Five steps to great BLOG design
Whether you have just begun with blogging for a business, or are a longtime business blogger, the benefits of blogging are clear: it is the main way you can add fresh content to your website, consistently.
New, unique, fresh content keeps users coming back and is a powerful way to propel your site higher on Google search pages.
In fact, blogging has become a main tool in what is called content marketing, the approach which brings customers to you, by posting valuable and exciting content.
A talented writer—and better yet, a talented content creation team—can and must compete in this key part of digital marketing.
There is no magic to blogging success.
But there is a process. With work and practice it is fully learnable.
Learn these five steps to great blog design and you are well on your way to standing above the rest:
In this post, we explain how to use keywords, how to find great topics, the secrets to storytelling , and how to build the “authority pyramid,.” We detail the structure of your post, from headline to subheads to conclusion and call to action.. And why companion visuals are critical, since your brain processes images way more powerfully than text.
Ready?
The human-centered blogger
Start here: your website is centered on your users, your prospective clients. Who are they exactly? How do they speak? What are they really interested in, what do they want to know?
The benefits of blogging come straight from the benefits of your blog to your audience.
Sure, we all love the business we are building, and we want to talk about it. But your prospective customers want their problems solved, and needs met, and want to hear about that.
Customer (audience) profiling is the first and most critical exercise in developing a terrific website user experience.
Knowing your audience takes two tracks:
Speaking directly to people who represent your prospects (or followers). We are talking formal (and sometimes informal) interviews with users.
Using analytics and the rich information in Google, and other apps on the web.
The end result should be a priceless document you will create called a persona.
This is a fictional biography, a one-pager which records the best info and insights on the people you have just spoken with. It contains age, gender, occupation, location, but also interests and background…and even a fictional image!
Remember this is fictional, but it draws from your experience.
Once your create personas for the different profiles among your prospects, you will use it over and again, in countless ways.
You can learn more about user interviews, analytics apps, and building a persona in our post How to Create Blogs Like Your Users Depend on Them.
Your blog posts, or blogging campaigns must aim at clear business goals.
Are you looking to help propel the launch of a new product?
Or is it to create awareness of your brand, the company that “wrote the book” on your product or service?
Or Is it to engage users with your brand in some way, even if a small step. Examples: downloading an ebook, taking a survey or quiz, setting up a free consultation or quote?
Each of these goals are very different, since they aim at prospects st different stages of intent.
They may aim for users who know little about your company (intent: find out about your company). Or go into detail about your product or service (intent: make a yes-or-no buying decision)
The voice, tone, and even length of your post will vary depending on goal. .
Because posts may have differing goals, posts may measure success differently. That’s to be expected, but not ignored. Success must be measured, and its metric agreed in advance.
These metrics of course will vary according to the aims of your business Commonly, business Blog success is often measured by one or several;. ...
The total number of visitors to your site. Well this is a correlation, a definite pattern shows value.
Average length of stay. A statistic that may be found in caps on Google analytics, or in one of of a A statistic that may be found in Google Analytics, or in widely-found analytics plugins.
The number of times your blog post is shared.
The number of pages viewed once a visitor arrives on your blog.
Your keywords are a list of terms that prospective readers type in or speak in order to find what they need on search engines.
Clearly, if those same (or similar) keyword phrases are used in your post, they strongly help your visibility (“ranking”) on a search results page.
More to the point here, they are, in fact topics, questions your users want answered.
At this stage, you can think of your keyword list as a powerful way to arrive at interesting topics for your posts.
So discovering the keywords most used by your prospective audience remains a key part of your research.
How to discover the most powerful keywords for your post?
First, there are are a large number of tools, some of them free, that can help build your keyword list. And of course, there are people that specialize in this very skill, known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
You can find valuable posts on keyword research from pro-level SEO businesses like Moz.com, WordStream, Ahrefs.com, SpyFu, Hubspot, Ubersuggest, SEMrush, and many others.
