Beginners guide to Blogging: Content Creation – Episode 2

Yesterday I began a series on “Beginners guide to Blogging: How to build a blog – Episode 1”, and I covered all you’ll need to build your WordPress site from scratch starting from why you may want to blog to the qualities you will need to succeed as a blogger, how to choose a niche, domain name and good web host to how to install WordPress and customize it. You can even get me to do that for you for free; if you missed the episode please I recommend you read it before continuing with this one.

Now let’s get started with the next episode of our series “Beginners guide to Blogging: Content Creation – Episode 2”. After you must have designed your awesome looking blog the next thing to do will be to start publishing contents, I know you are exited about this, but take a moment to hear what I have to say about content creation before you jump right into publication.

Beginners Guide to Blogging: Content Creation

Content creation can be fun if you choose a niche you find naturally good at just as I advised you yesterday, and could be frustrating when you are trying to come up with great contents day in day out in a niche you don’t know much about. Remember content creation is something you will have to do on a regular basis, so you need to be well prepared with all the necessary information so as not to get frustrated by it easily.

But before we dive right into it, I will like to teach you the various types of content so you can choose one that best suits you blog niche and one you can work effortlessly on every day. Blogging is fun when you have what it takes to make it fun. I will advise you to have a mix up type of contents in your blog and sometimes in a blog post.

What is Web Content?

Web content is simply the information, videos, pictures that you read on the internet. This post you are reading now or the pictures look at on Pinterest or even the videos you watch on Youtube are all web contents.

Types of Content:

Web content do not necessarily have to be texts alone, web contents could also be in other formats like videos, Infographics, slideshows, lists, guides, product pages, reviews and articles (news, interviews, featured posts etc). You can create any type of content that best suits your need for a blog post or a combination of several.

When you have made up your mind on the best type of content for your blog, you can begin your content creation. But there are other things you may need to know, so read on…

Characteristics of a Great Content:

What exactly makes content a great one? Is it the length of the content or what? Is it the author’s name or blog design? Several people have mailed me in the past asking me this question, glad I will have to share the answers I gave them here with you.

In one of my previously published articles on this blog titled “6 Characteristics of a Good Blog Post” I discussed the characteristics that show a blog post is a great one. A great content should be easy to read, keep your content error-free. Ensure a high Flesch readability score in all your posts.

In content creation, always ensure to use catchy headlines or titles as this is the first thing that can attract a reader to your contents, keep the content flow natural as you must always remember you are writing for humans.

Most importantly make sure you cover all the necessary areas of any topic you choose, don’t allow your contents to raise more questions from your readers, and always ensure to cover all grounds. Content length also matters but no matter what ensure your average content length is at least 300 words.

Search Engine Optimization:

Content Optimization: What is the essence of content creation if it is not to reach more eyeballs? What good is compelling content if it can’t be found? If your content cannot be found by the hungry audience out there, then what is the need of blogging at first?

Keywords: A keyword is a word or groups of words by which an article can be found on the internet. Each content must have a core concept it is talking about and this can serve as a keyword so that when such keyword is searched on Google or any other search engine your content will come up in the results.

Characteristics of a Perfect Keyword:

What makes a keyword suitable for use? What makes a keyword perfect? How do I determine the best keyword for my content? Read “Keyword – Characteristics of a perfect Keyword”. A perfect keyword should be good enough to have high traffic, low competition, high CPC with great relevance to the content.

So optimizing contents properly with a keyword can greatly improve your content’s visibility and if you can do this right, then you will surely earn good money from your blog. That is exactly the essence of the “Beginners guide to blogging”, so I can teach you how to build your own blog and earn money with it.

To be successful in blogging, you have to take content optimization very seriously. The easiest way to be found on the internet is through search engines, so you have to optimize your content properly so you can easily be found when a certain keyword is searched on the internet. Note that different types of contents have different optimization methods.

Optimizing Texts:  Most times our most preferred content type is texts and to properly optimize such content you really have to optimize the following;

Title tags: Your title tag is simply your post title, so you really need to properly optimize it as it is often used to describe your content especially on the search engine results. Always ensure your keyword appears on your post titles.

Meta Description: The Meta description is usually displayed in search engine results as the descriptor text for each result which mostly influences searchers in deciding which search result to open. So during your content creation you must properly optimize your Meta description with your keyword in a natural flowing manner to compel a searcher to read your content.

Optimizing Images: Usually we use images as illustrators in our contents and bearing in mind that most search engines now have image searches, we have to properly optimize the images on our posts for discovery. A well optimized image can even appear on a search engine result even when the main content doesn’t.

Alt tags: The Alt tag is an alternative text to describe the image when the image fails to load on the browser.  Ensure your images have the proper alt tags with the keyword as part of the name.

Image tags: The image tags appear when you hover or point a mouse on an image; this can help your audience the context of the image. Ensure your images are properly named with the keyword as part of the name.

Optimizing Videos: Videos are also another type of content remember? Just as text contents are optimized for high ranking on the search engines, videos are also optimized, a video doesn’t even have to be professionally recorded to go viral on the internet.

Just as we did with text above, optimize your video titles, description with the proper keyword so it can easily be found online.

Search engine optimization is a very wide concept and I intend to treat it as a full episode in this series, so I will recommend you read my previous publications on SEO. I will be discussing it in full in the “Beginners guide to Blogging: Search Engine Optimization SEO – Episode 3” tomorrow.

This is the end of the second episode of this series, I will continue with the rest tomorrow. I hope you find it interesting to share your views and contribute to it. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to ask me via the comments or better yet via the contact page.

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