Writing a blog post, the methodology

1. Choosing a blog post topic

The most important question to keep in mind while writing is: who are you writing for? You have to write a text on a topic that will be useful to your blog's target audience, or even more generally, to your "ideal customer".

It is therefore essential to know your target audience, their needs and their problems.

The best thing is therefore to write an article that gives an answer to a problem your target has.

💡Tips

• To identify the questions of your customers, you can for example note what they say on the web:
  • In Facebook groups on your theme
  • In discussion forums
  • Read the reviews of e-commerce websites (if you sell a product)
  • On your social networks and those of your competitors
  • On question and answer sites such as Quora
• Practice listening to the people around you! Indeed, you need to get your hands on concrete problems!

2. Search for keywords

Pleasing your ideal client is good. But on the web, blog posts found on distant results pages don’t get any views ...

The truth is, content that is read, is often content that arrives in the first results on a search engine. The good news is that you can improve your position in search engines (what we call "SEO" or natural referencing)!

It is recommended to build your article around a keyword or a main expression. But it is not necessary to place this main keyword everywhere in your text! It would quickly become hard to read... That's why you need related keywords.

💡Tips

• Pay attention to the suggested Google search results.
• Pinterest also has a keyword suggestion tool when you type in a query
• To make reading your blog post enjoyable: use synonyms!
  • The best synonym dictionary
• Use dedicated keyword research tools:
  • Ahref
  • Semrush
  • Google Trends

3. Write a powerful blog post title

The title is the first tool to catch the eye! On a search engine, it's also what will make people want to click on your article or not.

💡Tips

• A good title is therefore short, ideally less than 10 words
• The title must include your main keyword (to please search engines)
• The title must give an information, an anecdote, a tip... (to please your readers!)

4. Researching for a quality blog post

Of course, you can't start a blog post without checking the information you're going to cover. You can also bet on an article angle that doesn't exist yet. But a word of advice, don't go on too long, keep your writing goal in mind 🙂 !

5. Writing the introduction

Like the title of your article, the introduction is very important. It is your opportunity to capture the attention of your visitors. You can start by challenging the reader with a question or a quote.

And why not, talk about yourself? By injecting some personal narrative, you increase the chances of grabbing your reader.

6. Write the skeleton of your article

The skeleton is the outline of your article. When you have the main ideas in mind, write your paragraph headings. This way, each idea will be described and supported by examples in a paragraph.

7. Write the article

That's it! All that's left is to develop your ideas by adapting your tone to your audience. If you're wondering how many words you should write in your article, don't limit yourself.

However, a minimum of 500 words is recommended.

💡Tips

• Always remember to meet the 5W rule
• Give your key information at the beginning of the article, and follow what is called the inverted pyramid
• Develop one idea per paragraph
• Use a concise and direct style
• When your text is too long, format it (bold, italics, bulleted list). Also, break it up into paragraphs.

8. And after you've written your blog post?

Is your text written? ✌️ Well done! That's not all, before you publish it, remember to...

• Proofread it, of course!
• Insert several images or an SVG in your article (not too heavy and don't forget to fill the "ALT" tag of the image)
• If possible, add links to other pages of your website to promote internal linking
• Fill in the meta tags
• Prepare images to share your article on social networks or Pinterest
• Insert a "call-to-action" at the end of the article, to encourage your reader to subscribe to your newsletter for example