The Smart Way to Plan a Successful Blog Post

Every new post on your blog is the first step to new visitors and another expert opinion. So we have to make sure that we simply don’t write up the post and leave it. For writing every single post, I have a plan and today I will share it with you all to write an excellent blog post. There are 3 stages of writing a new blog post that I follow:

Stage 1: Pre post planning and research

This is the most important stage of planning a blog post, where you have to decide the topic on which you are planning to post a new article on. Browsing other blogs, forums and news feeds for trending topics will certainly give you more ideas to identify a topic in demand in your particular niche.
Keyword and market research: Doing a keyword research is very important before posting a new article on your blog. The keyword and market research is all about identifying the demand and supply for a particular topic on the web. The two factors that I would seriously consider for doing this are:

• Monthly search queries for a particular keyword or topic
• The competition for that particular keyword or topic in the market.

I usually use many methods to identify the query count and competition. The most common of the methods I use are Google Adwords keyword tool and Yahoo! Site Explorer. They are both free, so do try them.

Stage 2: Writing the article

Crafting a good article is the next stage. This is equally important as the research part. Usage of good English without any grammar mistakes or spelling mistakes leaves a very good impression on the quality of your writing.
Having reasonably more amount of information on the topic than anywhere else on the internet is the key in writing a quality post. Have a interactive style of writing including facts and points in short paragraphs would be like icing on the cake. I highly recommend you all reading DailyWrintingTips.com for improving your writing skills.
Giving importance to OnPage SEO while writing an article
One should never ignore the importance of SEO while writing a blog post, make sure you have a plugin that takes care of most of your on page SEO factors. I use All in one SEO pack for this purpose.
The various on page SEO factors that you should give importance to are:

• A very effective Title in line with your keyword research results
• Good description and keywords
• Usage of “Tags” in WordPress blog’s new post option
• Usage of H1, H2, H3 headings within your post
• A good keyword density
• Usage of at least one image within your post with the ALT tags comprising of the keywords.

Stage 3: Marketing and publicizing the post after publishing

Although you have published the post, its all not over. The final step is publicizing the post effectively on the Internet. SEO is again an important factor here.
SEO of published articles – PR analysis.
Do a Google search for the article you have published and identify the top search results and what are the factors leading to their SERP (Search engine ranking position). The most obvious reasons could be:

• Page rank of the website
• Number of backlinks to the domain (BLD)
• Number of backlinks to the page (BLP)
• Domain age
• On page SEO
• Anchor text of the backlinks.

Post studying your competition success, you can replicate the same on to your posts by linking to your article from high PR dofollow blogs and directories. Also usage of social networking by Tweeting your article links on Twitter and Facebook could improve your article’s exposure.
Take Home
Blogging is not simply posting a defined number of articles in a mechanical manner, That’s what most of the auto blogs do. Blogging is about providing value to the Internet and sharing valuable information.
The cycle of publishing a new article is not over until you complete the circle of research, publishing and publicizing of your new blog post. Wishing you all the success in blogging.
About the Author: Joshu Thomas is a full time blogger. He quit his day job and successfully earns a good living by blogging. You can read more from him on NapIncome.com.

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Choose Best Image for Your Blog Posts Wisely

 

We are living in a world that rewards instant gratification; people do not want to take the time to read a book, if the movie is available. In other words, "a picture is worth a thousand words." It should not be difficult to see why illustrations are important when keeping readers interested in your blog posts. Pictures can help readers to follow your writing more easily, breaking up the text so that it doesn't look like one long, tedious piece of work.
Here are some tips on how to choose the best images for your blog posts:
(#1.) Relevance - blog posts are generally there to persuade readers to show interest in a certain topic, product, or service. Adding pictures to help illustrate those concepts can only help, but don't go overboard. Shy away from adding pictures for the sake of adding pictures. Make sure that you are putting up illustrations that are going to add to the relevance of your text, not take away from it. It is easy to add too much, so try to keep it straight forward and to the point, just like the text.

(#2.) Copyrights - always remember that not all images are available for your use. There are copyrights for images that are on the internet as well as copyrights for images that are in print. If you want to avoid any problems that you might encounter with copyrighted materials, use your own images. Go looking for images that give relevance to your post and take the pictures yourself. If that doesn't seem like a viable option for you, there are public image sites that you can locate off of any search engine. Most search engines will provide you with an image option; type in the object or term that you are looking for and browse through the hundreds of images that are available to use without objection. If you find an image on another blog or site that you would like to use, remember to be courteous. It is polite to send a short email or contact the owner of the site asking for permission to use the image.

(#3.) Editing - it is important to do minor (and sometimes major) editing on your images before just sticking them up on your blog. It is more than aggravating to have to wait an eternity for a page to load because the file is too large. In fact, in this "instant gratification" world, no one waits for a page to load for very long without just moving along. If you have a file to add that is of larger size, put a thumbnail up on the page. If users want to wait to view the full photo, they have that option. If not, it doesn't create problems when loading. When finalising photos or images for your blog post, keep clarity in mind. A clean and crisp image gets the point across a lot better than an unclear one. Photoshop is a great tool to use before putting pictures up on your blog; you can add or subtract from an image as needed, and sometimes it is needed.

(#4.) Avoid - there are some things that you should try and avoid when choosing images for your blog post. For instance, animations are great and can potentially add just the right ingredient to your post, but it is important to think about internet connections. Some people don't have the fastest connections, and you don't want to alienate parts of your audience. It is also a good idea to stay away from background images; they can slow the process of loading your page down to snail pace. Account for those readers who may want to print your post without the background attached.

(#5.) Include - there are images that are better to use than others and should be highly considered. You want to make sure that you are using unique illustrations. If people have seen the image a thousand times, it loses its weight. People associate certain objects with a product or service and you want your readers to associate illustrations with your work. Include pictures that capture the essence of what you are trying to relay to your readers, it doesn't have to be completely literal. Capitalise on reader satisfaction by using photos that mean something to them; use pictures of people, kids, animals. Everyone likes to laugh, so adding a humorous image is a tool that will keep readers returning to your page. This is your chance to shine, to set yourself apart from similar blogs or from those that are selling the same product or service. Images can very easily turn into a mascot for a particular product, site or service. Mascots can be very beneficial to a business and finding a good one starts with searching through images that are relevant to your end goals.

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