“Explore your own innermost thoughts to create content that will evoke deeply relatable emotions and passion in others.”
— Ken Poirot
Everything You Need To Know About Professional Blog Writing
You want to start in a specific subject not many people are talking about. To begin with, you have to be strong in one subject. You would want Google to think that you’re good at this subject. The more niche, the faster you’ll start getting traffic. After getting credibility in one subject, you can start branching off.
COMING UP WITH AN IDEA OF A NEW ARTICLE
The best way to approach writing article subject research is you need to do keyword research. There are 2 tools you can use, there’s SEMrush and AHrefs. When you are starting a blog from fresh, you want to look at:
- Long-tailed keywords. (These are usually keyword that are most focused, more niched)
- Stuff that doesn’t have so much traffic but because it doesn’t have much traffic. It’s glossed over by bigger guys so it’s less competitive.
- That’s where you come in and you can start writing articles about the subjects.
- Change people’s questions relating some keyword, start covering at your niche and grow from there.
Eventually, over some time, as your domain becomes more credible in the eyes of google, you can start targeting keywords that have more volume and are more competitive.
DOMAIN AUTHORITY
You’re really limited by this thing called “Domain Authority”—which is how trustworthy your website is in the eyes of google and if you have a low domain authority, then there’s no point in targeting competitive keywords because you’re just gonna get destroyed by the people with higher domain authorities.
If you spread yourself too thin or you start competing with something that’s too competitive, you’re wasting time. You’re never gonna get initial audience in a wider scale. It’s going to be doing nothing, essentially. It’s a mistake when you target the competitive keywords too quickly.
If you start too quickly, you tend to make content that’s not competitive enough to rank on the keyword. Because if your domain authority is low and you want to compete for a keyword, your content has to be exceptional.
FATHEAD KEYWORDS VS. LONG-TAILED KEYWORDS
There are two ends of the spectrum. There’s a fathead which is a keyword that’s searched frequently and is very competitive. And then there’s long-tailed, which is more niche. So, for example, plane tickets, a fat head keyword would be like “plane tickets”, you will get a klot of search result on thi. But if you are targeting the keywords, let’s say “plane tickets to Mexico City for a Cruise”, you just niche it down and be more specific.
The point of niching it down is to have less competition. You can provide better content at that level and then you can start growing. Then over time, you can start going towards the more competitive keywords. You can go from “Flights to Mexico City” to just plain “Flights”.
HOW DO YOU KNOW WHNE YOUR CONTENT IS EXCEPTIONAL?
Google looks at how many links you are getting from other high-quality websites. So, if your article is so good, that they will probably link you to it. Then Google will think it’s a great article and it will rank higher, maybe 2nd or 3rd rank on Google.
And the other thing that they look at is how long are people are spending on you, on your webpage after they click. It’s called the bounce rate. If people are spending a lot of time on your webpage, that means it’s engaging, it’s answering questions which google likes. It’s so good as getting referred to by other websites.
It’s both about understanding the Algorithm and it’s also about the Psychology, about how to tap into the way that people think about the problem and present answers in a way that’s both compelling and again, matches what we got out of the Algorithm.
What we want to do is we want to make our article visual. In that way, we get people to spend more time. An interesting way to present an answer to a question is to present the answer first. After that, start to back up your answers like why is that the answer. It seems like that’s what people are looking for. Use the result as the hook. People have pretty short attention span. Putting the answer right at the top could make people think “These guys have my answers and maybe I want to read more about it”.
IS THE ALGORITHM CHANGE SIGNIFICANT?
Remember the 80/20 rule where 20% of the work gets 80% of the results. The algorithm is not so important to know. Focus on creating good content that answers questions effectively in a compelling way and making it visual and digestible. In the long term, this is what google wants. Google wants to engage the searchers and answer their questions. From day-to-day, if there’s an algorithm change or in a short time it will affect your article writing, but it the long term it usually climbs back.
THE PROCESS OF WRITING A BLOG
- Assign a topic..
- Keyword research on a topic like what questions are people asking, How much search volume does each question have
- Structure the article in a way that answers the most important questions that are getting searched the most and go section by section. And so, this will be the general outline of the article.
- After the outline, do some more research and look at the competing articles, usually the 1st-3rd articles that are ranking for these keywords on google and see how they approached writing off the topic.
- After having the outline and knowledge, just basically fill the blanks in and go answer people’s question concisely and visually.
THE PROCESS IT TAKES TO WRITE A BLOG
It depends on how many words the article has to be. This is something google also compares articles on. How many words do they have. If the competing article has 3,000 words, and your article is 1,000 words, google will probably think that you not talking about anything or that you are making stuff out. So, in a way, you would want to sound similar to the competing articles. A 3000-word article could take, depending on how complex the subject is, up to 6 days. If it’s a simple subject with 1,000 words, it may take a day and a half.
We are in an age where people have short attention span. An article with huge paragraphs has the tendency of being ignored. Most people prefer articles that’s pretty, colorful, that has short paragraphs. That keeps people’s attention span, specially the visual. That encourages them to read longer.
INFOGRAPHICS
Use colorful graphs, use colorful tables to compare different subjects. Use it as a template to summarize the article. Put in on the top of the article to catch people’s attention. When you have an interactive graph, obviously, people are more likely to spend more time on the article and it will fit to google.
THE ATTENTION GAME
Writing an article is like buying people’s time. You try to be entertaining while also being valuable so that you can capture people’s time because it translates to money. The reason is the more people pay attention, the more value there is. The more value there is, the higher to rank. The higher to rank, the higher percentage of the people who’ll click though it, potentially become target markets.
OTHER TRENDS IN THE NEAR FUTURE
It’s all about taking information and making it more digestible to help with the attention spans of people these days. Some websites approach that by making cartoon-like videos to explain a subject. Some websites are approaching it by having a listenable article where you can put your device down and it will speak the article to you. These are all the new ways people are finding to effectively communicate information with each other.