Unhappy with your blog? Worried your readers aren’t interacting with you? Do you even have any readers?
According to WordPress, 5 million blog posts are written every day. That’s a lot of new content being created on a daily basis.
If you want your blog to stand out, you need to write the best articles in your niche.
We prepared this article with 7 useful tips for beginning bloggers so that you can write better articles and get more traffic on your blog.
When writing articles for a blog you’re not writing for yourself, you’re writing for an audience. Therefore, you should get inspiration from your audience.
Who are you writing for? Take some time to think about the answer. And don’t be vague. How much do you really know about your readers?
Knowing your audience is as important as knowing the topics you’re writing about. Where are they from? What are their personal stories? What problems and challenges do they struggle with every day?
The more you know about your readers, the more you’ll be able to help them with your blog posts. The easiest way to do it is through a survey.
There are several platforms that offer surveys and polls. We recommend Typeform, which allows you to send free surveys via email and social media. It’s the best way to ask your audience how you can help them.
Beginning writers will feel tempted to start writing as soon as they decide on a topic. This usually leads to dead ends and interruptions in the writing process.
The best way to organize your work is to do all your research before you begin writing.
What does ‘doing research’ mean? For starters, doing some basic Google searches on the topic you want to write about.
Although you should never copy other blogs, it’s important to know what has been written on the topic. Read as many articles as you can from various sources, going from reputable media outlets as Forbes and the New York Times to personal blogs.
After you finish doing your research on what has been written, you can also do some research on what has been asked. The best place to go looking for interesting questions on a certain topic is Quora.
Done with the research? It’s time to organize your article.
Before you write, you need the basic skeleton of the article. Having a title, headers and subheaders is an excellent way to distribute all the information you gathered into sections.
The goal of the headers and subheaders is to advance the article. Casual readers will usually skim over these in order to know what you are writing about. Of course you want to save some information for the content of the article, but with the headers and subheaders alone it should be possible to tell what the article discusses.
The rule of thumb you should follow is the following: the title should be a summary of what the article is about; the headers should include the most important ideas; the subheaders — if you decide to use any — should help the reader understand your reasoning.
You know your audience, you have done your research and you organized all the information into sections. It’s time to write!
You should think of writing a blog article as running a 6-mile race. If you try to go too fast, you’ll get exhausted and need to take a break. If you go too slow, it will take you hours to complete and you’ll probably get bored mid-way.
If you take too much time to write an article in a formal tone with an academic vocabulary, your reader will most likely be bored by it. If you try to write your article extremely fast and make it short, the reader won’t get any value from it.
When writing your articles, do it in a conversational style. Write short sentences. Then write longer sentences that grab the attention of the reader for a longer time and help him stay focused on the message you’re trying to transmit.
Use contractions, don’t abuse adverbs and avoid sentences that are too hard to read. Just write your texts as if you were talking to your readers.
A good tool you can use to identify common problems in your writing style is the Hemingway Editor.
A successful blog has great articles, of course. And you should constantly try to improve and learn how to write better articles. But there are other ways to get more traffic on your blog.
Including long tail SEO keywords is the easiest way to gain new readers.
When writing your articles, try to repeat certain phrases or expressions of 3 to 6 words. Don’t overdo it, but use those keywords whenever you can.
Why? Long tail keywords will put you on the first page of Google when people search for those words. Unlike shorter keywords of 1 or 2 words, long tail keywords have lower traffic and easier to take over.
If you want to discover long tail SEO keywords related to the topic you’re writing about, you can use Neil Patel’s free tool UberSuggest.
After you finish writing your article, you will immediately feel a great relief. And you will probably feel like you did a great job writing a wonderful article that everyone will love.
But will everyone find it as valuable as you do? You did hours of research. You know so much about the topic that your article will make sense to you, although it may not make sense to others.
Once you finish your first draft, you should go back to your research and try to think of important information you left out. Then, add a paragraph or two to back up your arguments with that data.
Remember: your article is just one of the many articles out there. Anyone can write about anything. To show that you have done the research and that you actually know what you’re talking about, don’t be afraid to mention studies and results obtained by others.
The last tip for beginning bloggers who want to write better articles is to edit before posting.
Far too often writers will feel worn out by the writing itself, without realizing that the process doesn’t end there.
As Ernest Hemingway said: The only kind of writing is rewriting.”
So how do you rewrite an article you just finished writing? If possible, you should leave it untouched for a few hours. Do something else; go read a book or watch a movie. Then go back to your article and read it as if you were one of your readers. What do make of it?
Editing an article is about two things. First, check its coherence and readability. Does it make sense? You can do that on your own or you can ask a friend to help you.
Second, you need to correct its mistakes. We recommend you use Grammarly, a powerful online tool that checks your spelling and grammar to make sure you don’t make any errors.
We’ve given you 7 tips for beginning bloggers on how to write better articles and get more traffic on your blog. Now it’s up to you to do your research, write remarkable articles and edit them into memorable blog posts.
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