So you have written many blog posts and you are proud of them. That sounds great but how many of those posts manage to get some level of attention from the viewers in the form of comments or social shares? Well, not many right? Don’t be sad though because there is no silver bullet when it comes to writing a blog post that can encourage people to interact or at least talk about the post on their social circles.

Writing a blog post is not that easy contrary to what you might believe. To grab attention of the online readers, you need to plan meticulously.

Unfinished posts and posts that don’t have a purpose are better left unpublished, because they can destroy the trust your readers have put in you, and ruin your reputation of a serious blogger, or your chances of building one.

Of course, you can’t always ask someone to read the posts that you’ve written before you publish them, but you can get into the habit of imposing a simple routine to yourself to be sure that your posts have a purpose: ask yourself these questions:

Is this post going to help my reader?

This is the most important of all the questions. You’re blogging for the sake of your readers, so it doesn’t matter if another blogger has trashed you in his or her post – writing about it to show how you’re right doesn’t help your readers (ok, there are exceptions, but in general – it doesn’t).

Your audience is following you because they want to learn something new, not to hear about your day (you can chat about it all you want on Facebook or Twitter, and who wants to know about your day and your four adorable kittens can go and read about it there) – so things like guides, tips and ideas are always welcome.

If you aren’t sure what your readers would like to read about – ask them. Create a special blog post to let them know that you’re listening to their suggestions; or go through the comments, and see which parts of your older posts are unclear to them.

Don’t add too many images

The idea of adding some gaudy images with your blog post is tempting but don’t fall for this. Of course you are allowed to use two or three images in a single blog post but don’t go overboard with it because that might have serious impact on the visibility of the website. If you are not sure about the loading time of your website, you can always use some tools like pingdom, Bitcatcha, gtmetrix, WebPagetest to test the loading time and to understand whether it is the hosting company that is slowing down your website.

Is this post covering one key topic?

Every one of your posts should be oriented towards covering one single topic, not many of them; you have to assume that your readers know much less about the subject than you. 

So having more than one topic can easily confuse them and make them lose the interest, because they can feel that you’re moving too fast for them.

If you really need to cover a more complex topic, then make sure that you have already written and explained the vital parts of the process, so that you can link to them for further explanation.

Is my formatting effective and practical?

If you have written a post that contain 600 or 700 words, but have done nothing to separate its logical parts than creating new paragraphs (sometimes not even that), most of your readers will take one look at it and lose interest.

Your posts have to look attractive, and that means: using subheadings, bullet points, bold text or block quotes, insert images and videos where you can – all to make it look more professional and eye-catching.

This is also for practical reasons: it’s much, much easier to read a properly formatted copy, and you want your readers to feel comfortable when reading your posts, don’t you?

Print these questions, and every time you are writing a new post, ask yourself if it answers “yes” to all of them. If one question is a “no”, then tweak the post until it becomes a resounding “yes”; once this becomes a routine, it will be much easier.