10 Blog Post Templates For Marketers to Create the Best Content

10 Blog Post Templates For Marketers to Create the Best Content As a marketer, you have a lot to do. Promotions to manage. Campaigns to plan. In other words, you have no time to write fantastic blog posts. Sure, you do your best to â€Å"create great content† (because that’s what you been told to do). But, you’re not happy with the results. Meanwhile, your competition’s blog is crushing it. â€Å"How can I be like them,† you ask. Reading this post is a good start. We’ve put together ten different blog post templates that cover every step in the content creation process. Plus, we’ll walk through how to use each one. By the time you’re done, you’ll know exactly how to write effective blog posts, without spending nearly as much time. The days of staring at a blank cursor are over. DID YOU KNOW: You can plan, publish, and promote all your WordPress blog posts on one marketing calendar with ? See how it works. Get 10 Free Blog Post Templates and Create Great Content Now This awesome bundle includes all ten templates well show you in this post. From developing personas, to craftingf outlines, to actually writing the posts themselves, youll get everything you need to succeed. Grab ‘em now. Then, read the post to learn how to use them. Jump to Template: Blog Audience Persona Template Blog Keyword Research Template Blog Title Template Blog Post Outline Template Blog Post Template Blog Call-to-Action Template Content Editing Checklist Blog Post SEO Checklist Blog Post Promotion Template Blog Post Analysis Template10 Simple Blog Post Templates to Create the Best Content Step One: Use Your Blog Audience Persona Template  To Identify Your Target Audience First, determine who your audience is. By knowing exactly who you are writing for you can tailor your content to fit their needs. How do you build an audience persona for your brand's blog? First, read this post on finding your target audience. Then, pull out your blog post audience persona template and outline the biography of your blog reader. This should include where they work and what types of companies they work for. Include details like, what their title is (manager, strategist, etc.) and specific company types like (Fortune 500, startup, etc.)   In the end, it should look something like: The next part of your template is filling in the demographic information for your audience persona including age, gender, income, level of education and location type. Next, you’ll focus on their hobbies and interests as well as the challenges and goals they face. Hobbies and interests will play an essential role in identifying who reads your blog as it can help you relate your content back to them. Challenges that your target audience faces can help you identify what sorts of topics to cover. Defining the goals of your audience can help you create content that shows your readers how to reach them. The next part of your persona template is writing a personal summary of how your target audience would describe themselves. You should also add what your audience expects from reading your blog as well as concerns that may prevent your target audience from reading your blog posts. The last part of your template should include other blogs and news sources that your target audience reads. You can also include customer quotes to finish off your persona. Build an audience persona with this free template (plus get nine more templates for creating... Step Two: Use Your Keyword Research Template to Organize Blog Post Keywords If you’ve written blog posts before you know how important it is to have a keyword that has a high search volume and low competition. Not only that you need to make sure that the keywords you use are terms that your target audience is searching for. Keywords are broken into two sections for every blog post that you write. One is your main keyword. Your entire blog post is centered around this keyword. The second set of keywords are LSI or latent semantic indexing terms. These keywords relate back to or are variations on your main keyword. To find keywords around the subjects, you want to write about turn to a tool like Moz  or Ahrefs. Type in the subject you may want your blog post to cover: This example shows Moz's Keyword Explorer tool. Ahrefs (another popular option, and one of our favorites at ), features a similar tool. Record the main keyword in your template: The next part you need to record is search volume. This tells you how often your keyword is searched per month. For the keyword social media calendar it’s searched about 201-500 times per month: Difficulty refers to how hard it will be for your blog post to rank for a specific keyword. For our example, the difficulty score for ranking on this particular topic is 65: Include an arrow that points to difficulty and says score out of 100. The next part of your keyword research involves finding your additional LSI terms or other keywords that you would want your blog post to rank for: Include an arrow that points to monthly volume that has text that says: Add in LSI terms that have a high search volume like your parent keyword. Record any additional LSI keywords in your template: The next part of your keyword research is going to be reading the top ten posts that are currently ranking on the keyword topic that you are going to write about. Look for what your audience wants to learn. What is their intent behind a search for that particular keyword? For