How to Write a Blog Post That Gets MASSIVE Traffic

In this video, I'll show you how to

write

a

blog

post

that receives hundreds of comments, thousands of social shares, and first page Google rankings. In fact, I use the exact process in this video to grow my

blog

to four hundred and twenty-six thousand and four. one hundred ninety six views per month i'm brian dean the founder of backlinko the place where marketers look for higher rankings and more

traffic

keep looking let's face it getting

traffic

to your blog is harder than ever in fact , I have recently partnered with buzzsumo. We analyzed 912 million blog

post

s and found that the vast majority of blog posts published had no links or social shares when I launched my first blog in 2009, things were completely different back then, get links that were shared on social media was relatively easy, you could publish a 500-word blog post and call it a day for 198 words 499 words 500 words Dunsky, fast forward to today if things are completely different according to WordPress. 2.3 million blog posts come out on their platform every day, so stop your content.

To stand out and be shared today, it must be great luck for you. That's exactly what I'm going to show you how to do in this video, step by step, starting with step number one. Find a proven blog post topic. It's no secret that your blog. Post topic is huge, here's exactly how to find blog post topics that really work first. Address you and me. You to me is a gold mine for blog post topics. Here's why udemy doesn't just show you content that people are interested in, you see content that people are actually paying for, you can search for courses by category or by keyword, either way you'll find content that people are actually paying for to access, for example, let's say you have a blog about graphic design, go to the design category on udemy and scroll down to your best selling courses and in 5 seconds you will have a list of very interesting tested topics.

The next place to look for tested theme ideas is Amazon. To use it, simply search Amazon with the keyword that describes what your blog is about. search for a book on that topic with a lot of ratings, this shows you that people actually bought the book, finally click look inside to see the table of contents and just like you with me you will get a list of topics presented in tray silver. Finally, we have conference agendas. First, go to the website of a conference in your niche. Go to the agenda or schedule page and you'll see the topics that people are paying to learn more about, which brings us to step number two.

Write Your Headline Now If you have a proven topic, it's time to

write

a blog post title. You may have seen the statistic before. 80% of people read your headline, but only 20% click on the actual post. Is that statistic true who knows, but I do know that your headline is very important so here's exactly how to write blog post headlines that stand out and get clicks first. Start your headline with proven phrases. Buzzsumo recently analyzed around a hundred million headlines, so what did they find that headlines starting with these 20 words and phrases are shared more on social media, for example, when I publish this post on my blog, I made sure to start my title with one of those phrases, obviously you don't need to start every title with one of those phrases, but when it makes sense to try to use them second, make sure your title uses square brackets or parentheses.

A study by Outbrain found that adding brackets to headlines can improve click-through rates by up to 38%. This study confirms what I have seen in the real world. In fact, six of my top 10 most popular blog posts of all time have square brackets or parentheses in the title. Finally, you want to use long headlines. That study of 900 million blog posts I mentioned earlier found that posts with long headlines earned 76% more. actions compared to publications that used short headlines with that it's time for step number three correct and attention-grabbing introduction check the title check the title now is the time to write an introduction that captures the attention of your readers from the beginning how the PPT formula this formula is killing It's for me right now because of the way PPT stands for Preview Test Transition.

Here's a breakdown of the formula. Now I'm going to break down each part of this formula and show you how it works with real life examples. First, you have the preview. This part couldn't be simpler, just let your reader know exactly what to expect that way when someone lands on one of your blog posts, they'll know they're in the right place. Here is an example. Next, it's time to see the test. where you show people that you know what you're talking about now, what if you don't really know what you're talking about? If you have bigger problems, then blog post presentations, but that's another story, now you can show evidence with the use of personal results. of experience number of clients credentials or certifications or anything that shows that someone should listen to your advice here is an example, lastly we have the transition, end your introduction with a transition a transition that prompts your reader to continue reading, for example, you can see that I used the phrase let's dive in at the end of this introduction, we just move on to step number four, correct and awesome post.

Is there a formula for writing blog posts that people link to and share? To know if everyone would use it to say. There are proven strategies you can use to improve your content 10x, for example, one technique that is working very well for me right now is to use a lot of section subheadings. Subheadings are great because they divide your content into easy-to-read sections. snippets, which is very important if you publish a lot of long form content like I do, for example this post on my blog is very long, in fact the post is 4300 words, so I broke the content into small fragments using dozens of subtitles.

I also recommend using a lot of visuals in every post you publish now when I talk about visuals and I talk about things like screenshots, charts, images, infographics, basically don't be afraid to use a lot of different visuals and just a lot of visuals in general. each post, for example this post for my blog has 95 images, then use a glitch that is between 16 and 20 pixels, if you have ever read anything on medium comm you have probably noticed that their articles are very easy to read, do you? how do they do that? Well, in addition to a clean design, they use a 21 point font and if you use anything less than 16 you are probably missing out on a lot of readers, that is why we use an 18 point font here at backlinko, finally when it makes sense to publish content that is In less than 3,000 words, our Buzzsumo industry study found a clear correlation between long-form content and social media shares;

In fact, our data showed that long-form content got an average of 77 percent more social shares compared to traditional short blog posts. Obviously, this doesn't mean you need to pad your blog posts with a bunch of nonsense or filler, but if it makes sense to publish a long blog post or guide, do it, so now that your post is in the books, it's time to take the next step. number 5 write your conclusion, this is the deal that most people use throwaway conclusions like this, but professional bloggers know that your conclusion is very important, especially if you want to get a lot of comments on your blog.

