Welcome back, friends. Today.
I'm going to share with you a blog post template that you can use either for
your own blog or your clients' blogs.
And this will help you keep people on the page longer and also get them to take
the action that you want them to take,
whether it's read the next blog or sign up for your mailing list or something
else entirely.
What I'm going to teach you is a very small segment of what I cover in my
writing program, How to Blog Like a Pro. If you're interested in enrolling,
you can use the code 33off and I'll give you 33% off at checkout.
That link is in the description below. All right, let's get going.
We are going to break the blog up into three sections: the introduction,
the body of the blog, and the conclusion.
And we'll look at each of the three separately.
I will also show you an example using a blog on my own website,
just to illustrate it a little more clearly.
So let's start with the introduction. The introduction can make or break it all.
And that's because you have about three seconds to get people's attention,
if that, so you have to hook the reader. Here are a few suggestions.
One idea is to start with a question.
So you might open the blog with something like,
"Have you ever experienced..." Or "Have you ever felt..." And the goal with
this method is to get people to stop and go, "Oh yeah,
this is totally me." Second idea is to start your blog with a statistic.
Including stats is a really simple way to show people that you know your stuff,
you've done your research, and you're not just talking out of your bum.
Third idea is to try relating to the reader on a more personal level.
Now I understand you might not always be able to get away with this,
especially if you are writing content for a client and the client is ultimately
going to put their name on the blog, not you. This approach might not work.
But if you can pull this off,
then it's really an opportunity to kind of tell the reader how you personally
relate to this topic and why you're qualified to be writing about it.
Ask a question, share a statistic, get personal.
Three ways to hook the reader in the introduction. After you hook the reader,
you really want to get to the point and tell them exactly what the blog is
about.
Give them an idea of what they're going to learn and why they should continue
scrolling. They have to have a reason to stay on the page. Keep it concise.
You do not want your introduction to go on and on and on. Okay.
So we're looking at a blog that I wrote late last year:
The Lead Generation Strategy That Got Me to $10k a Month.
Right off the bat here, with the first paragraph of the blog,
I ask the question,
"Have you hit a frustrating plateau in your business?" My goal here with
starting with a question is that people are going to read this and be like,
"Oh yes I have." But I also kind of combine it with another approach that I
told you about.
I talk about how my own income once plateaued at $5,000 a month.
I go into a little more detail about what this experience was like and how I was
having trouble finding the right clients. And then right here,
I'm making very clear what the blog is about. It's about lead generation.
And if the reader keeps scrolling,
they're going to learn how I adjusted my lead generation to land bigger
and better clients and ultimately scale my business's revenue.
So this introduction accomplishes the two things that we talked about.
It hooks the reader with a question and personal experience,
and it clarifies what the rest of the blog is going to be about.
That brings us to section two, which is the body of the blog.
This is where you get into the nitty-gritty of the content of the topic.
Whatever your readers are here to learn, this is when you give it to them.
But this video is all about how to build a blog post template.
So what exactly should the body of the blog look like?
One thing you want to keep in mind, and this is really important,
you want your blog post to be skimmable,
and that's because a lot of your visitors aren't going to be reading the blog
word for word. They're going to be skimming it.
So you want to make it so that people can do that and still come away with the
answers that they need.
And even if you are getting people who are reading your blogs word for word,
I want you to kind of envision reading huge blocks of text.
It's painful. You have to make your blog easy on the eyes.
It needs to be easy to read,
and you want people to feel like they're able to read it quickly.
One simple way to do this is to use headings. In whatever CMS,
content management system, that you're using,
you should have the option to highlight a word or words and turn them into a
heading -- an H2, H3, and so on. Let's talk a little more about how this works.
You probably already know what a heading is, it's this,
but what do the numbers mean? We've got H1. An H1 is,
nine times out of 10, the title of your blog. That's how it works.
When you're creating a blog in your CMS,
the title will automatically get pulled as an H1.
You only ever want one H 1 in your blog.
So that's your title. Don't add any more after that. Moving down to H2s,
you could have multiple.
Look at H2s as the main points of the
blog that support the H1, which is the overarching topic.
A simple way to think about this is if you were to outline this blog,
or maybe you already did,
what are the main points that you would outline before breaking them down even
further? Those are H2. And you can continue to break it down from there into H3,
H4, and so on. You won't always get into H3s, and that's okay.
But you should, at the very least, have at least one H2.
This is for both the reader and also for your SEO health. And on a related note,
your headings, especially your H2s,
are a really good place to weave in your keyword.
This is a very standard SEO best practice.
If you need a little more help understanding how to conduct keyword research,
I have a free guide on that. I will drop the link in the description below.
