By Stephanie Ball

As we established in the first post of this series, blogging is vital to your website’s success. But what makes a good blog post? Here are five things that will make your article a winner. 

1. Appropriate Length: Keep it around 450 to 600 words. If your post is too long, people won’t take the time to read the whole thing. If they are too short, the post isn’t providing enough information to make the read worthwhile. A 450-600 word blog post takes roughly two to five minutes to read, making it perfect for the average reader.

2. Well Written Content: Let’s go back to English class and start with the basics: choose a topic, write an outline, and fill in your content from there. Writing your post will be much easier if you set yourself up for success. Once you’ve finished writing it, PROOFREAD. If punctuation and grammar are not your strong suit, ask somebody to help you, or use websites like grammarly to edit your article. If your article doesn’t make sense, people won’t read it.  

3. Interesting Topic: If you aren’t writing with a clear objective in mind, you might as well stop writing all together. Write about what you know! A blog post is putting your knowledge down onto digital paper for other people to access. When brainstorming your topic, think about things that you do every day. Remember times people have asked you for advice or help. Think of a time you assisted a customer. Pull from your own expertise. 

4. Graphics: We all like pictures. Use them! Whether you add photographs you've taken, stock photography, or a custom graphic from a designer, adding visual intrigue helps move your story along, and keeps people reading. Just make sure they are appropriate to your article. Don’t stick a graphic in just to have a graphic. Every piece of your post needs to have a purpose. 

5. A Catchy Title: The first thing people read is your title! If it is too long or doesn’t accurately depict your article, people are going to scroll on by. Make it short, interesting, on topic, and fun. If you’re struggling to come up with a title, wait until your blog post is finished, and don’t be afraid to change your title after your article is done. The most important thing is that it catches your reader’s attention and pulls them in. 

Creative writing is not for everybody and that’s ok. Like with most things, the way to improve at writing, is to do it. The more you do it, the easier it will become. Just start! And of course, if writing is the last thing on earth that you want to do (sort of how I feel about washing the dinner dishes), that’s where we come in. Creative Fuel Co. can write your blog posts, so you don’t have to.