Every blog post has three sections which include the introduction, the body and a conclusion. You may have learned in English class in high school to tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them again. Essentially that is your intro, body and conclusion. But, with blogging content it’s really easier than English class. For one thing you don’t really have to concern yourself with perfect grammar and syntax. That’s not to say you want to sound ignorant, but you can use your normal talking language for blog posts and be very profitable.

When writing content for your blog, consider the following:

1. Your target audience – Every single blog post should be written directly for your ideal audience. If you don’t know who you’re writing for, it will be hard to know what to write. If you keep in mind that it’s all about them and not you, you’ll write more captivating blog content.

2. Your headlines – Every blog post has a title, and a headline, plus headers. These are important components of your blog post – not just for the reader, as it focuses them on your message, but also for the sake of search engines which will send the reader to your content.

3. Focused topics – If you know who you’re writing for, you also need to know what you’re going to write about and how you want your reader to feel about it before you start. If you can’t say in one sentence what you’re trying to tell your reader, you may need to stop and focus more.

4. The five W’s – You learned it in high school; each post should answer most of the who, what, why, when and where of the topic in order to be complete. Don’t leave things out that you think they already know, because your reader doesn’t have ESP.

5. The three S’s – Each blog post needs to be short, simple, and scannable. People have short attention spans, especially if they’re reading on the run or while at work. By creating a blog post which has bullet points, is focused on one topic at a time, and has plenty of white space to make it easier to read on screen, you’ll create a captivating blog post.

6. Optimized images – Using images and graphics is an important part of making a blog post look interesting to your readers. However, don’t forget good SEO, and always include alt image tags. Instead of just naming the picture, use the alt tag as a way to describe the picture. This not only helps disabled people enjoy your blog better, it also helps search engines or people who’ve disabled their images on mobile devices to read your content better.

7. Your voice – One of the most important aspects of writing captivating blog content is to remember who you are. While you’re writing for your audience you need to remember to write how you talk and not put on airs for the readers. They want to understand you and know you, and follow and read who you are. Only you can be you, so be the best you that you can be.

8. Link smart – When incorporating links into your blog content, remember to use keyword-rich anchor text. Also remember not to put too many links within the readable content because it will be distracting to the reader. Consider linking to like articles and blogs after the main content instead of inside it. Avoid links that go outside your blog if you can.

9. Keywords – The meaning of your content is more important than keywords in many ways. You don’t want the concern about keywords to override the good information you want to impart on your readers. Plus, you don’t want to use more than three per page anyway. Any more and it can just get crowded.

10. Edit – When you sit down to prepare content, just write it without much thought to it. Then come back to it afterwards and edit it. The editing process will produce far different and better content than you started with.

11. Promotion – Finally, the most important part about compelling and captivating blog content is that no one will read it if you don’t promote it. You can hardly know if the content is having the impact that you desire if no one reads it. Therefore, promote each new blog post, and each new content addition proudly.

Finally, it’s important to simply “do it”. So many people want to be money making bloggers, yet they never do it. They learn, and learn, and think about it, but they don’t do it. Doing is what’s going to get you there. Doing is going to give you the practice you need to produce captivating content that gets results.