Blog Writing And How To Write An Article With Impact that sells!
It can be difficult to find inspiration for an article and many people procrastinate like sleepwalkers while waiting for inspiration. But here are a few very important things that will help you write something incredible! I have 14 great article writing tips for you.
Most people don’t know but because I learned the hard way what discipline can do for you.
The most important thing you can do is to get started! It’s like a water tap. If you are waiting for someone to come by and open it, you have to wait for a very long time! But if you take the initiative and responsibility yourself, you simply open the tap right away! So get the pedal to the metal NOW!
When you start out, it is almost certain that your direction is not correct from the start. It’s like leaving your garage, driving slowly out of your driveway, out of your neighbourhood, through half of the city and only when you are on the highway you can speed things up!
Here Is How To Write An Article
Article writing isn’t hard! But you have to get started. And that’s the hard thing! It always is because the brain need time to adjust. These are my proven steps to write an article, that works every time.
When writing an article, compare the reader’s experience to a mountain hike. Imagine a small mountain. And that you are the one who guides the hiker to the top. It must not be too difficult to get up there and you need to encourage them along the way. If it’s too steep, people give up. If it’s too flat, it’s getting boring. The reader must be ‘lured’ to read because the view from the top is AMAZING!
1. Power Words
Use easy-to-read language and lots of descriptive words to create a mood or feeling in the reader. DO NOT use unnecessary words and wordings, but use understandable expert phrases. Wise people call it Storytelling because it is entertainment.
You can use anticipation. Like this: “I will teach you How To Write Something Incredible. BUT first, we need to look at the basics!”
Then you go through the basics and build up anticipation and in the end, you spill the beans. The point you have to TOUCH people! Do it with emotion and you will touch their hidden needs!
2. The Length Of Your Article
If we are talking SEO and look at articles from Google’s perspective, the length is a vital ranking factor. It shouldn’t be but it is. Some answers to some questions does not need to be very long.
“Are there a lot of carbs in potatoes?”
The answer to this question would be imbearable to read from a 4,000 word article! And Google haven’t found a way to handle this yet. That is why the length of an article matters to Google.
And posts on blogs on the internet has become significantly longer the past ten years! Significantly! It is not unusual for bloggers to write 4-5,000 word articles today. And this is ONLY to rank properly in Google. I know. I am an introvert. I can explain things short and precisely. Which a lot of people actually prefer.
I have some customers with blogs and I have a lot of test websites too and believe me, articles on 200 words doesn’t rank in Google. A website with 200 word jokes will never rank on Google.
Five years ago we created 500-800 words articles. But the Internet is totally saturated so today our articles need to be longer, more comprehensive and be relevant.
If you look at Seth Godin’s blog, you will find he has a lot of smaller articles in only a few hundred words. And they rank! That is because he has a Domain Authority on 84 which comes from 46,000 backlinks! This can make anything rank!
Lead Posts
Post that attract leads do so best if they are 2,500 words according to HubSpot (2019). In short longer content works best for generating leads.
Pillar Posts
Pillar posts should be around 4,000 words and that might be why most bloggers end up with huge articles.
Listicles
Listicles can be shorter. They tend to perform well at 2,300-2,600 words.
How To articles
How to articles are this kind of article where people want a fast solution and don’t want to read for ever to get a fix to a problem. These articles perform best if they are short and to the point at 1,700-,2,100 words.
Minimum blog post length
Yoast recomend at least 300 words. That said numbers show that longer articles perform better. And that’s where the entirety of bloggers come in with posts around 4,000- 4,500 words! But length only matters if we are writing quality content. Thin content won’t rank higher if you make it longer.
Content with 3,000 words or more is much more likely to be shared on social media!
Words matter! Content is still King!
Article length for users/readers
Research shows the ideal length of an article is 7 minutes. That is approximately 1,400 words.
As long as article length is a significant ranking factor, this is a race we really don’t want to be in. But we need to until Google wakes up.
3. Forget About Typos When You Start Writing
Do not think about typos and punctuation in the beginning. Just let go, full steam ahead and let your creativity kick in. Proofreading is not important at this stage. Creativity should be in focus. Not correct spelling.
4. Don’t Wait For Inspiration! Just start writing even if it is gibberish!
Simply start typing. Don’t think about how bad it is. Allow it even if it is bad. In a couple of minutes, it will get better. This way you invite inspiration. Slowly but surely! It is like starting a car. You don’t drive 80 Mph the first split second! You start slowly and automatically you pick up speed! A total hit is if you read an article you liked, tell yourself you can do that even better in your own language and add your own opinion and images.
If you are totally out of ideas just start writing a review article about one of your favourite things or maybe one of your anti favourite things. Or find a review or an article on the net and write it better! Add your own stuff! Bring something new to the table.
5. Use Passion And Put Excitement In Your Articles.
Always think about substance and content. Do not write a ‘thin’ article. No one bothers to read that kind of shit unless they are on the loo in jail, and have read everything there is to read in the library. Do your research when you have written your article. This will give you even more inspiration to put into your article.
Write the article as if you are the Washington Post and have exclusive rights and exclusivity on the subject. Write as if you were a professor in the subject. As an authority that knows what you are writing about. Remember on your About Page humbly to mention how much experience you have in this area. That you are among the experts when it comes to the subject you are writing about – without getting complicated scientific. Some choose to write a short exclusive biography with a small picture at the bottom of the article.
Don’t use passive words and avoid past tense. Write in present tense and project a dream into the future. “What if…” or “Imagine for a second…” sentences.
