7 essential elements of a perfect blog post - Executive Summary

1. Headline: the 6 words that count most
2. Storytelling hook
3. Fewer characters per line at first
4. Featured image
5. Subheads for scanning
6. Content and the 1,500-word sweet spot
7. Soundbites for sharing

How to write the perfect headline

Eight out of 10 people will read your headline. Two out of 10 will read the rest of what you wrote. Stats like this 80/20 rule from Copyblogger illuminate the fact that headlines are often the make-or-break moment for each and every blog post. So how do you make a headline great?

Readers tend to absorb the first three words of a headline and the last three words, revealing that we don’t just scan body copy—we scan headlines, too.

Of course, few headlines will be six words long in total. In those cases, it’s important to make the first three words and the last three words stand out as much as possible. 

In terms of SEO, the headline (or title tag) will need to be around 55 characters or fewer in order to fit the entire title on a search results page and avoided being abbreviated with an ellipse.

here are eight headline strategies that are backed by psychology.

1. Surprise – “This Is Not a Perfect Blog Post (But It Could’ve Been)”
2. Questions – “Do You Know How to Create the Perfect Blog Post?”
3. Curiosity gap – “10 Ingredients in a Perfect Blog Post. Number 9 Is Impossible!”
4. Negatives – “Never Write a Boring Blog Post Again”
5. How to – “How to Create a Perfect Blog Post”
6. Numbers – “10 Tips to Creating a Perfect Blog Post”
7. Audience referencing – “For People on the Verge of Writing the Perfect Blog Post”
8. Specificity – “The 6-Part Process to Getting Twice the Traffic to Your Blog Post”

Ex. 10 Simple Things You Can Do Today That Will Make You Happier

Start your post with storytelling

The headline entices readers to clickthrough. The intro hooks readers into continuing.

Cut down on characters per line by using a featured image

Visuals are hugely important, and it helps to draw attention with a catchy image up top.

There’s another reason for the image, too. Characters per line.

Placing an image at the top right/left of your blog post forces the first few lines of the post to shorten in width. This shortening leads to fewer characters per line. Fewer characters per line has a psychological effect on the way we view content: The fewer the characters, the easier the text is to comprehend and the less complex it seems.

If you’re opposed to a featured image, there’s another way of achieving fewer characters per line. You can boost the font size of your opening paragraph.

If you’re comfortable with code, there’s a neat CSS trick you can do to make this happen on your own blog. Add this to your CSS file, replacing the font size with the actual size you’d like to see.

p:first-child { font-size: 1.5em; }

Subheads, subheads, and more subheads

Perhaps you’ve heard that people don’t read on the Internet, they scan.

It’s not true for everyone, but it’s true for a large enough majority that setting up your content to be scannable is an absolutely essential element of a perfect blog post.

Use subheads to make your post scannable.

• H1: post / page title
• H2′s and H3′s: subheadings and sub-subheadings
• H4: your blog’s name, and possibly related widgets
• H5: same as above: sidebars etc.

Basically, these tags are signifying a content’s importance both to the reader and to search engines. 

Write the perfect amount of content

Blog posts of 1,500 words or more tend to receive more shares.

Quick Sprout has some interesting data behind this recommendation. They cite research from a popular online journal that tested the Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn shares of all its post, broken down by word count. The longer the post, the more shares the post got.

(The stats above would suggest that the bare minimum in length should be 700 words. That’s where shares really started picking up.)

Of course, with longer content comes the necessity to make it as scannable as possible. The Nielsen Norman Group found that people only read 28 percent of the words in a blog post. Subheads (as mentioned above) are a great way of making your post scannable so readers can find the content they want

• Lists – bulleted and numbered
• Blockquotes
• Bold text in paragraphs
• Short paragraphs
• Visuals

Add a ‘tweetable’ or two to your content

People love to share quotes on social media. Make your perfect blog post as quotable and shareable as possible.

To make a soundbite or tweetable, pull the best bits from the content you’ve written and include a “Tweet This” or “Share This” link alongside the text. Make the text stand out so that readers (i.e., scanners) can quickly see your most notable and shareable words and so they can easily click to share.

There are some neat WordPress plugins that can help you here, as well as some online tools.

Click to Tweet website – The website tool lets you build a tweet to include in any post, and your work gets saved on their site to edit or track clicks after the fact.

Click to Tweet WordPress plugin – The team at TodayMade (makers of CoSchedule content calendars) built a tool to share quotes from inside blog posts. The implementation is really beautiful. 

4 little things to look for in your perfect blog post

1. Place a call to action in your post

—the sidebar, the header, and the footer get our most prominent CTAs and the text itself has a handful of internal links sprinkled throughout. Links are a standard part to the majority of successful blog posts out there. Blog Pros’ study of 100 high-ranking blog posts noticed that these posts averaged nearly 10 links inside each story.

2. Visual content is essential

We remember photos 6 times easier than text. So not only will people enjoy reading your blog more if you include beautiful photos, they’re more likely to remember it too.