But see below for ways to discover keywords (topics) even without pro-level apps.
First, use a Google search to uncover the topics that interest your audience.
Search the topic or phrase that is the general subject of your post. Or go wider yet: search terms in the field in which you work.
Search, for example, “Art Therapy.” Midway down the results page you will find a list Google calls “People Also Ask.”
Bang! What a gift from Google! These are the very questions that Google has extracted from its hundreds of millions of searches on your subject. Wow. It’s Google’s idea of what interesting blog posts might be.
And yet another bonus: at the very bottom of the Google search results pages you’ll then find a list entitled “Searches Related to Art Therapy.”
You’ll get even more from the Google results page using the inexpensive, pay-as-you-go browser extension Keywords Everywhere . For any given search, KE shows a longer list of keyword phrases (often called long tail keywords….topic ideas!). Furthermore it shows you Google's People Also Ask and Searches Related To… sections quantified by popularity. So when consulting People Also Ask...you now know how often they ask (Search Volume).
Other apps which may have great ideas for post topics are the question and answer site Quora, and the popular blogger’s site Medium. In Quora, for example, enter a subject term, and by the nature of that app, you will get dozens, maybe hundreds of questions people have posed about that subject.
The posts in Medium are curated, and also crowd-sourced, so when you search there, the posts that display contain stories or information that really interest people. Another potential goldmine.
Formats—that is the style and structure—for business blogging, as with everything in business, depend on the customer.
Two of our most-used:
Storytelling
More and more, content creators are thinking them of themselves as storytellers. Personal experience, striking bios, stories from the news, or social media posts, the ground is fertile.
Stories are vivid, person-to-person way to communicate ideas. They can be used as part of a piece, say it’s opening, or as the core of its narrative.
Storytelling can especially work in creating awareness of your brand, and stirring excitement.
The story format is usually simple:
Recount a problem or obstacle
Describe how it was overcome
Picture the result… what’s in it for your reader.
The story format can open by keeping people in suspense, or tickle their funny bone. Sure, you will need to pretty quickly convey your main points, or the reader will lose interest… But in a story you have a little more running room.
Currently popular among journalists is the contextual lede, which begins with an incident that embodies the essence of what you are about to say. “It was 2 PM when Michael Smith approached the parking lot, fully expecting his car to be in its rightful place…”.
The authority pyramid
Some users are looking for authoritative, valuable information they can use to compare products or services, justify a purchase, or make a decision about one. These users are already aware of your brand, and are engaged.
In this case, the traditional pyramid style of structure may be best.
The pyramid simply means that the most important, and core ideas of your post begin at the very top, and are developed, “widen” systematically as you read through the post.
You’ve researched your users and have a picture, or persona of the most typical people in your audience. You know what they need, what questions they want answered.
You researched the keywords your audience uses in search.
You’ve brainstormed some topic ideas. All that research has paid off.
You have an idea of the style, or format of the piece.
It’s time to build it, element by element.
Probably the most important component on the post page.
There are many time-tested ways of attracting headline attention. If you’re like me, the evil temptation is to try for cute and smart.
But your users aren’t always big on cute. Some mainly want to know what this is all about—and so does Google.
That’s why the headline should include your main keyword, and come to the point.
Some headline angles to get you thinking:
Suspense: Does your headline create suspense?
Information: Does it promise valuable information you won’t find anyone else. Notice the oft-used technique in media now: “ [your topic idea]… that may surprise you.”
Listicles:
The list format: “7 tips for…” (use numerals, don’t spell out the numbers).
Question
Is blogging really dead?
Make the headline brief but don’t skimp on the keywords: 8 to 14 words is a good rule of thumb.
Most blogs consist of a blog collection page, where posts are headlined. On the collection page, two or three sentences, a teaser, should draw the reader within.
