The Ultimate Guide to Effective Blog Writing

Your blog is the engine of your inbound marketing on your website. It is the one section of your website where you can add content to your website for literally years. I know this because I have worked for individual clients for years, yet we never run out of topics to write about. 

You can go as deep and granular as you’d like about one single topic for many months and dozens of articles. Don’t believe me? Check out that blog over at www.dirtlegal.com/blog and see how many dirt bike articles there are! It’s wild. Anyway, that is just one small example, although it is the best example that I’ve ever worked with.

As you can see in the above, their traffic started from scratch with nothing in early 2019, and over the course of about three years, they exploded. Right now, it is in the ballpark of 35k-45k monthly SEO clicks, which are all organic searches. Pretty impressive. No money spent on ads, and they are getting an average of about 40k people landing on their website every month. 

Now, this is obviously not all due explicitly to the blog, but the blog is a major driver.

Those first seven articles alone bring in just a hair over six thousand monthly clicks, and there are around three hundred published blogs on the website. Now, most of those are getting just a few clicks per month (if any), but it really does all add up. Effective blog writing gets the job done, period. 

Alright, now that we’ve kinda whipped that dead horse into submission, let’s talk about how to write a killer post that converts. 

1. Choose a Topic and Write a Headline

This first step seems like it should be fairly common sense, but sometimes it isn’t as easy as you’d think. Paralysis by analysis, we call it. Of course, there is a caveat: if you are a content writer for hire (as I am) doing client work day in and out, you don’t usually have to worry too much about your topics. 

You may still need to develop a headline if you know the topic but an outline hasn’t been provided. More on that in a little bit. 

Choose a topic that you're passionate about and that you know something about

Okay, so if you are already writing for a blog doing client work, then you have a topic that you know something about, and usually, passion comes with pay. But if you are starting out with blog writing as a pet project, it needs to be about something you find interesting. The description of this that I’ve heard is that you need to find something you can talk about and say the same thing a thousand times but differently. 

Personal anecdote time:

I grew up obsessed with aviation and still enjoy it to a certain extent. I spent just shy of two decades in professional aviation, though not as a pilot. In fact, the job I quit to do this hustle venture was working as an airport manager for the Department of the Army. And I really loved that job! But I was burnt out. 

And I couldn’t write about it with any passion, so I figured there wasn’t any reason to start a blog about it. Will my work in that field make cameo appearances in this blog? Absolutely. I worked in aviation full-time for my entire adult life until this. But it wasn’t my passion anymore. 

Anyway, don’t start a blog about a topic that you don’t care about. You’ll lose focus, motivation, and your creativity with suffering. Listen up: it is okay to trade off one passion for another! I did it. I couldn’t go back to public or corporate aviation ever again. I still look up every time I hear an airplane fly over, and I always will, but that isn’t anything that stirs my emotions enough to write about a hundred times, and then a hundred more. So here I am, and here you are as well. 

Write a headline that is clear, concise, and attention-grabbing.

Ok, so you have a blog writing topic that you enjoy, that doesn’t suck, and that you can write about a lot over the next however long. SEO is a loooonnnngggg game. This is no flash in the pan, but it is also your best long-term source of leads and digital opportunities. 

But getting Google to recognize you in only half of the battle. First, you need people to walk through the proverbial door. 

To do that, you need a hook. You need to do a few things to draw people in. 

First, you must appeal to your ideal persona and convince them that what you have to offer matters. If it doesn’t, they won’t open the link.

2. Research Your Topic

Learn as much as you can about your topic by reading articles, books, and websites.

Don’t ignore this one. Make no mistake: your ONLY goal is to convince as many people as possible that you’re not only an expert but THE authority in the field.

And it doesn’t really take as much effort as you think it will. If you hustle hard and learn as much as you can, within six months, you’ll be in the top echelon of knowledge in your field.

Stretch that out to 12-18 months, and you’ll be in the top 2-3%, easy. But you need to make sure that you can back it up as a writer with authority based on your own experience. 

Talk to experts in your field and get their insights.

It’s not hard to find experts in your industry who are willing to talk to you about your business, their experiences, and so on.

Get their take on things like where they think it’s going, what catches their eye, and so on.

3. Write an Engaging Introduction

Intros are best kept to around 100 words, so you don’t really get a lot of opportunities to set the hook.

I personally write the introduction first in sequential order, but a lot of writers suggest writing the body of the text first and doing the intro and conclusions last.

4. Write a Well-Structured Body

The body of your content is your bread and butter. 

Break your body into paragraphs and use clear, concise language.

There is nothing worse in content consumption than opening an article that’s 2,500 words long and has one heading.

And you know what? I see it all the time. Break your body up into multiple headings and subheadings. You only want one H1, your title, but then you need to break it out into multiple H2 headings. These are your primary headings, and then the H3s are your subheadings. You can add subheadings all the way down to H6, but I’ve never found those altogether necessary.

Use subheadings to help your readers skim your content.

The subheadings break up big blocks of text and make it easier to skim through the article. Remember, they probably found it by asking a specific question on Google.

5. Write a Compelling Conclusion

Finally, we have reached our conclusion.

Summarize your main points and leave your readers with a call to action.

You’ll want to wrap up your article in about 100 words or so. Keep it short, sweet, and to the point.

Hit all the high notes of the article, and then introduce a call to action. Maybe it’s for a private group or an email list, or it could be a product. You are here to monetize, so don’t miss out on your opportunity to pose a CTA.

Proofread your blog post carefully before you hit publish.

This should go without saying, but make sure you get over the article or content thoroughly. However, don’t obsess about it; this isn’t 10th-grade English. Get it cleaned up, check for major issues, and hit publish.

Parting thoughts 

That is it in a nutshell. Writing a blog post isn’t hard, although it is a whole lot easier once you develop a framework for it.

Once you figure that out, you realize that they are all the same, even if the topics aren’t. Once you have the process down, the rest is simple. You write out the headings using as many keywords as you can, and then you just fill in the blanks.

And, of course, this is where I plug my stuff! If you are thinking about getting into the freelancing game, you really should consider Upwork. I have earned over $70k in lifetime earning on the platform, and it really is a well-oiled machine. 

Check out my book on exactly how I got my start!