 The 100 popular blog posts averaged one visual image for every 350 words. 

3. Include social share buttons

4. Create a usable, readable, searchable URL

Google has revealed that it is best to use three to five words in the slug of your permalink. Additional words will be weighed less and could even appear spammy. So keep your permalinks short and take care to place important keywords first!

While keeping in mind the search engines, also keep in mind us humans. Be descriptive with your URL so that someone who sees the link can know what they can expect to see if they click.

For instance, this:

http://blog.bufferapp.com/inside-the-ideal-blog-post-the-research-and-science-behind-the-perfect-post

Can become this:

http://blog.bufferapp.com/ideal-blog-post-research

Timing: Blog posts get more shares on the weekend

Blog posts get more shares on Saturday and Sunday than any other day of the week.

 Essentially, when there’s less competition, the more your post stands out. When nothing is on late at night, infomercials get their most play, and a similar comparison could be made to content posted on the weekends.

Perhaps boost some promotion on the weekends or even consider posting original content that doesn’t have to compete with so much other content (only 13 percent of the 1.2 million blog posts in the Track Maven study were published on the weekends).

Beyond the best day of the week for social shares on blog posts, Track Maven also found some interesting data about the time of day when posts can expect to see the most shares. (Note: all times are Eastern standard.) Below, the two charts show when during the day blog posts are published (the green chart) and when during the day the most social shares happen (the purple chart).

Shares tend to spike early in the morning and again late at night, with steady, lower sharing throughout the day.

Great blog posts are …

1. Actionable
2. Relatable
3. Urgent
4. Visual
5. Solution-based
6. Entertaining
7. Definitive

Executive summary derived from http://blog.bufferapp.com/perfect-blog-post-research-data

How to Write a Business Letter:

SHANNON CHAMBERLAINOCT 22 2014, 8:01 AM ET

Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP; Elisa Glass/The Atlantic

The Earl of Chesterfield, the 18th-century British statesman and patron of the arts, had a number of concerns about his illegitimate son Philip, but one he revisited often in his posthumously published letters to the boy is about Philip’s correspondence. This species of worry ranged from handwriting (“shamefully bad and illiberal; it is neither the hand of a man of business, nor of a gentleman, but of a truant school boy”) to the boy’s prose style (“one principal topic of our conversation will be, not only the purity but the elegance of the English language; in both which you are very deficient”).
The latter became a particular concern after Chesterfield went to the trouble of setting the boy up in the world. In December 1751, he offered Philip some delightfully modern-sounding advice on his business correspondence:

The first thing necessary in writing letters of business, is extreme clearness and perspicuity; every paragraph should be so clear and unambiguous, that the dullest fellow in the world may not be able to mistake it, nor obliged to read it twice in order to understand it. This necessary clearness implies a correctness, without excluding an elegance of style. Tropes, figures, antitheses, epigrams, etc., would be as misplaced and as impertinent in letters of business, as they are sometimes (if judiciously used) proper and pleasing in familiar letters, upon common and trite subjects. In business, an elegant simplicity, the result of care, not of labor, is required.

In case Philip might mistake his meaning, and perhaps reasoning that a demonstration of his recommended prose style was worth much more than a mere description of it, His Lordship added, “Let your first attention be to clearness, and read every paragraph after you have written it, in the critical view of discovering whether it is possible that any one man can mistake the true sense of it: and correct it accordingly.”

Lord Chesterfield (Wikimeda Commons)

Lord Chesterfield’s advice on business writing, published in 1781, joined a heap of careful and voluminous 17th- and 18th-century attention to business correspondence. Titles such as The Young Secretary’s Guide, Or A Speedy Help To Learning; The Complete Art of Writing Letters; and Every Man His Own Letter-Writer were immensely popular bestsellers;The Young Secretary’s Guide went through more than 20 printings and piratings, from 1703 well into the 1750s. And if imitation is the highest form of flattery, we can gauge something of the book’s status in the fact that in 1730, someone got the bright idea to call his version The Young Secretary’s Guide Compleated: Being the Speediest Help to Learning. (This time, with 57 percent more learning.)
The format of the manuals, which were large collections of letters between imaginary but archetypal characters, also lent itself to recycling. An introductory letter to the reader would always lay out the general principles of entering into correspondence and the purpose of the manual: As the century went on and these manuals acquired ever increasing numbers of imitators, some of them would use this opportunity to explain, eloquently, the necessity of another entrant into the lists. Although we must allow for a certain natural exaggeration in what essentially amounted to a sales pitch or the 18th-century version of jacket copy, it’s from these introductory notes that we get a sense of the great regard in which business correspondence, and letter-writing generally, was held. From Every Man His Own Letter-Writer, for instance, we learn that “the importance and necessity of letter-writing, as it relates to our social and commercial concerns in every rank and station in life, are so evidently apparent, as to stand universally confessed…it becomes the duty and interest of each individual member of the community, to acquire a competent knowledge in an art which equally redounds to their credit and advantage.”

