How to write the basic blog post

How to write the basic blog post

Writing a basic business blog post isn’t hard. Even if you are a middling writer, time-poor business person or someone who finds a blank page confronting, this how-to guide will make things easier. By giving you a tried and true structure to follow, your basic blog articles will achieve what they need to: getting your message out there and informing your audience. With practice using the template linked below, you should be able to pump out an informative, high-quality article in about an hour. 

 

What is the “basic” blog post?

The basic blog post is called an explainer. The name is appropriate because the goal is simply to explain something that your audience might not be totally across.

Every business that has a unique selling proposition (and every business should) has a need to explain what’s unique about it. Why? Well, if its truly unique then the audience simply hasn’t seen anything precisely like it before.

What’s more, most businesses have multiple unique aspects that deserve full explanations. Each of these is a good topic for the basic “explainer” blog post.

 

How long should my basic blog posts be?

There are several factors to balance here: SEO, readership, budget and business goal. Some research has found that 2416 words is the sweet spot for content in 2019. This is, to be blunt, quite long – roughly equivalent of 8-10 book pages.

If your blog is not primarily an SEO play (such as if you use it as an info source for repeat customers), then you should opt for a length that is not so demanding for people to read and digest.

As such, 750 to 1500 words is a good range – it’s about the size of your average magazine article or newspaper feature.

If your budgets are tight, then you can lower the word count down. Even 500 words is worthwhile. Any shorter is pushing it. Nevertheless, a 200-word blog article that actually gets posted is better than a 2000-word one that never quite gets finished.

 

How to format your explainer post

Forget most of what you learned at school about writing articles. This is writing for the web. Here are a few pointers:

  • Include a meta description. This is a short statement of what the article is about. It is very important for SEO and search ranking. It must include your keywords and key topics and can be no longer than 156 characters (including the spaces)   
  • Your headline is now called an H1. For SEO reasons it should be no longer than 70 characters (again including the spaces)
  • Paragraphs should only be 2 or 3 lines. This often means a single lengthy sentence will comprise a whole paragraph
  • Every few paragraphs you should insert an H2, aka a subheading
  • Use bulleted or numbered lists wherever possible
  • Good links are good! Link out to reputable research sources and to other pages on your own site wherever relevant 
  • End your article with an instruction for the reader to do something, such as “For more information, call this number today”.

 

What should an explainer blog post cover?

One topic. Yes, just one overall topic for the whole piece. You state this topic as a “promise” in the introduction and, by the time of the conclusion, you should have kept it.

Take for example if you wrote an introduce that read “By the end of this article you will know why you should upgrade to our latest model”. In answering that question you might touch on about other topics but only so far as they contribute to keeping that original promise.

 

Write for a specific person

This sort of advice is often given when you are planning an article, and it is useful there. But what I mean here is that not only should you write for a specific type of person, you should straight-up say who that person is in your introduction.

For example: “If, like most American moms, you’re concerned about the dental health of your young kids, this is the article for you”. Including a sentence like this qualifies the article to the right reader and makes it easier for you to talk directly to them.

 

Basic blogging wrapped up

Over the past 700-odd words, you’ve read about the basic concepts of writing an “explainer” blog post – the style of post that will be building block of your blog.  What you need to do now is click here for our basic explainer blog post template. Don’t worry, it’s just a link to a Google Doc that sets out the overall format for your post and gives pointers for what you should talk about in each short section. Try it now – it’s really simple, but it works.  

 

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