How to write an optimised blog.

What is Inbound Marketing? You’ve heard the term thrown around but you’re not 100% what it means. We’re dedicating a series of posts to helping you understand what inbound marketing is and how you can improve your efforts.

Your company blog should be posting at least three days a week – but you already knew that, right? We’re part of an impatient society that texts and tweets, so how can you get your point across without boring people to death? Harsh, but true! You really need to appeal to your audience and keep them interested in your content – don’t let me freak you out though, you’re halfway there.

A Punchy Headline

You have maybe three seconds to convince someone to read your post. Piece of cake! RIGHT??? It can be a piece of cake, you just have to get creative. I could have named this post “3 Tips for a Perfect Blog Post” or “3 Things Every Blog Needs” but then it would look like every other post with advice for your business blog – and Twitter is so saturated with the same recycled blog titles. It’ll be nice to stand out – trust us. Think of a title that isn’t super long and gets the point across – mathematically a title should be under 70 characters total so your audience doesn’t zone out mid-headline.

Take Gizmodo for example, their headline “25+ Famous People’s First Tweets That’ll Make You Feel Better About Yours” could have been “25+ Underwhelming Tweets From Celebrities” - BUT THAT’S A TERRIBLE HEADLINE! The great thing about their headline is that they are making their audience think about their tweets and wonder just how awful some celebrities’ tweets could be. SOLD! CLICKABLE! For the full scoop on how to write a fabulous headline check out HubSpot’sA Simple Formula for Writing Kick-Ass Titles.

Awesome Visuals

I would never make anyone suffer through a post without at least one photo, and hello! You can embed Vines! Tweets! YouTube tutorials about the correct method of shaving a llama! Maybe! I haven’t checked. You know why BuzzFeed articles are everywhere you look, and I enjoy them too but most of their posts are about 20 pictures and people love it. Two of my current blog obsessions are Peak Design andEat24 because they both have a sense of humor and clear, interesting visuals – and not just of their product. Gifs or fun memes to break up the text. Really, you should be doing quite simply is keep your readers interested with bullet points, lists and visuals. It’s as easy as that.

Sorry. Also, the internet loves cats. But you already knew that.

Smart SEO

When you write a blog post you should already have a keyword in mind, and for those that don’t know about long-tail keywords, do read up on them because they’re so necessary for your posts to rank on Google, so people can find your blog posts, then blog, then website and look at all of your products and BOOM! You’re a millionaire! You need your keyword to be strewn across your blog – intelligently, of course, because there’s nothing more depressing than blatant keyword placement.