A table of contents listed each kind of letter contained within the book, such as the perennially popular “From a Guardian to His Ward, against a volatile, frothy French lover.”

After this self-justification would follow a table of contents of each kind of letter contained within the book: a clear necessity, as the manuals represent just about every possible situation one can imagine occurring under the conditions of early British capitalism. Sample letter titles: “From a Shopkeeper in the Country to a Tradesman in London, Complaining of the Badness of his Goods” and “From one Friend to Another, generously offering him Assistance, on his having sustained great Losses by the Failure of a Correspondent” and the perennially popular “From a Guardian to His Ward, against a volatile, frothy French lover.”

A 1721 edition of the Secretary's Guide (Google Books)

As the genre—like Chesterfield’s letters to his prodigal son—was ostensibly directed at the young and naïve, almost every example of it follows a natural progression, from children writing to their parents thanking them for placing them in apprenticeships, or (in the case of daughters) in service, to masters writing up apprenticeship contacts once they had completed their own apprenticeships and acquitted themselves with enough linguistic propriety to advance in the world of business. Some later manuals tend to follow the same characters, from errant apprentices writing to their fathers for more pocket money, to young men writing to prospective father-in-laws to ask for their dowries and daughters, to older men writing to excuse their debts or requesting that debts to them be paid. The ubiquity of letters about every possible permutation of debt is especially prone to the creation of characters, whom you can follow through initial requests to successful (or unsuccessful) petitions to their creditors, and their creditors’ replies.

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Go Ask Alice - Clarifying Business For Your Audience.

While surfing the web one evening after work I came across this Twitter status:

アリス・リデル on Twitter:
"How can she stem this growing corruption or assist my search?
What does she know that I don't?"

 https://twitter.com/Alice_AMR/status/526293712263868417

It was a moment of clarity for me.
Humorous, insightful, and a Revelation to me in that moment.

   I was not asking Alice when she was ten foot tall, but Alice was asking me when I was ten foot tall.

Often times when working on complex cases, I have used the Alice in Wonderland branding  symbolically to soften my image. Perhaps it is a comfort zone of recall from a childhood little theater productions that engulfed most my early years. Where ever this bell was tolling it was profound.

Alice was asking me questions that I should be answering for her.

How can I stem the growing corruption or assist her on her search?
What do I know that she does not?

Techniques For Giving Better Presentations

the content is the most important part of your presentation. All the bonus stuff—the animated slides, the videos, the jokes—can’t compensate for lack of compelling content.
What’s more, your content should stand out from what other people are saying. 

You have to take a stance and differentiate yourself from what’s out there. 
That's the part that people forget when it comes to presentations. They try to be everything to everyone, but you can’t. 

The goal of a presentation is to change someone’s beliefs or behaviors. If you don’t take a stance, if you’re too vanilla, you can’t change other people’s behavior.

Rock stars use production elements like lighting to shape the emotional effect of their presentations. As a corporate speaker you may be able to do that to some extent, but mostly you communicate emotions through your personality, your passion, and stories from your life. 

Three recommendations.

First, be authentic. Don’t try to be funny if you’re not. Don’t pretend to be a bigger company than you are. Don’t pretend to be more knowledgeable than you are. And don’t pretend that you want to be there if you don’t. Audiences can sniff out a fraud in 30 seconds.

Second, be confident. At an M.I.A. ladies were gushing: “She has so much swagger! I wish I could have some of that.” Confidence is attractive. Frank Sinatra, who was a physically unimposing high-school dropout. But through his self-confidence, he made the most of his talents as a musician, actor and businessman.

You can’t fake confidence, so it’s best rely on your expertise, practice and preparation

Finally, be likeable. Make an effort to be relatable, friendly, and open. It helps build relationships with audiences. Some adopt a more punk attitude. and break free of the constraints of likeability. But as a public speaker, you’re better off taking the route of Taylor Swift than Courtney Love.

Rock stars really wow us when they simplify. Some of the best business talks I’ve seen have been simple. No slides, no videos, no New Yorker cartoons, no fancy infographics. But they had a meaningful message that resonated with me and was all the more memorable for the lack of frills.

Finally, go for broke. Give a great show each and every time on the stage. “Business people somehow believe that if they didn’t sleep well or had a bad flight, they can be off their game, That’s wrong. When you’re trying to present,when you trying to influence people, when you’re trying to change behavior, you better bring it. You get one shot to get it right and you’ve got to go for it.”

After a good show, people talk. They buy the t-shirts, they share on social media. Presentations are the same. “If you do a good presentation, people talk about it afterwards.It will lift you and your career. If you do a lousy job, then boy it’s a missed opportunity.”

VIA http://www.forbes.com/sites/ruthblatt/2014/10/16/rock-stars-techniques-for-giving-better-presentations/