Be it as a personal initiative or for your company, a blog is important for your business and remains an indispensable tool for online communication.

As we all know, a blog consists primarily of posts, which are also called articles. Recently, more and more companies and private individuals are setting up a space on the web to communicate their culture, their skills and get closer to the consumer/user.

As we have already said, posts are the core of a blog and today we want to pinpoint the basic elements that will make your post relevant with 5 useful tips.

Let's jump right in and find out what we are talking about:

Starting from the technical point of view, particular attention should be paid to the headline, which plays a key role. It's the first part of the article, it appears before everything else, just like the price for products, which is the first element of communication that people deal with.

The headline should be of a maximum of 5-6 words and should succeed in grabbing the reader's attention immediately. Keywords in the headline should be concise and direct and reflect relevant information that the article will examine.

The internet offers a lot of headline templates, from a step-by-step (just like this post) to the famous “How-To” headline, which is basically a guide and many more.

Formatting and creating paragraphs makes the text fluid. A quality post has to have the readability characteristic, so that the reading experience will be much more enjoyable.

Moreover, creating paragraphs allows readers to have a clearer view. The space between paragraphs corresponds to a visual break that will facilitate the reading.

Bold type is important and should be used to draw attention to keywords and to emphasize them. Use italics for foreign words to distinguish them visually and for citations, because they are sentences or parts of speeches that do not belong to the writer.

The alignment of a text is a key element as well: you can choose left, right, justified and centered. However, it is customary to use the left alignment for the majority of cases.

Staying focused on the purpose is another essential element for a successful post. All too often, you lose sight of the goal you are trying to achieve, because you're either in a hurry to write new articles or because you have to keep the blog updated.

Obviously, the aim varies according to what you want your users to do. For example, we may want to trigger a viral sharing mechanism, or we simply want to teach to do something specific (a guide and so on).

In this case, our goal is to provide you with a valid content, that can help you in the drafting of great articles for your blog (whether it is personal or for your company).

Visual communication is important as well and that is anything related to the visual impact, including the graphics, such as, images, graphic elements and so on.

Choose a style in line with the colors of your website and stick with it.

How many times have you visited a website or a blog that has contents surrounded by bad graphics?

Well, it's important to match the right combinations of colors, lines, logos, layout settings and widgets: all these elements are worthy of great attention.

Images have to be coherent with the topic of the blog post. They accelerate the learning process and the storage information to create a stronger memory of the blog post. 

The number of characters can often be confusing. A long article does not necessarily mean a quality article! What matters is writing down everything that you feel necessary in order to achieve your goal and to explain what you want.

So, if the article will barely reach 500 characters, don't worry! What's important is being able to answer the following questions:

• "Did I write everything I wanted to say?"
• "Did I use a clear and direct language?"
• "Did I use the right images?"

Those are the questions that will give you the answers you need and make you understand that the length of a post is variable.

Often people prefer to read short articles because they want to get right to the core of the news. As a matter of fact, the number of characters also depends on the type of article. A news article will probably be more efficient if it's short.

However, other articles need a longer structure because of their nature, such as in depth articles. The important thing is to use the right keywords for reaching high rankings in search engines, but we will see shortly in another blog post by Mr. Apps Srl.

In other words, feel free to write without too many obligations.

Enjoy and share! ;)

Photo credits: © John Carey