A Step-by-Step Guide to Writing a Earth Shattering Blog Post | Ep. #805

Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today we're going to give you a step-by-step guide to writing an earth-shattering blog post. What's an example of an earth-shattering blog post, Neil?

Something you want to share, link to, and tell your mom about.

That's how you shatter the earth.

All right, so we're going to do something entertaining again, at least for us, in which we're going to break down how to write a blog step-by-step. I'm going to start off. Then Eric's going to give the next step and we're going to keep going until we get to the end of the blog post. So step 1, use this framework to write your blog post. You have your introduction, body, conclusion. You label them. Introduction, technically you don't, but then when you get into the body, use subheadings. Conclusion, you label conclusion. You write your blog post, you summarize it within the conclusion. And you end your blog post with a question. The reason you end with a question, Eric knows this. If you end with a question, what happens?

Engagement.

That's right. More comments. If you don't end with a question, there gives no real reason for people to leave a comment.

Yeah. So my turn? Yes.

All right.

So within that blog post, if you look at how Brian Dean, for example, at Backlinko or some of these good copywriters, how they write their blog posts, it's like a couple sentences. Each paragraph is like maybe 2 or 3 sentences or so, right? It's short, it's to the point. And some people, people do this on LinkedIn as well. They call these bucket brigades, okay? So the way you do this is you're keeping people engaged, you're keeping people on the hook because even though you're writing a long-form earth-shattering blog post, you got to keep people hooked because people don't want to read long walls of text. People are ADD. Like, you give me a long blog post, I'm going to take out my phone, I'm going to start talking to my mom, I'm going to start doing an Instagram selfie. I don't really do that, but You got to hold people's attention. Bucket grades are going to help you get there. And then what I'd recommend that you do, every single quote, every single thing that you, that you claim, you got to link to something. You got to link to a case study or you got to link to something that's out there. Because if you're just going to make claims out there and not have— you're not going to back things up, you're not going to have subheadings in there, you have something that doesn't have a lot of substance and you cannot shatter to earth if you don't do that.

Now that you've figured out how to write a blog post from a structure standpoint and some of the rules to follow, you need to come up with a headline. And actually, before we come into the headline, I'm going to actually give you a few more rules. One, use images and videos to convey your message. People like that. A picture's worth a thousand words. 2, people love a conversation. If I talk like this in a podcast, what do you think would happen? You would ignore me. Same goes with your blog posts. Don't make them dull and boring. Yes, Eric mentioned how to keep the paragraphs short and to the point, but also use the words you and I within your blog posts. It'll make it seem more like a conversation.

Great. So, actually Neil brought up a really good point. In your blog posts, if you want to shatter the earth, you got to shatter the earth for the algorithms too, right? I'm just enjoying saying that. So, you can— one of our mutual friends, Syed, he runs a company called OptinMonster. He made a WordPress plugin called YouTube Subscribe, I believe. So he can just, he can just take, or I can just take Neil's videos on YouTube, embed the video, and there's going to be a subscribe button, but it's going to go to my channel. Okay. So you're going to increase dwell time, even if you don't create videos, put videos in there, and then, and then you can suck away his subscribers. And then from there, also you can put Amazon Polly on your blog post, put at the top, and that's going to increase dwell time as well. That's going to help you from an SEO perspective.

All right. So now that you've got the basics down, it's time to come up with a topic idea. 8 out of 10 people will read your headline, only 2 out of 10 though will click and read the rest. So when it comes to your headline, you need to come up with something that's amazing and knocks people's socks off, so much so it's earth-shattering. If you're not sure what kind of headline that's amazing, general rule of thumb, keep it around 7 words, short and to the point. It works for search engines, works for humans, works for social sharing sites. In addition to that, by keeping it short and to the point, what you'll find is you'll be able to grab people's attention much quicker than if you had a 20-word headline. Or if it's only a 3-word headline, it's not descriptive enough so people don't know what they're going to get into. And if you don't know what kind of headlines to create or what kind of content to create, go to BuzzSumo, type in keywords within your space, you'll see what's hot, you'll see what's not, it'll give you ideas of what to write on.

Great. And also I talked to my buddies over at Home Depot or CarMax and I asked them, what makes your SEO so good? Because they rank for— CarMax, for example, ranks for 1.9 million keywords. Okay. So how do you do it? Well, guys, uh, he said, Eric, we have a lot of data. Okay. We have unique statistics and all that. Um, and we share those within the blog post. So think about where you can pull different sources of statistics, different graphs as well. People like that stuff, especially if you're in B2B. People like that stuff. So I shouldn't say everybody likes it, but if you're B2C, for example, maybe not necessarily true. But my point is having compelling pieces of content or compelling points inside your piece of content, that's going to help set it apart from everyone else's. And that's how you can shatter the earth.

Yeah. Now you want to start writing. Once you start writing, you're going to get it out there. It's not done. You need to have someone proof your content. I don't care if you're the best at grammar, best at spelling, You need to have someone proof your content. Once they proof it, you get it out there, you can publish it. And then once it's out there, what do you do?

You promote it.

That's right. What's the last step? Promotion. You want to break down promotion for them?

Yeah. Promotion. Listen to our other podcasts on marketing. No, I'm just kidding. But we do talk about promotion quite a bit. So around promotion, what do you do? You can use a tool like BuzzSumo, for example. I find people that have reached out to, or that have— find people that have mentioned or linked to similar pieces of content. Literally, if I wrote a piece on content marketing, I'm going to look for people that have shared, linked to similar pieces as mine because they're likely to do so. Reach out to them and then basically you can, like Neil mentioned, at the very lowest level, you can beg them for a link. Otherwise, you can build a relationship with them. You can say, hey, let's figure out how we can collaborate together. Here's something I can help you with. I noticed you're interested in I noticed you're into cars, let me buy you a car, right? That's like the highest level and you're building a relationship that way, right? And that way you keep the promotion cycle going because if you're starting out with your earth-shattering blog posts, if you don't have an audience in the beginning, you're going to spend 90 to 95% of your time promoting. So, you might spend 5 minutes writing it, great. You might spend the next 95 minutes promoting it because nobody knows who you are and you got to get yourself out there. You got to put in the hard work, you got to get punched in the face a lot. with your promotion.

And the promotion is simple. As Eric mentioned, BuzzSumo, you see who shares it. Once you see who shares it, you email them, you ask them to share your content. Put in competitor URLs into Ahrefs, see who links to them, hit them up, ask them to link to your content because you wrote something that's better using our framework. And then you go and see who you linked out to within your blog post because you're citing, you're using data to back everything up. You email them being like, hey Eric, just want to let you know, love your data, your facts, your blog. I linked to it here, here, and here.

Check it out.

Check out my latest post. If you like it, feel free and share it on your favorite social network. Get that going, you now have traffic.

There you go. So that's it for today, but if you want to see an earth-shattering event, it's a free event in Los Angeles with free streaming, free recordings, free food. All you have to do is help us hit 1 million downloads over a 30-day period. Go to marketingschool.io/stats. We're aiming to throw the event in Q1 or Q2 of 2019. Rate, review, subscribe, do all the little things that matter because they actually help. Please do it. I'm going to beg again on the video. And we'll see you tomorrow.