Wondering how to publish a blog post properly and easily?
Writing a blog post is hard and unfortunately, hard work does not stop there. Once you have created your piece of content, it requires effort to publish it properly.
Let me break down all the important steps on how to publish a blog post, which can earn you more readers.
Post headline
Do you know on average, 8 out of 10 people will read the headlines only? 80% of the readers will not make it past the headline of your piece of content.
This is why it is crucial to pay equal attention to your headlines, as you usually do to create your posts to earn more eyeballs to your content.
Here are the few things you can do to create better-performing headlines:
- Keyword research: Search for your main keyword in Google, furthermore, review headlines of top ten results to get the pattern of best-performing headlines.
- Focus on your reader: The more you focus on the benefits to the reader in your headline, the more readers you’ll have.
- Use headline analyzer tool: Advanced marketing institute has a great headline analyzer tool. Aim to get a 20% plus score for your headlines there.
How to’s & list posts are the most popular posts on the internet and it is mainly because a reader can get the clear outcome from the post headline.
Content formatting
The first impression is the last impression.
I’m sure you must have heard this plenty of times. How you format your content plays a big role in establishing your blog’s first impression.
Which type of writing format do you prefer to read yourself?
I consider each section of a blog post a brick. The better the brick quality, the higher the value of your complete blog post.
Following are the important ingredients of a blog post brick:
- Short sentences
- No paragraph must be longer than 3 lines
- Lots of bullet points/lists
- A quality image to support the point
- A short paragraph to conclude the brick
Although, it is hard to follow the brick style for each section of the post. But I learned that following this brick style in your post can lead to a better post outlook.
Moving content to WordPress
Many bloggers use different word processors to create their content and only move it to WordPress right before publishing it. Besides, If you’re like me, who creates the post in Google docs and moves to WordPress before publishing. You can follow the following workflow.
- If you have time, move the content brick by brick.
- Ideally, copy the content to notepad first and then onto WordPress.
- Upload finalized images only.
Copying content directly from another word processor can bring along a code, which can mess up your WordPress theme’s styling. Therefore, to avoid this issue it is better to copy it into the notepad first before pasting it in WordPress.
Headings
There are six types of headings you can use to format your content. However, you’ll mostly find yourself using up to h3 or h4 the maximum.
You must have only one H1 on each page and as for the rest of the heading types, you can have as many as you need.
Hyperlinks
The whole Internet is connected through links and also search engines rely heavily on links to gauge the importance of a particular page.
Therefore, it is important to understand the fundamentals of internal & external hyperlinking.
- Do follow link: It means you are telling search engines to pass the link juice to the linked page.
- No follow link: This is a way to communicate to the search engines that you are not endorsing this link.
- Open in a new tab: While linking to other pages, don’t forget to choose the following options so you don’t lose your hard-earned visitors.
Internal linking is a great way to help your SEO. However, if you own several sites, you should avoid linking heavily or if you have to link to your owned site, try using no-follow tag to avoid any penalty from search engines.
Run Grammarly
Grammarly is a lifesaver as a blogger or writer particularly if English is not your first language. It is highly recommended to run your content through Grammarly before publishing to correct typos or spelling errors.
Credits must be given where due
It is unethical to copy someone else’s work and pose it as it’s your own. Therefore, you should always give credit where it’s due.
Before you publish your post, you must ensure that following are credited appropriately if you have used them in your post.
- Quotes
- Stats/studies
- Images
Likewise, you can cite the source by hyperlinking or including it in the footnotes of your post.
Images
Images are an important part of writing on the web, which helps bloggers support their writing points. Here are a few important things you should know before including images in your posts.
Image size
The size of an image may vary and you can not directly upload images to your blog as the large image file size can affect the speed of your blog drastically. Therefore, before uploading an image to WordPress it is essential to compress it.
Many different software can be used for that purpose.
Tiny Png is one of the tools for this purpose, which is very easy to use and offers the best results. You just have to upload an image and download it once it is compressed.
Image filename
Images are part of your overall blog SEO, which can help you attract more traffic to your blog, especially if you are original images. Search engines need your help to recognize your image so they can rank it in search results.
For starters, you can begin with naming your image files wisely, also, giving your images meaningful and descriptive names goes a long way.
Post thumbnails
WordPress gives you an option to include a post thumbnail image that would be displayed whenever you share a link with someone, particularly on social media.
Furthermore, carefully selecting the thumbnail image is important to get the maximum click-through rates for your posts.