You want to be strategic with these. Don't just throw something in as an H2,
just for the sake of having one. Remember,
people's eyes are naturally going to be drawn to your headings when they're
reading or skimming your blogs,
mostly because headings show up in a bigger font.
So make sure you're using headings to get your main points across.
Another way to make your logs easier on the eyes and more reader-friendly and
skimmable is to write in shorter paragraphs. Now, I know that growing up,
when I was in school,
we were taught that paragraph should always be at least five sentences,
but that was before we were writing for the internet,
where people have the attention span of a goldfish. These days,
your paragraphs might be one sentence and that's okay.
Break it up where it makes sense. It still needs to flow easily.
But if you're writing in huge chunks of texts that take people a long time to
get through, they're going to leave the page.
Something else that you can incorporate to make your blog more reader-friendly
and skimmable is lists. This can be bullet points or numbers.
Lists help to create more empty space on the page, which is a really good thing,
because as a result, they make it a lot easier to skim. Lastly,
images and videos. You can add both to your blog.
They help to further break up the text and they also give people something
pretty to look at.
Videos in particular are really powerful because if your reader watches them,
then they're going to end up staying on your page a lot longer.
This is great for your site performance and your overall rankings.
Let's go back to my blog and check out the body of it a little more.
Scrolling past the introduction,
the body of my blog starts right here.
This is my H2:
The Lead Generation Strategy That Took Me to $10k a Month.
Now I have a few H3s,
which I have numbered here. So here's one,
here's the second, here's the third.
Is that it? Okay, so it looks like it was those three.
You can see I'm writing in really short paragraphs.
A lot of them, many of them are just one sentence.
So it helps to break up the text and it makes for lots of empty
space, meaning space that isn't occupied by text within the blog.
It makes it really easy to read and skim through. Also,
if you were to skim this blog, you could look only at the headings and you know,
you wouldn't walk away with a ton of detail,
but you would walk away with the general idea.
So if you were to skim the headings,
you'd get the lead generation strategy that took me to $10k a month,
and you would get my three tips. My three, I guess, steps.
I contacted businesses in certain industries.
I contacted employees who worked in my department.
And LinkedIn became the foundation of my outreach. So again,
they would be missing out on, you know, the bulk of the blog.
And I would hope that they would stay and continue reading through it.
But let's just say worst case scenario, they didn't.
They could read those few points and get a very broad
understanding of what I'm talking about. All right.
That brings us to the third section, which is the conclusion.
If there were ever a part of the blog that writers never care about,
it's the conclusion. And it sad.
You can use the conclusion as a really powerful tool in two ways.
For starters,
you can use this as an opportunity to recap everything you just talked about to
summarize it.
This is really good for those readers who kind of just scroll to the end without
really reading it or for the people who skim. Sum up the main points,
which you can just grab from your H2s, in the conclusion.
This is also an excellent place to include a call-to-action or a CTA.
What do you want the reader to do next? You don't want them to just leave.
You want them to take some sort of action and continue interacting with you.
For example, is there a related blog that you think they might be interested in?
Call it out and link to it. Do you have a free guide that you want them to grab?
You can call it out and either link to the page for that free guide or embed the
sign up form right in the blog.
Use this opportunity as one last chance to make an impression on them and
continue to grow your relationship further. A note on CTAs...
I also recommend that you throw a subtle CTA somewhere in the body
of the blog for the people who don't make it to the end,
which is going to happen. Personally,
I don't think it's wise to assume that everyone's going to read through to the
end, because they won't. A lot of them won't.
So counting on them to make it that far,
and having that be the only opportunity to sneak in a CTA,
you're going to miss out on a lot of people.
So you should put a CTA earlier on where more people are likely to see it.
I often do this with my blogs and my YouTube videos. I did it with this video.
Let's look at my blog one more time.
Once readers pass this third section here that starts with this H3,
if we scroll down a little bit, I say right here, point blank,
"So let's recap." And I sum up, uh, you know,
very simply what I discussed throughout the blog.
And then if we scroll a little further,
we will see my CTA.
I mentioned that I have a free guide to optimizing your LinkedIn page,
and then I make it really easy for people to get it. I have bold,
a hyperlink here saying, get the free guide. I also have a second CTA.
If people want to learn more and they're interested in enrolling in my course,
Revenue Spark,
they can very easily click this link and it'll take them to the page for that
course. Formatting matters, and using a blog post template like this,
like the one I've shown you, can really make for a better reader experience.
Put that extra effort into your content. Take pride in your work.
Be obsessed with quality. And I promise you, it's going to pay off.
If you want more expert help creating blogs that rank higher in Google and get
more organic traffic,
don't forget that I'm offering you 33% off enrollment in my writing course,
How to Blog Like a Pro.
All you have to do is enter the code 33off at checkout,
and it will give you the discounted price. As always,
thank you for sticking around.
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