How to Write Awesome Blog Posts

Saying that how-to posts are the best posts to publish is debatable, yes. But what these articles do is drive significant traffic to your website. According to BuzzSumo, the top posts being shared online are how-to posts with over a million shares across all social media channels. Of course, this does not mean you should churn out how-to posts incessantly, you have to add value to the discussions happening in your field of interest so that people will read and recommend your article.

There is an art to writing how-to posts, though, you cannot just pick a topic nonchalantly. If this is your first foray into online writing, or generally writing consistently, this is may be a bit more challenging than designing a website, or researching keywords.

Stay on brand

Before you start writing, you have to know when to put limitations on the kind of content you are churning out. It is easy to write various topics about the industry that you are in; however, ask yourself first if the purpose your website fulfills needs to touch on all of the topics. Let’s take the review website, Den of Geek, as an example. Their branding shows that they only publish news and reviews of geek related entertainment. You shouldn’t see anything that strays from that niche; and so far, they have consistently stayed on brand.

Staying on brand starts with the domain that you are going to use. If you already have a preferred domain, do a domain check to see if it is available for purchase. If it isn’t, you have two options: change your domain choice or do a WHOIS lookup and contact the domain owner to ask if you can purchase it off them.

Afterwards, it’s only a matter of laying out the kind of content you want your brand to publish and making sure you are consistent with it.

Conduct research

There is nothing worse than writing a how-to post content that no one thinks is helpful, and there are two reasons why they wouldn't: they already knew it and nothing of value was added to their knowledge.

To avoid this, you can research questions that your audience are interested in knowing about. You can ask them directly what they want to know more about or what issues or concerns do they want to be addressed on your social media channels and collect all the comments that you find helpful. Not only will you be able to elaborate on key concepts that they want to understand, but you will be able to pinpoint emerging issues or trends from their suggestions and start creating content about it before anyone else.

You can also use tools such as Answer the Public. Just type in keywords and, through Google, it will suggest content topics for you which you can use for your next article.

Choose the best question to address

The next thing to do is categorise the questions. If some of their comments share a theme, you can write one whole article that addresses those questions. But you should also consider which of the questions will help your audience understand more and prioritise writing about that.

Other ways to make your article relevant would be:

●Not teaching them what to do, but what to do differently to achieve excellent results

●Providing new case studies or research

●Creating an easy-to-understand infographic

As a tip, one way to hook an audience is to tell them immediately that you aim to add or improve their knowledge on the topic you have written about. Always assume that they have already seen a lot of how-to posts and are bound to be bored if you present basic explanations. Aim to be different, show them an entirely different or superior method than what other people have offered.

Format your post properly

The most shared how-to posts are long form articles, mostly within the 3000-word range. Normally, this will bore people because they will be a huge chunk of text that seem never ending. If your article looks like this, they will definitely ignore the article and not read it entirely. The best way to deal with this is through proper formatting.

First, you need to separate your points into headers that can act as an outline for your article. In this way, if they are scanning the text, they already see the major points that you plan on elaborating. If you are presenting steps on how to accomplish something, make sure that they are numbered.

Put images or videos in between points to give their eyes a break from all the black text. If you are going to mention tools or case studies, make sure that you provide links so they can check it out on their own.

Towards the end of the article, provide ways in which they can practice what they have just learnt or provide actionable tips they can immediately try on their own. For this one, you can even add a call-to-action like "share your results with us!"

When writing how-to posts, you have to be on top of trends and updates that may be relevant in your field of interest. At the same time, you must be aware about topics your audience may want to know more about. So do not hesitate to engage with them while doing your own research. Sometime article ideas come from some of your most active commenters.