Videos
You should never upload videos directly to WordPress. If you need to include a video in your posts, always upload your video to YouTube or Vimeo first and then add videos to your posts using their provided embed code.
Adding videos directly to your blog will cause you major issues such as:
- Server bandwidth
- File size and storage space
- Freezing videos
- Not supported video formats
- And a lot more
As a result of hosting videos on YouTube or Vimeo, all the troubles associated with uploading videos directly to your blog will be eliminated.
On-page SEO
To complete on-page SEO effectively you should have the main keyword for the post or page and a list of related keywords handy.
Ideally, you should have your keywords before writing your post.
Let’s assume your main keyword is coaching websites and I go through with you to explain how you can use it to complete your on-page SEO before publishing your post.
1. Keyword in the URL
As mentioned earlier, after you have decided on the main keyword, make sure to include it in your URL. Consequently, it will help you rank better for that specific keyword.
2. Keyword in the title
Similarly, the main keyword should also be in your title as well. Google pays special attention to how relevant the title is. For example, in this blog, “coaching website” is the main keyword.
3. Keyword in the opening paragraph
The earlier your keyword appears in your post body content the better for on-page SEO.
4. Alt tags & captions
Describing images using alt tags with your main and relevant keywords is an important on-page SEO factor as well. Moreover, it helps you drive traffic from image search as well as text search.
If you have several images on the page, it is recommended not to use your main keyword in all alt tags, you should know relevant keywords and use those instead.
Alt-text and caption should be included in all the images. This is important for search engines as it will help them to define what an image is about instead of guessing it.
4. Keyword frequency
Using your keywords without relevancy is called keyword stuffing, which you should avoid. Although for a better on-page SEO, you need to use your main keyword and related keywords in the content several times. However, you must use keywords where it makes sense for your readers.
Yoast SEO plugin had greatly reduced the time that was required to spend on this task. It gives you proper guidelines about the right keyword ratio, all you need to do is follow that guideline and you will be good to go.
5. Keyword at the bottom of your page
As it is good to include the main keyword in the title and URL, it is also a good practice to include your keywords in the conclusion paragraph of your blog post.
6. Post categories
Categories help with finding better navigation of your blog and make it easier for readers to content on your blog.
If you consider your blog is a book, your blog’s categories can be classed as chapters of your book. Picking up the relevant category for your post, help search engines determine the main topic of your blog post and ultimately rank in the relevant search queries.
I recommend having as few categories as possible and choosing one category per post to keep it simple for search engines.
7. Tags
Tags works like subcategories to group different posts under one tag. However, I don’t like to use tags on my blogs unless I have thousands of posts or it is impossible to organize the content using categories only.
8. Internal linking
Linking to your existing relevant blog content helps those pages with on-page SEO. But the main purpose of these links should be to enhance the user experience and make your content more helpful.
Internal linking is a great way to drive more traffic and increase the time a reader spends on your blog.
9. Linking to other owned sites
You should avoid linking heavily to the other sites, which you own. It can easily fall outside Google’s best SEO practices. However, if you need to link to other sites, it is preferred to use the no-follow tag to avoid bad terms with Google.
You can easily not follow a link if you are using WordPress.
10. Links should open in a new window
You worked hard to bring readers to your blog post and you don’t want them to click away from your post and never come back.
To avoid this and keep your readers on your post, you must ensure that all links open in a new window.
11. Metadata
Additionally, You can have a look at the following guides for details.
The above resources will help you complete your on-page SEO including how to add metadata (title, description & focused keyword) like a pro on every page or post of your blog.
Call to action
A call to action is a must for every blog post as CTA tells the reader what to do next. Therefore, your CTA should be as clear as possible for better results.
For instance, in this article, my CTA is a newsletter sign-up.
Similarly, a few other commonly used CTA’s are:
- Leave a comment
- Buy a product
- Purchase a service
- Learn more
- Social media sharing
Broadcast to your email list
Last but not least.
On the internet, your two most valuable assets are your self-hosted blog and email list. If you are blogging and not collecting emails, you should start doing it at your earliest.
If you have an email list, you should not forget to send an email broadcast to your list as soon as you publish your new post. If you know how to provide value to your email list through your content, your email list will be invaluable for your content marketing success.
Conclusion
Content creation is hard work and there are so many aspects to it, which you need to get right. Publishing a post is a final step that can determine the finish quality of your hard work. I hope this post will help and answer all your questions on how to publish a post to earn more readers.
Do you find it hard to hit publish often?
If yes, what is the biggest hurdle you face when it comes to publishing content often?
Leave a Reply