How to Write a Blog Post That Gets MASSIVE Traffic

in this video I'm gonna show you how to write a blog post that gets hundreds of comments thousands of social shares and first page Google rankings in fact I use the exact process in this video to grow my blog to four hundred twenty six thousand four hundred ninety six visits per month i'm brian dean the founder of backlinko the place where marketers turn for higher rankings and more traffic keep watching let's face it getting traffic to your blog is harder than ever in fact i've recently teamed

up with buzzsumo to analyze nine hundred and twelve million blog posts and we found that the vast majority of blog posts that are published got zero links or social shares when i launched my first blog way back in 2009 things were completely different back then getting links that social shares was relatively easy you could publish a 500 word blog post and call it a day for 198 words 499 words 500 words dunsky flash forward to today if things are completely different according to WordPress 2.3 mi

llion blog posts come out on their platform every day so for your content to stand out and get shared today it needs to be amazing lucky for you that's exactly what I'm going to show you how to do in this video step by step starting with step number one find a proven blogpost topic it's no secret that your blog post topic is huge here's exactly how to find blogpost topics that actually work first head over to you to me you to me is a blogpost topic goldmine here's why udemy doesn't just show you

content that people are interested in instead you see content that people are actually paying for you can search for courses by category or by keyword either way you'll find content that people are actually paying to access for example let's say you run a blog about graphic design well head over to the design category in udemy and scroll down to their best-selling courses and within 5 seconds you have a list of proven topics very cool the next place to look for proven topic ideas is Amazon to u

se it just search on Amazon with the keyword that describes what your blog is all about then look for a book on that topic with lots of ratings this shows you that people actually bought the book finally click look inside to see the table of contents and just like with you to me you get a list of topics presented to you on a silver platter last up we have conference agendas first head over to a conference website in your niche go to the agenda or schedule page and you'll see topics that people a

re paying to learn more about which leads us to step number two write your headline now that you have a proven topic it's time to write your a blog post headline you might have seen the stat before that 80% of people read your headline but only 20% click over to the actual post is that stat true who knows but I do know that your headline is super important with that here's exactly how to write blog post headlines that stand out and get clicks first start your headline off with proven phrases buz

zsumo recently analyzed about a hundred million headlines so what did they find that headlines that start with these 20 words and phrases get the most shares on social media for example when I publish this post on my blog I made sure to start my headline off with one of those phrases obviously you don't need to start every single headline off with one of those phrases but when it makes sense try and use them second make sure that your title uses brackets or parentheses a study by Outbrain found

that adding brackets to headlines can improve click-through rate by up to 38% in this study confirms what I've seen in the real world in fact six of my top 10 all-time most popular blog posts have brackets or parentheses in the title finally you want to use long headlines that study of 900 million blog posts that I mentioned earlier found that posts with long headlines got 76% more shares compared to posts that used short headlines with that it's time for step number three right and attention-gr

abbing introduction topic check headline check now it's time to write an introduction that grabs your readers attention right off the bat how the PPT formula this formula is killing it for me right now by the way the PPT stands for preview proof transition here's a breakdown of the formula now I'm gonna break down each part of this formula and show you how it works with real-life examples first up you have the preview this part couldn't be any more simple just let your reader know exactly what t

o expect that way when someone lands on one of your blog posts they know that they're in the right place here is an example next it's time for the proof here's where you show people that you know what you're talking about now what if you don't know what you're talking about well if you got bigger problems then blog post introductions but that's another story now you can show proof with personal results use of experience number of clients credentials or certifications or anything that shows that

someone should listen to your advice here's an example last up we have the transition cap your intro off with a transition a transition that pushes your reader to keep reading for example you can see that I used the phrase let's dive right in at the end of this intro simple moving right along to step number four right and awesome post is there a formula for writing blog posts that people link to and share know if there was everyone would use it that said there are proven strategies that you can

use to make your content 10 times better for example one technique that's working really well for me right now is using lots of section sub headers sub headers are great because they break your content up into easy-to-read chunks which is super important if you publish a lot of long-form content like I do for example this post from my blog is super long in fact that post is 4,300 words so I broke up the content into little chunks using dozens of sub headers I also recommend using lots of visuals

