How to Write Your First Blog Post

If you’ve decided to write a blog post to help grow your business, then that’s a great idea. Blog posts can provide very high returns on your investment. But, they can also result in a lot of wasted money if you don’t do things right. 

In this blog post, we will outline six straightforward steps to help you write a blog post that will perform well. You’ll walk away from this post with a clear understanding of the process involved in writing blog posts so that you can use this winning formula again and again.

1. Select a topic

Finding the right blog post topic is a crucial step in writing a blog post. Without the right topic, you can kiss any potential views goodbye. 

What makes a blog post topic a good choice? 

1. It has sufficient search volume
2. It’s something you can provide authoritative information on
3. It solves your target audience’s problems
4. It relates to the goods or services you sell 
5. It isn’t too competitive

There are many content ideation tools you can use, so to keep things simple; I will show you how to come up with blog topics using Ahrefs Keyword Explorer and Site Explorer.

Here’s how I came up with this blog post topic.

First, I found a competitor that offers content writing services as we do. 

In this case, it was Junto Digital. 

Next, I input Junto Digital’s website URL into Ahrefs Site Explorer. 

Next, I click on “Top Pages.” 

Now we can see Junto’s top-performing pages. 

Their third most popular blog post is about writing your first blog post and ranks well for the keyword “first blog post.” 

OK, so at this point, things are looking good. We’ve found a topic that’s performing well.

Now we can input the focus keyword into Ahrefs Keyword Explorer and put it against the five criteria previously mentioned. 

The keyword “first blog post” has: 

1. Sufficient search volume (600 per month)
2. It’s a topic we are an authority on 
3. Writing a guide on this topic is helpful for our target audience
4. It relates to the services we offer (blog writing services)
5. It isn’t overly competitive (18/100 keyword difficulty)

Therefore, it’s a great choice!

You can apply this same process to any of your competitors and find blog topics with ease. 

There are many other ways to find blog topics, but performing a competitor analysis is a straightforward and proven method.

2. Establish clear goals

Your goal is to post a blog post that increases traffic and increases your revenue. That much is clear.

To set better goals, get more specific.

Ask yourself: 

• Who is your target audience?
• What are your KPIs? e.g., bounce rate, conversion rate, unique visitors, etc. 
• What is the primary objective of the blog post?
• What type of call to action (CTA) are you going to use?

Once you have answered these questions, you will understand what determines your blog post’s success or failure.

You’ll also have a good foundation for the next step, writing your outline. 

3. Write an outline

To write a good blog post outline, you must focus on two things:

1. The search intent behind your focus keyword 
2. What Google is prioritizing in SERPs

If you understand what people genuinely want to see after typing in a specific keyword, and you know what people are being shown, this gives you the information you need to create a good outline.

And that should be your goal — to create more helpful, accessible, and accurate content than your competitors.

Read through top-ranking competing posts, and pick out subheadings you think are relevant to your focus keyword’s search intent.

At this stage, forget about SEO. Focus on the search intent and structure your subheadings around providing a comprehensive outline that fulfills the keyword’s search intent. 

For example, let’s say your target keyword is “samsung refrigerator smells.”

Your readers will want to know: 

• The cause(s) 
• The solution(s)
• Which refrigerators this applies to

Current top-ranking posts are your best friend for determining search intent. 

Even better is to hire a qualified expert related to the topic of your blog post. They will know, better than anyone, what needs to be covered.

It’s also important to think about what article structure will work best for your topic. Are you going to write a “how to” post or a “listicle?”. 

Next, write the content.

You may decide to write it yourself, hire a content writer, or work with a content writing company.

4. Optimize for SEO

First thing’s first. Don’t repeat your focus keyword over and over to “optimize for SEO.” You will not rank high doing this. 

Here is a blog post checklist for SEO.

Remember, your focus should be on making your information accessible, factually accurate, easy to understand, and focused on search intent.

• Use a short permalink, ideally your focus keyword or a close variation that has sufficient search volume
• Include keywords naturally related to the post’s search intent 
• Keep your writing simple
• Write an enticing meta description that makes your readers want to click on your article. Aim to keep it under 160 characters 
• Include your focus keyword in your meta title, ideally at the beginning 
• Try to keep your meta title under 60 characters, including your brand name  
• Use authoritative external links to provide more value 
• Use internal links to other pages and posts that help provide value to your readers at the right time
• Make your content “skimmable” by including bolded words, bullet points, and break up your sentences to improve readability 
• Set outbound links to open in a new tab to reduce bounce rate

5. Edit and proofread 

After you write your blog post, make sure you edit and proofread it.

I strongly recommend hiring a professional editor to handle your editing and proofreading. Grammarly is great, but nothing beats having a professional edit your blog post. 

If you’re planning on making blogging a big part of your content marketing strategy, then you’ll eventually want to hire a professional editor to ensure your blog posts are free of grammatical and spelling errors. 

A great editor will also make your writing more concise and point out logical inconsistencies and factual inaccuracies.

Next, publish your post in your CMS of choice!

6. Analyze results

One big mistake people make when writing their first blog post is publishing it and forgetting about it. You must track its performance based on KPIs you’ve chosen. Google Analytics and Google Search Console are two great tools for monitoring your performance. 

Great blog KPIs to focus on include: 

• Overall blog post visits
• Traffic sources
• Social shares per post
• Conversion rates
• Bounce rate
• Average time on page
• New vs. returning visitors 

Once you start gathering data about your blog posts, you’ll better understand what your audience responds positively to, what they don’t like and why, and what blog posts lead to the most favorable behavior for your end goals.

You can then harness this data to improve the blog posts you publish in the future and increase the probability they will succeed and perform better than previous posts.

Publish, review results, optimize, and publish again. Don’t publish blindly and expect exceptional results. 

The bottom line

To keep things as simple as possible, for your first blog post, write about a non-competitive topic that people are searching for and focus on providing the most comprehensive information on that topic in the most concise way.

Hopefully, this guide has given you a good starting point and a simple step-by-step process you can re-use to create blog posts that will perform. If you need help with writing blog posts, we’d be happy to assist you so you can focus on other aspects of your business.