What if you had the money to do whatever you want? Imagine for a moment you have a lifestyle that makes you happy every day. The passive version: Imagine if you had a lifestyle that made you happy. You probably see the difference between passive and active sentences, right?
7. Link To External Resources.
Feel free to link to external references that can substantiate the credibility of what you write. But make sure they are correct and authoritative. People tend to misuse this and believe the link in it self it is proof. It isn’t if you are authentic!
Many people think that linking from their article to other articles hurts ranking in Google.
Let me tell you from 15 years of experience: IT DOES NOT! Linking to trustworthy articles makes your content look better to Google! Yes you pass a little ‘juice’ to that article, but it does NOT hurt your ranking in Google!
8. Use This Model When You Write An Article
- Image
- Explanation
- Argumentation
- Conclusion
Start your article with a picture, continue with an explanation, go on with your argumentation and viewpoints and end it with understanding, insight and aha experiences. Remember paragraphs and illustrations.
You can also use this model on sections in your post.
9. Formatting Your Article
Using paragraphs with only a few lines make your text much easier to read. Only use 2-3 lines in each paragraph. Use subheadings and ensure a good and manageable structure that makes your article easy to read.
My paragraphs start with a header (H2), and continue with some text and ideally an image or some infographics.
Sign up for an account at Grammarly if you need help with grammar.
I have seen a lot of blogs which use gigantic fonts. Maybe it is to help visually impared people to read. Many alo use headers with fontzize 8000 or above so the header takes up 4 lines.
Sorry folks! It looks horrible!
Yes, I know I use small fonts. Don’t go smaller than that. Maybe even slightly larger. That’s because I’m from the VGA days (640*480 monitors) where font size 14 was big. On a 1920*1080 monitor size 14 is actually often small. Maybe one day I will generally change them to 16.
Another problem with huge fonts is we have to scroll A LOT.
So it is a delicate balance.
10. Use Images and Infographics.
Images makes the article more vivid and infographics is a great way to say a lot of words in a very short time. Infographics can catch your targeted audiences’ attention like nothing else. We are very visual and images and graphics tends to attract the readers attention first.
Infographics can make it easier to get your article shares on Social Media. Infographics will also make you look more like an expert who knows what you are talking about. You can find infographics on the Internet but be aware of two things. The Copyright and the age. Stats from 2005 doesn’t necessarily apply to toady’s reality.
11. Don’t Try To Sell!
People hate to discover that the purpose of your article is to sell them something when they would much rather be entertained. Just give the reader a good experience. And if it is relevant put an affiliate link somewhere in the bottom, and tell people in your text that you sometimes use affiliate links. Be honest.
12. Call to action!
Not Call to Action (CTA) for a sale but for an action (which can be a sale). Follow a link. Press a button. Download for free, Claim your exclusive deal today, Read more here, Join now and cancel any time, Join the club, Let’s work together, Apply now, Join our family or whatever. The list is endless.
It is important to guide your reader through your sales funnel and put him in front of the choices you want him to make. Because some readers want more. And you need to show them where to get what they need.
13. Get Backlinks to Your Blog
In 2021 Google reported on an error that had something to do with indexing out sites and pages. For months it was impossible to get indexed in Google. The the inexing possibility came back. We could manually send our pages to Google for indexing. What they didn’t tell us is they evaluate our pages and if they find them Not Worthy they simply skip indexing!
Very nice Google!
To this day the skip crazy amounts of pages and it is a wonder to me how they determine which pages to skip an which pages to index. But it sure looks like small and new pages are uninteresting to Google now.
We can log in to Google Search Console and manually ask Google to index our pages. But we can only get 10 pages indexed every day.
It is VITAL that we do this if we want our sites to be found in Google!
Log in to Google Web Master Console and click on Pages (to the left) and then on the two lines:
- Discovered – currently not indexed
- Crawled – not indexed
Here you will find a list over pages excluded from Google. Read it carefully and decide which pages to index. Pages that end on /feed should normally not be indexed and if you have sign up pages, login pages, thank you pages etc. Concider if they are worth indexing.
From this list you can Inspect the URL and select Indexing.
Every time you post an article you should make sure it gets some backlinks to it. Backlinko has a graph that shows the correlation between Domain Authority (backlinks) and Google Rankings.
94% of all blog posts have NO backlinks. The no. 1 result in Google has on average 4 times more backlinks than positions 2-10!!! So here is your chance! Get some backlinks!
Use comment posting (carefully!) or forum posting (also carefully) or find a website that want to host your links to the page.
I have a forum Total WordPress Optimization. There you can sign up for free and post a GOOD DESCRIPTIVE link here. Please be MY guest! It is MY forum.
The better the description are the better link you will get!
Can I write about multiple things on my blog?
Well, it depends on what the focus of your blog is. Don’t confuse people, but stick to your overall plan (and headlines) of your blog.
If your page is called Carrots in 100 ways it’s probably wise to stick to carrot variations as a focal point. If it’s called Recipes with Carrots, the subject is even narrower.
If your blog is called Jennifer’s Life, Jennifer is the focal point, and then you can write about everything Jennifer thinks, feels, eats and deals with.
Topical Relevance
One thing to keep in mind is Topical Relevance. This means that every single article on your blog is circling around the same topic which is the main purpose of your website. Blogs with a low domain (below 20) rank can actually outperform DR 60-70 sites this way. So stick to your topic! Keep the articles relevant to the overall purpose of your blog. This is a great way to tell Google that you are an expert on this exact topic.
If your blog has many topics in different niches it is much harder to convince Google you are an expert.
May The Muse be with you!
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