How to Write a Blog: A Digital Marketer’s Guide

Understand what it means to “provide value”

One of the very first things you need to understand before you write another blog post is the concept of “providing value.” To keep it simple, providing value means giving your reader what they came for. 

The potentially confusing thing here is actually understanding what your audience is looking for. Of course, you can’t really read their minds and write something that they’re looking for before they know it. To figure this out, you’ll need to ask yourself a few simple questions.

1. Who is your reader?
2. Why did they click your post?
3. What makes your post different?
4. Why should they come back?

Just reading these questions should give you a better idea of how you should be approaching your blog. However, some people might think that it’s strange to focus so heavily on what their readers want instead of what they want. After all, for something like a personal blog, isn’t it best to just speak your mind and talk about things that you personally enjoy or want to speak about?

That’s true for the most part, but even if it’s a personal blog, you’re going to have to focus on what your readers want if your goal is to grow a big audience. Of course, if you only use your blog as a personal space to rant and talk about various things, then you don’t really need to follow this guide. However, if you do want to see how far you can take your blog with effective blog writing strategies, then it’s a good idea to start thinking more carefully about how you plan your posts.

So let’s break down these questions and explain them in more detail.

1. Who is your reader?

You need to have a rough idea of who your audience is. Doing so can really enhance your blog posts because you can tailor your content and language to that specific audience. The key here is to remember that blogging isn’t really about you or what you want, it’s about how you can appeal to your audience so that they’re more likely to return in the future.

Identifying your audience can be tricky, but here are a few steps to help you break it down.

• How old is your audience?
• What country might they be from?
• What other websites do they visit?
• What kind of products do they use?
• How much knowledge do they have of your specialty?
• What is their primary reason for visiting your blog?

Once you figure out this kind of information, you’ll have a much easier time tailoring your content to your readers.

2. Why did they click your post?

This is where you start asking yourself why a reader would click on your post in the first place. This goes beyond simply well-written content. There are a number of different ways to think about this. For starters, you could imagine what your readers might search to bring up your blog post.

As an example, let’s imagine that you’ve written a blog with the title “Top 5 laptops to purchase for school.” There are a number of different reasons why someone might have searched and clicked this post. It could be a parent that’s looking to buy a laptop for their child for school, or it could be a university student who is looking to buy something for lectures and studying. It could also be a teacher or a staff member at a school that wants to equip their students with laptops.

These are all possible situations, and it easily answers the question “why did they click your post?”

3. What makes your post different?

You should also consider what makes your posts different from others on the internet that cover similar topics. Perhaps you’re thinking of changing your blog length because all other posts like it are much too long. Or perhaps no other post has gone into detail, so you might be interested in creating a more comprehensive version of what other people have already done.

The key here is to focus on creating something unique that helps you stand out, even if you’re technically answering the same questions and providing similar levels of value.

4. Why should they come back?

Lastly, it’s important to think about why your audience might come back in the future. Many readers will have found your blog posts purely by chance because they were browsing the internet, but there may be situations where they’ll bookmark your blog because it’s providing a lot of similar knowledge.

This is where it helps to define your audience so you have a number of different topics and subjects that they might be interested in. You can then start writing more about those topics to expand the variety of your posts.

Writing a blog post doesn’t need to be difficult as long as you approach it from the right angle. Take more things into consideration and put a little more thought into how you write your post and always remember that the aim of your blog should be to provide value to the reader.