Well, I've recently developed a three-step process for writing awesome stuff. conclusions is called the tact process this is what it looks like first start your conclusion with a transition this sentence lets people know that your blog post meeting is over and it's time to wrap things up here's an example below it's time to ask here we are ask your reader a very specific question, in other words you don't want to ask something vague like what do you think, instead give the reader an incredibly simple question that is easy to answer, for example in this conclusion You can see I asked people something.

It will take you about two seconds to respond and you want to end your conclusion with a CTA. Your CTA can be whatever you want your reader to do next. You can ask your readers to leave a comment. Share in social networks. Subscribe to your newsletter. Subscribe. For the YouTube channel, the exact action you use is entirely up to you, but the important thing to keep in mind here is that you have someone reading your blog post to the end, which means they really enjoyed your content and You're ready for the next step, and as long as you give them the next step in your conclusion, you'll be fine with your conclusion in the books.

Let's go to step number six. Optimize your post for SEO. Obviously there is a lot more to SEO than I could cover in a short video, in fact I have an entire blog and YouTube channel about SEO that says SEO is very important to the long term success of your blog posts, so I want to quickly cover three simple techniques you can use to optimize your blog. posts for SEO because the truth is, traffic to most people's blog posts looks like this: a huge spike on the first day, then plateaus to practically zero, but when you optimize your post the right way, you still you get that boost but your post still generates consistent traffic month after month, for example, I first published this post over 5 years ago and I've updated it several times since then, but it's basically the same post and because it's Optimized for SEO, it still attracts over 12,000 visitors per month. from Google, so the first on-page SEO technique is to include the target keyword in the introduction.

Google and other search engines place more importance on words and phrases that appear at the top of the page, so be sure to use your keyword. once in the introduction of a blog post like this, next use short URLs when it comes to Google rankings, there is no doubt that URLs perform better, in fact, Google recommends that you use short descriptive URLs, because URLs Short ones make it easier for Google to understand. the topic of your page and people use your URL to determine which result they should click on, which is why many industry studies have found that short URLs are clicked more than long URLs, ultimately posting internal links to your posts, now internal links don't.

In fact, it doesn't have to be complicated when it comes to internal linking. I like to keep things simple every time I post a new purchase order. I add two to five internal lengths to some of my older posts. Now you can also go back to older posts and link them to the new post you just published, for example when I published this post about keyword research I linked related content on my site that I already published and added some internal links from older posts to my new guide and before finishing this video. I have a quick extra step for you to promote your posts.

I know this video is designed to show you how to write a blog post, but here's the deal. Most blog posts, even good ones, fail because they aren't promoted enough and your content isn't shared. Twitter and Facebook don't really count as promotion to get your content seen these days, you need to do a lot more than just share it on social media; In fact, I typically spend about 20 percent of my time writing content and 80 percent of my time promoting. that content, that's how important content promotion is, here are three quick content promotion strategies you can try. our first strategy is the content newsletter when it comes to content promotion, email crushes social media and it's not even that close, for example, I posted this.

I posted on my blog a few months ago and, as I do with all new posts, I sent out a tweet. I also sent this simple plain text newsletter to my email subscribers and when all was said and done, the newsletter received almost 13x more. clicks than my tweet To be clear, I have more email subscribers than Twitter followers, but still there is no denying that email is much more powerful when it comes to promoting content compared to social media. Then we have retargetingFacebook. It's no secret that Facebook's organic reach is practically zero right now, fortunately you can still get your Facebook followers to see your posts without paying a fortune, the secret is to boost your posts, but only boost people who have visited your site, in other words, retargeting, for example, I paid about 50 cents per click on this enhanced Facebook post, which is very cheap considering I'm in the competitive and expensive b2b niche, we finally have email reach.

If you don't have an email list yet, outreach is probably the best way to get content, that's the good one. The bad news is that you can't just send the same spam email to a hundred people and expect it to work. In fact, I get generic emails like this all the time, probably... and I delete them in two seconds, but I don't. I don't automatically delete every email I receive every hour. If someone takes the time to send me a personalized message, I usually at least review their post and if I think the post is something the backlinko community would enjoy, I'll share it.

There you have it, my seven-step process for writing a blog post. If you like this video make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel right now just click the subscribe button below this video and if you want exclusive SEO techniques that I only share with email subscribers head to backlinko comm and subscribe to the newsletter. Now it's free. I want to know from you which strategy from this video you will try first. Will you promote your content via email or try to use shorter blog post URLs? Let me know. leaving a comment below right now when you hear that beep, ringing your ears, finally trying, trying with that, okay, next use, okay, let's try another take of that.