the social media calendar example, the search intent behind that post is to build out a social media calendar to help marketers stay organized. Templates, as you can see, are a plus: Record the intent in your spreadsheet: The last part of your template will involve identifying if the content is new if you are optimizing a post you have already written and what type of content it is: Repeat this process for every blog post you intend to publish. Keep these tips in mind for every keyword you look for: Make keyword research easy with this free template (plus get nine more templates for creating... Step Three: Record Your Headlines In Your Blog Title Performance Tracking Template Now you have your keywords and your audience in mind. The next step is creating a remarkable headline that grabs the attention of your audience. Headlines are what attract your audience and encourage them to click. They are your opening act. Without a strong opening, your audience won’t continue to read. According to our research,   we have found that headlines do well if they: Incorporate keywords. Use â€Å"How to† formatting. Use numbers or statistics. They are about 55 characters long. Have a strong positive sentiment. Use our  Headline Analyzer  to create better headlines instead of guessing at what might work: In your Blog Title Performance Tracking template, write two different headlines and record the scores, sentiment, headline type, and length in words and characters. Aim for a headline score of at least 70 for each headline you write. After you’ve composed two, choose which one fits your blog post best. Step Four: Use Your Blog Post Outline Template To Format Your Thoughts I can speak from personal experience when I say the best bet you have to create a great blog post quickly is to write an outline. Outlines allow you to format your thoughts and give you (or your writers) a concise direction to take the post in. We’ve made it even easier to format your outline with our blog post outline template. To start, identify what's in it for your audience. We call this the WIIFM (or What's In It For Me section, which is exactly what your audience will be asking themselves before they read your post). This should identify the exact benefit your audience will take away from reading your content: Next, decide what format your blog post will take. Some common options are: List posts. How-to posts. Infographic posts. Story posts. Example posts. Once you choose a post format, identify why your post should be in a particular format: Next, you’ll tackle your introduction. This should be formatted into three different parts: The problem your audience is experiencing. The three things that your reader will learn when they read your post. How what they will learn will help solve their problem. Your introduction acts as your opening argument. There’s a ton of content out there on the web; you need to convince your target audience that your blog post is the one to read. Then comes your body copy outline. These should be overhead thoughts, not necessarily entirely fleshed out paragraphs of text. Just write down the idea you want to bring across. This can be done through something as simple as writing your H2 and H3 headers: Once you have the body of your post figured out you can move on to creating the Call-to-Action text that will be in your blog post. First, determine what you want your CTA to say. It should be between eight to ten words like your headlines. This should give your audience explicit direction for the action you want them to take after they read your post. There’s also space in your outline to add in any sources, data or research that you need to back up the advice in your post: The last part of your outline is your conclusion. Here is where you’ll summarize the main points of your post and add in your CTA: Craft better blog post outlines with this free template (and nine more to create awesome content). Step Five: Use Your Blog Post Template To Write Your Content The next part of your blog writing process is going to be crafting your post. This is usually the most time-consuming process, but now that you have your outline and your angle it will be much faster. Your blog post content template will be able to help you as well. Did you know? You can write your entire blog post in using our built-in text editor. First, add your headline: Then add your title tag. Title tags should be under 70 characters to properly show up in a Google search. Next is your meta description. Meta descriptions are the short descriptive text that appears under your title in a google search. Your description should be under 156 characters to display correctly. Now you can start writing the meat of your blog post content. First up is your introduction. Remember to keep it short, cover all the points that are in your outline and don’t bury the lead for your audience. Next is body content of your blog post. This section needs a separate subheader. If you need additional sub-points underneath, label them with an additional subhead. Each section of the body of your blog post should be between three and five paragraphs long, with no more than three sentences to a paragraph. This helps keep your blog post easy to skim. Repeat this process for each section of your post. After you’ve crafted the body of your blog post, add in your conclusion and CTA. Your conclusion should wrap up the main takeaways from your post while your CTA should entice your reader to take action.