5 Essential Elements To Make Your Blog Post Effective

Blogging Tips, , , , , , , , , , , 81 Comments

When you post on your blog you want your posts to be the most effective they can be and to be able to reach a bigger audience. There is nothing more disappointing than writing a post and it not gain the views and engagement you were hoping for.

There are a lot of elements that make up a successful blog post and to ensure that your post is the most appealing to your audience. When you are sharing your content you want to make sure you have the fundamental elements to improve your SEO and that your posts are user friendly. Some of the essential elements are sometimes easily missed or mistaken, just some of the blogging mistakes you should avoid to help grow your blog.

Here are the 5 essential elements you should ensure your blog post has before you hit that publish button.

#1 Include a featured image

A featured image is the first graphic your audience sees when you share links on social media or when they click on your blog to read your post. Having a featured image is great placement, as an image that is placed above a headline the latter text ends up being read 10% more than when the image is placed lower. If you are sharing a review about a product it is much more appealing for readers to have an image featured of that product. If you are struggling with image ideas you should use stock images that are relevant to your post. Just ensure that if you are using a stock image you always credit the original creator.

#2 Use headings or subheadings

How many times have you been put off by large paragraphs of text? Using headings or subheadings can break down these larger paragraphs and it will be less daunting  for your readers. A reader may have only visited your post for specific information therefore with headings and subheadings it can be easy for them to navigate them to that information. Not only does having these headings and subheadings make your post more appealing but it also boosts search engine optimisation.

A desk with a grey laptop a tea cup with pen pots and books with white and red flowers

Photo by Ella Jardim on Unsplash

#3 Include powerful call-to-action

Every blog post that you share should have a call-to-action, it could be leaving a comment, could be to read another blog post or check out a product or service you are sharing. Having these actions in your posts means you are seeking further engagement with your readers.

#4 Include images or graphics

Are you ever put off reading blog posts that are just reams of text and no images? It is important to share images especially if you are talking about products you are using or a place you have experienced, it can help your readers relate to your writing. As I said with the featured image you can use stock images with the appropriate credits. When using images in your posts it is important to include alt text, this helps improve your sites accessibility, help you rank in Google Images and it serves as an anchor text for image links. A post that has several images are so much appealing to an audience.

An LG desktop on a white desk with a cork board pen pots and a pink mug

Photo by Ella Jardim on Unsplash 

#5 Interlink your content

Do you like free advertising? That is exactly what interlinking gives you. When you are writing a blog post you may have relevant content that your audience could also benefit from. Interlinking content is great for SEO, it increases the number of pages per visit and increases how long visitors are on your site which helps Google recognise the time spent on your posts.

Focusing on these 5 areas can not only help you share effective content, but can help with SEO an driving engagement. They all work together to help improve your blog. I have been working on these especially for my older content and it has improved my DA and has been driving more blog traffic.

Do you have other elements that are a must for each of your blog posts? I’d love to hear in the comments.

 

81 thoughts on “5 Essential Elements To Make Your Blog Post Effective”

  2. Wonderful advice. I use all of these elements in my blog posts. If I could add one more item to your list, it would be “good formatting.” The easiest blog posts to read are the ones that are written in simple grammar and formatted properly. Headings, italics, bullet points, etc. should be given high priority.

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  6. These are great tips. I didn’t discover featured images and headings until I had been blogging for 6 months. Now I am going back and slowly updating my earlier posts. It’s a learning process. 😀

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  10. Amazing advice! SEO and DA’s are still super new and confusing to me and I don’t fully understand them yet but hopefully these things will help. I don’t know what kinds of sites to interlink to. I have a book blog so does linking to my other posts count or does it have to be to amazon or Goodreads etc?

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    1. No interlink to your own content always. So if you have written a review by the same author before you could link that or link your previous post. It’s about keeping people on your site and visiting other blog posts 😊

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  15. Love the tips here Lauren!! I admit it’s usually a catchy title or featured image that makes me curious to read a blog post. A call to action is something I forget to do a lot in my own blog posts and I need to pursue that more often. Thanks for sharing lovely!!

    Geraldine | https://geraldinetalks.com

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  18. These are awesome tips! I need to get better at adding in images to my posts. I try to add at least one pin style image per post, but sometimes laziness gets me and I just skip it.
    I didn’t realize images higher up increased later text reading! I’ll have to look back on my posts and make some changes.
    Thank you for sharing!

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  28. I’ve never thought about internal linking being free advertising but you’re spot on! It’s on my to do list to go back to older posts and start linking them to newer posts but there’s never enough time in the day, haha. These are all some really great tips, Lauren, super helpful, thank you for sharing! Lisa xx

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  29. Great advice Lauren. I have found a call to action has really increased engagement on my posts. It makes a huge difference and is so simple. Linking content is a great idea too, works well when you have a strong niche.

    Thanks for sharing x

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  31. This is really helpful: I know I’m guilty of using text rather than images as I’m definitely more of a word person than a visual one! I’m currently struggling with adding featured images: I can see how it should work, but it just doesn’t (I add a featured image, hit ‘update’ and… nothing happens. I’ll keep trying having read this and seeing how important it is!

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  32. I follow most of these apart from the featured image. That is usually an image with text over it, to add as a bit of a title image…might have to change that up! I now need to go through old blog posts and make sure they are up to scratch with the newer ones.
    Great advice!

    Aimsy xoxo
    Aimsy’s Antics

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  33. I like longer posts to have an easy-to-follow layout, so subheadings and headings and especially paragraphs are important to me when I sit down to write a longer piece. I do not often use more then one image, but I recently used three within a post to illustrate a point and was surprised at how much more effective that was then trying to explain it in words. 🙂

    Thanks so much for sharing!

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  34. I read somewhere once that you didn’t want to start a blog post with an image (although this was years ago) so now I’ve been too worried about using a featured image. I’ll definitely be doing it from now on though. This was such a useful post – thanks for sharing!

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  38. Great suggestions! I’m surprised by the number of bloggers that are still overlooking the importance of the basics. For example, headings and subheadings – not only do they help to break up the text to make your post more reader-friendly, but Google LOVES them when determining how a post rates on search. There are other ways to break up a wall of text as well. You can add more images, create lists or use white space strategically.

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