So how’s this as an excerpt for this very post:
Even with all the millions of posts published every day, it’s totally possible to create one that people want to read… and share. So why do 90% of posts on Google fail to get a single click?
As blog posts become longer, readers need an easy way to jump to the portion they are really interested in. A table of contents, ideally with links to sections, will do that. For shorter posts, a T-of-C may not be necessary.
A T-of-C, or “Jump-to” links, also provide a major bonus of Google-friendliness, helping the search engine figure out how relevant is your post to a given search. The more you score a bull’s-eye on relevance for Google, the higher your visibility.
This T-of-C should be a snap to produce, because it will simply repeat your subheads in sequence. (see below).
These phrases are categorized by their first “intent words“ such as “what“, “how“, “can.”
Answer the Public also includes a visualization, which we find problematic—totally cool but functionally problematic—but that might just be us.
If your headline connects (80% do not!) you have only a few seconds to introduce with a compelling, suspenseful, possibly controversial first paragraph. Use your main keyword here early in the paragraph, but not mechanically.
A must-have. And see above, for this is the way you clue your reader to the arc of the story: in short, what’s your point? Each subhead delineates one easily digestible chunk of subject matter. That is, each subhead should introduce a single takeaway, and include the keyword for that takeaway.
The next step? Once you understand your audience thoroughly, empathetically, then it’s time to encapsulate this knowledge in a form called a persona. Personas are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research in order to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand.
John Medina, a molecular biologist, is the author of the New York Times bestseller Brain Rules. Among the trove of information useful to blogger and content creators, he writes:
“The more visual the input becomes, the more likely it is to be recognized and recalled…it’s called the pictorial superiority effect.:” 1
“Text…he says, is less efficient than pictures.” 2 By far.
Include visuals in your blog and your viewer is incredibly more likely to remember it…and act on it.
Link from your post to other pages with related subjects. This will give users, a fuller picture of your subject and insights, and give Google a sharp and clear picture of your subject.
Consider also linking from key related pages to the post, thus passing users attention deeper into your site.
Repeat your key insight once again, but not mechanically by copy and paste! Rephrase that, in good storytelling fashion.
Remember the old standby: good writing is a sandwich: say it, talk about it, say it again.
Interested in digging deeper? Talk to an expert.
For heaven sake, if they’ve come this far, they are interested, so…suggest something else in which they might be interested. Point the way deeper into the subject at hand. This could be a call for comments, newsletter newsletter sign-ups, a quiz, survey, or product purchase. As you develop your range of content types, the call to action will become more and more obvious.
Blog for Business FAQ
What are the benefits of blogging?
Blogging is a powerful way to draw attention to your business brand
Blogs can offer deep dive into topics
Opportunity for shares, and back links
Most immediate way to add fresh content to your website, a very positive sign for Google
What are the steps to great content design?
How do you research an audience for a blog post?
User interviews
Speak to influencers
Speak to salespeople
Use behavioral analytics apps like Google Analytics, HotJar, Google Data Studio, SparkToro, SEMrush, Ahrefs, SimilaryWeb, MixPanel, Amplitude, Heap and others
Engage with question-and-answer platforms like Quora, Reddit, Yahoo Answers, and Stack Exchange.
How to structure a blog post?
Style points:
What is Content Design?
Sarah Richards first coined the term while working with Content Design London . She says: “Content design is answering a user need in the best possible way for the user to consume it.” This blog post is an attempt at describing just how one does that.
What does it mean for a blog to be human-centered?
Your blog topics are answers to problems and questions on the minds of your users. And in their own language. Who are your viewers exactly? How do they speak? What are they really interested in, what do they want to know?
We all love the business we are building. But your prospective customers want their problems solved, and needs met, and want to hear about that.
Footnotes:
1 Medina, Dr. John, Location 2687, Kindle Edition
1 Medina, Dr. John, Location 2699, Kindle Edition
Hungry Monster is not an affiliate and is not paid in any way for mentions of third part applications and tools in our posts.