How to Structure a Blog Post to Better Engage Your Readers

Whether you’re blogging as a hobby, to drive traffic to your website, or simply crafting your writing to be the best it can be, knowing how to structure a blog post is important to the growth of your blog as a whole.

You’ve done the hard work of creating a blog, but now you want to know how to structure a blog post to generate as much traffic as possible and engage readers. In order to best structure a blog post, you will need to first determine the type of blog post.

Types of blog posts include but are not limited to

• List Based

Exactly as it sounds, these types of blog posts are centered around a list and are often-times titled using a number. For example, a blog about easy hairstyles for women in the workplace may have a title such as: “10 Hairstyles for Businesswomen”.

• How-To

Often used for recipe blogs, how-to blogs are written in a list format but treated as a guide for anything from tying shoes to making a successful holiday dinner.

• Personal Essay

Personal essays are most times treated as a journal format for blogging. There is no shortage of topics to create personal blog essays for.

• Image Based

Just as it sounds, image-based blog posts focus on images and have fewer words, but still tend to be more than 300 words in length in order to get the best traffic with SEO.

• Interview

Structured in a choppier manner, interview blog posts tend to feel like a conversation and are set up to be a question-and-answer blog. More informal than typical news interviews, blog posts can give away more info when using the interview structure.

Best Structure Tips

Now that you know exactly the type of blog you are constructing, and what your target audience is, you can start your structure.

Focus

Staying focused on the topic at hand is important to not only the overall flow of the blog post, but it keeps the reader engaged. If the post continuously changes subject the reader may become overwhelmed, or decide to go elsewhere for the information they came for. With attention spans getting seemingly smaller and smaller, it’s all the more meaningful to keep readers on the right track.

SEO

A phrase tossed around quite a bit in the blogging world is SEO or search engine optimization. Learning the ins and outs of SEO is crucial to achieving the best engagement. Knowing and staying on top of keyword trends can be difficult, but in order to produce the most engagement with your blog, setting aside time to research trends each week is important. There are also SEO plug-ins that you can purchase to make this process a bit easier.

Headers

On the topic of holding a reader’s attention span, headers will help a great deal with that. While you want to hit the sweet spot of not too little, nor too many words, you don’t want them all in the same place. Breaking up your thoughts into headers and paragraphs will make for an easy reading experience for your audience.

Photos

Readers are human, and at our core, we love to see pictures with words. There’s a reason comic books are so popular. And why children’s books are filled with illustrations to foster that love of literature. Having a photo near the top of your blog can help tremendously with generating traffic. Some people search strictly for pictures instead of headers to find the blog they are going to read. Take some time and find a photo that perfectly captures what you are trying to say within the blog.

Conclusion

After reading this blog, you should have the tools to structure a blog that grabs your readers, and holds them. By using the tips and tricks above they will read and continue to come back for more.