Creating highly effective blog posts is an important part of content marketing. If you want to write effective blog posts, you need to know who your audience is and target every post to them. You also need to create a plan of action for your blog posts, both individually and as a whole. For instance, you might start your blog posts with generalities, moving toward specifics as your audience becomes more informed.

While all that is important, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty about what should be included in each blog post.

* Blog posts need a telling title – The days of puns in titles are over. It’s important to create a blog post title that tells the reader what’s inside the post. This is why they’ll click through to read it. People do not like being tricked and will be more focused on the trickery than the post if you’re not clear in your titles.

* Catch their interest with your first paragraph – Your first paragraph is very important in terms of blog posts. You only have seconds, one or two sentences at the most, to capture your audience’s attention. This is where understanding your target market comes in. Create a compelling first sentence and first paragraph that catch the reader’s attention.

* Give readers a glimpse of your personality – Nobody wants to read dry blog posts stuffed full of keywords that ultimately say nothing. While it’s true you want the keywords there, show the reader your personality inside of your blog post. Let them know a little bit about your story, and how you think.

* Create an informative body message – If you’ve planned out your post well, with an outline, you will be able to create the body message easily. The body message is the meat of the message that you want to deliver.

* Provide a conclusion in the last paragraph – Nothing is worse than reading something and feeling like it’s left unfinished. Remember to make some conclusions in your last paragraph that ties everything you said together. Then ask your reader for feedback. Ask them a question about the content and invite them to answer.

* CTA – Always include, within that last paragraph or directly under it, a specific and clear call to action (CTA). Do you want them to respond, to share, to buy? What do you want them to do? Tell them how and why to do what it is you want them to do.

Aside from these factors it’s important to also be concerned with headings, bullets and plenty of white space. Your headings need to be keyword-rich headings that make sense for what is about to be read by the reader. By using bolded headings, and larger text for headings, the headings will stand out better. By using bulleted points the same thing occurs. It just makes it easier for your reader to take in what is being said. People read by “scanning” and a blog post with bullets, headings and plenty of white space makes it easier.

Images that you include should be relevant images. Don’t forget to fill out the “alt” information for the image. This doesn’t necessarily help with search engine results any more, but remember that some people who read your site cannot see or read images. By having the alt information to describe the image they should be seeing, it will make the blog post that much more interesting.

Further, don’t lay aside grammar rules. It’s okay if your grammar is not perfect. After all, no one is perfect. However, avoid serious issues that make it hard for the reader to understand or relate to your blog post. Finally, always include internal links that take the reader to other relevant information within your own website or blog.

By taking into account all these factors in your blog posts, you’ll create effective blog posts every single time.