WordPress- An Effective Blog Post

What makes up an effective blog post and is there a standard template we can all use to get our message across effectively?

These user-friendly ideas were shared by Michael Hyatt recently and they made so much sense, I’m sharing them with you.

Use a blog post template, don’t follow it slavishly, but always start with it. It includes all the elements that you need to make for an effective post. It also helps you write faster, because it provides you with a track to run on.

A good blog post template consists of five components:

Lead Paragraph.
This is key. If you take too long on the wind-up, you will lose readers. You have to get into the premise of the post and make it relevant to your readers. After the title, this is the second most important component of your post.

Relevant Image.
Use images for the same reasons magazines do: Pull readers into the post itself. Pictures do that. I get 90 percent of mine from iStockPhoto. Occasionally, I use a screenshot or an embedded video or slide show.

Personal Experience.
Try to share from personal experience. Why? Because readers connect with stories. The more honest and transparent you can be, the better.

Main Body.
Everything to this point has been an introduction. Always try to make my main content scannable. Use bullets, numbered lists—and often both. This makes the content more accessible to readers and more sharable via Twitter and Facebook.

Discussion Question.
A nice option is to end every post with a question.This makes your posts less of a monologue and starts comments and discussion through your comments section.

I also follow a few overall rules when writing my posts:

Make the posts short.
Aim for 500 words. This usually means you have to write the post and then go back and tighten it up.

Use short paragraphs.
Try to stick to 3–4 sentences. If it’s more than this, the content looks too dense. Readers will give up and move on. (Notice how newspapers usually follow this rule.)

Keep short sentences.
As a general rule, I try to avoid compound sentences. A period gives the reader a natural stop—and a sense of progress as they pass one milestone after another. To quote a common copywriting axiom, short sentences make the copy read fast.

Use simple words.
Your goal is to communicate, not to impress readers with my vocabulary.

Provide internal links.
You often can’t say everything in one post, so link to other posts where you have developed a thought in more detail. I think it is also genuinely helpful to my readers.