How to Correctly Format a Blog Post

When you write a blog post it’s more than just an essay that you used to write for school projects. You need to write in a way that’s educational, informative, and slightly entertaining. This is marketing copy; it’s not a term paper.

A blog post is not a journalistic article. People are used to seeing news articles and writing that way. Marketing copy is more like an infomercial. You want to have consumable, bite-sized chunks of content that people can scan.

The Video Tutorial

Readability Matters

Making sure the reading level isn’t above ninth grade is important. Newspapers aim for 5th grade, maybe the Wall Street Journal aims for 12th grade. Know your audience. For the most part, people come to your website from an article that you shared on social media. They scan it to see if it’s worth reading. This is why headings are so important. Also headings help with SEO which is how you’re found on the internet.

Headings seem to confuse a lot of people because they think it’s a way of formatting their texts. Headings are for organizational structure and it falls under the category of Semantic HTML. This is important, not just for screen readers which is an accessibility issue, but also for SEO. People will scan your website; they don’t read the whole thing.

Know Your Audience

Understanding user behavior when reading articles is really important. In Google analytics, you can find out how many people are coming to your website from mobile vs. desktop. You can also find out how long they’re reading from each. This should inform you on how long your post should be.

For SEO, you’ll want at least 300 words in your blog post. I generally write 300 to 500 words; sometimes 750 is my sweet spot but it really depends upon that article. I’ve gone as high as 1,200 to 1,800 words on it in a blog post on this site because it couldn’t be broken up. However, if you are writing that much, consider breaking it up into one or two parts — maybe even three.

Short Content Brings People Back

Breaking up your topics and to consumable pieces allows your reader to come to your site multiple times. Think about your blog as hors d’oeuvres at a party. You don’t want people sitting down and eating a meal and holding a plate. No. You want them to have a little snack, move around, keep talking, and enjoy the party.

So in the same way, you want people to enjoy the atmosphere of your website. This means the content that’s on there should be fun; it should be funny; it should be useful.

How Many Headings Do I Need?

Headings should break up about 150-300 words. They should make sense in the context. It should be a heading then a paragraph; a heading then a paragraph, and so on.

So, right now I’m typing this with voice typing in a Google doc. I’m going to make a video that shows you how to take text it’s already written edit it was Hemingwayapp.com. Then add in your headings and then paste it into your WordPress website with the classic editor enabled.

Semantic HTML Matters

You can write your blog post with semantic HTML. (Semantic is the grammar of HTML). Headings use semantic order which is H1, H2, H3, etc. H1 is the title. H2 should be all the headings and H3 would be a heading under an H2.

This is similar to an outline. Roman numeral one and then the points on the Roman numeral one will be 1 to 3. Then the points under number 1 are a, b, c. That’s how headings work in websites.

Embed Videos In Your Blog Posts

One of the best parts about recording video is that you give people another way to see your content. They can see your expressions, they can hear your tone of voice, and that makes a huge difference. Remember, people do business with other people that they know like and trust. This is why having a video with captions and a transcript is so important.

How Do You Get Captions?

One of my favorite tools for adding subtitles and getting a transcript is Temi.com. You can upload the video to Temi.com or you can give them a URL or to a video on Facebook or YouTube. They will provide a transcript based on artificial intelligence (AI). This costs $0.15 a minute and is very accurate.

Once the order is ready there are orange words in the transcript that you can change. It’s important to look over your transcript to make sure that any technical words are spelled correctly.

Why Does Video Matter?

Repurposing content, such as a video that you created, is a great way to add a blog post to your website. If your website is on WordPress you can embed the video right in the blog post by copying the URL or link from YouTube.

What WordPress does is it renders that link into a video that people can play right there in the blog article. Don’t worry about views because YouTube counts embedded views just like views on your channel.

Quickly Write and Publish

You should be able to do this work with the writing, a quick edit, adding headings, your featured image, and publishing within an hour. The more you do it the better it’ll get. The cool thing is when you get a transcript from Temi.com, you can actually add the transcript at the very bottom of the blog post. As a bonus, you have more words for Google to read as they crawl your website.

What Do I Do After the Post is Published?

After you publish, submit the URL to Google Analytics to make sure that it indexes the page. Scrape it with Facebook’s Sharing Debugger and check it with Twitter’s Card Validator. This will ensure that it shows up correctly when the post is shared on social media.

In my ebook called “If You Don’t Mind Your Business Who Will?” I give actionable tips on how to block your time, how to keep a journal of pain points, as well as affirmations and prompts for each month. Spending about two hours a month should give you one published article on your site.

The more time you spend writing and Publishing, the better the more healthy your website will be.

4 Comments

  1. Carol Stephen on July 7, 2020 at 3:07 pm

    Hi Bridget,

    Good point about the videos. I need to do more of that. My faster posts take about 25 minutes now, but I don’t do the graphics for them myself. I love your videos!

    Thanks,
    Carol



  2. Bridget Willard on July 7, 2020 at 3:45 pm

    Thanks, Carol. Less than a half hour is pretty fast in my book.



  3. […] presume you have your blog formatted so that Open Graph will pull in your 1200 x 628 featured image and meta […]



  4. […] “When you write a blog post it’s more than just an essay that you used to write for school projects. You need to write in a way that’s educational, informative, and slightly entertaining. This is marketing copy; it’s not a term paper.” Bridget Willard […]