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