer somewhere where it is obvious. My theme comes with an affiliate disclaimer built in. Therefore, at the end of every post, readers can see my affiliate disclaimer, with a link to my Privacy Policy.

If your theme doesn’t come with an in-built affiliate disclaimer, check out this tutorial from My Colorful Wonderings. I used this tutorial before using my current theme and found the information crucial to my blog’s legal compliance as far as affiliate links were concerned.

You might not have any affiliate links in that particular blog post, but you might have them in your side bars and widgets. Therefore, it’s still a good idea to have a disclaimer in an obvious place for your readers to see. Even if there are no affiliate links on your page, I personally still find it easier to have my disclaimer in every post just to cover myself.

8. Use external links

This might sound strange, as you don’t want to divert your reader’s attention away from your blog and your post, but inserting external links helps for several reasons:

• You give your writing credibility, particularly if you use external links to show where you get your evidence from
• Karma is karma; if you link to someone else’s blog or website, someone else might link through to yours
• Why not give your readers other sources of inspiration to read? They may click away from your post anyway, so you may as well direct them to something you found useful yourself. See how I linked to My Colourful Wonderings above? This serves no purpose to me. I get no commission or anything from sending my readers away other than knowing that I’m helping them find the information they need to complete a certain task.

However, external links can benefit your site too. External links which link to pages and sites relevant to your blog help search engines to understand your niche and your place on the web. Not bad when you’re trying to build your SEO status.

Not sure how to create internal links? Check out this short tutorial below:

• Highlight the text you would like to be an internal link
• Click the hyperlink button in the text format box which appears

• Next, enter the external link address

• Press the arrow and you’re done! Internal link is now inserted!

9. Use links to internal posts and pages

Internal links are just as important as external links. Internal links tell search engines how to read your website and how everything links up.

Not only that, but if readers click on your internal links then they stay on your blog for longer. This improves your Bounce Rate, which in turn improves your SEO.

When it comes to using internal links, make sure that the links are relevant to your post and your audience. Don’t randomly stuff them in. People get wise to this and simply won’t click through. And remember, when it comes to creating internal links for your blog, having ‘Related posts’ sections isn’t the same. You need to create a meaningful link for your reader.

Not sure how to create internal links? Check out this short tutorial below:

• Highlight the text you would like to be an internal link
• Click the hyperlink button in the text format box which appears

• Next, either enter the internal link address, or start typing and select from the options of published posts and pages which appear

• Press the arrow and you’re done! Internal link is now inserted!

10. Create designs for social media

For every blog post I create, I also create designs for Pinterest, Instagram and Twitter as a minimum. I don’t yet create graphics for Facebook because I’m not very active with my blog on there yet.

I use Canva to create my designs. What I love about having a Canva Pro account is that I can create one image, use the ‘Magic Resize’ function and then I have designs ready made for a variety of platforms.

Regardless of which social media platforms you use, it is important to make sure that you have designs which fit the different requirements of each platform. For example, at the top of each blog post, I include an image for Pinterest. The reason for this is because then readers can quickly tag the post to Pinterest if they’d like.

I then have separate designs for Twitter and Instagram. This is because the size requirements for images on these sites are slightly different and I want to make sure that I don’t just use one design on all platforms. Because the platforms may crop an image, the wrong sized image may mean that some of the information or reason why someone may click on the image in the first place cannot be seen!

11. Schedule and promote your blog post on social media

After creating the designs described in hack 10, I then schedule them for social media. Personally, I love Canva Pro for its Content Planner feature. It allows me to quickly schedule the designs I’ve created for Twitter and Instagram within a few clicks. For my Pinterest pins, I schedule using Tailwind.

For each platform, I have a post automated for publishing within a couple of hours of the new blog post going live. The publishing times vary depending on the best times for publishing on social media.