in every post that you publish now when I'm talking about visuals and talking about things like screenshots charts pictures infographics basically don't be afraid to use the ton of different visuals and just lots of visuals in general in every post for example this post for my blog has 95 visuals next use a fault that's between 16 and 20 pixels if you've ever read anything at medium comm you've probably noticed that their articles are super easy to read how do they do it well besides a clean la

yout they use 21 point font and if you're using anything less than 16 you're probably missing out on a lot of readers that's why we use 18 point font here at backlinko finally when it makes sense publish content that's at least 3,000 words our buzzsumo industry study found a clear correlation between long-form content and social shares in fact our data showed that long-form content got an average of 77 percent more social shares compared to traditional short blog posts obviously this doesn't mea

n that you need to pad your blog posts with a bunch of fluff or filler but if it does make sense to publish a long-form blog post or guide go for it so now that your post is in the books it's time for the next step step number 5 write your conclusion here's the deal most people use throwaway conclusions like this but professional bloggers know that your conclusion is super important especially if you want to get lots of comments on your blog well I've recently developed a three step process for

writing awesome conclusions it's called the tact process here's how it looks first start your conclusion off with a transition this sentence lets people know that the meet of your blog post is over and it's time to sum things up here's an example next it's time for the ask here's we ask your reader a very specific question in other words you don't want to ask something vague like what do you think instead give you a reader an insanely simple question that's easy to answer for example in this con

clusion you can see that I asked people something that'll take like two seconds to answer and you want to end your conclusion with a CTA your CTA can be whatever you want your reader to do next you can ask your readers to leave a comment share on social media sign up for your newsletter subscribe to youtube channel the exact to action that used is totally up to you but the important thing to keep in mind here is that you've got someone to read your blog post all the way to the end which means th

ey really enjoyed your content and they're ready for the next step and as long as you give them that next step in your conclusion you're good with your conclusion in the books let's head over to step number six optimize your post for SEO obviously there's a lot more to SEO than I could cover in a short video in fact I have an entire blog and YouTube channel about SEO that said SEO is super important for your blog posts long term success so I do want to quickly cover three simple techniques that

you can use to optimize your blog posts for SEO because the truth is traffic to most people's blog posts look like this a huge spike on day one then it flattens out to pretty much zero but when you optimize your post the right way you still get that spike but your post still brings in consistent traffic month after month for example I first published this post over 5 years ago now I've updated it a few times since then but it's basically the same post and because that post is optimized for SEO i

t still brings in over 12,000 visitors per month from Google so the first on-page SEO technique is to include your target keyword in your introduction Google and other search engines put more weight on words and phrases that show up at the top of your page so you want to make sure to use your keyword once in your blog post intro like this next use short URLs when it comes to Google rankings there's no doubt about it sure URLs work best in fact Google themselves actually recommend that you use sh

ort descriptive URLs that's because short URLs make it easy for Google to understand the topic of your page plus people use your URL to figure out which result they should click on which is why lots of industry studies have found that short URLs get clicked on more than long URLs finally ad internal links to your posts now internal linking doesn't have to be complicated in fact when it comes to internal links I like to keep things simple whenever I publish a new PO I add two to five internal len

gths to some of my older posts now you can also go back to older posts and link to the new post that you just published for example when I published this post about keyword research I linked out to related content on my site that I already published and added a handful of internal links from older posts to my new guide and before we end this video I have a quick bonus step for you promote your posts I know this video is designed to show you how to write a blog post but here's the deal most blog

posts even good ones fail because they're not promoted enough and no sharing your content on Twitter and Facebook doesn't really count as promotion to get your content seen today you need to do a lot more than just share it on social media in fact I usually spend about 20% of my time writing content and 80 percent of my time promoting that content that's how important content promotion is with that here are three quick content promotion strategies that you can try our first strategy is the conte

nt announcement newsletter when it comes to content promotion email crushes social media and it's not even that close for example I published this post on my blog a few months ago and like I do for all new posts I sent out a tweet I also sent out this simple plain text announcement newsletter to my email subscribers and when it was all said and done the newsletter got nearly 13 times more clicks than my tweet to be clear I do have more email subscribers than Twitter followers but still there's n

o denying that email is way more powerful when it comes to promoting content compared to social media next we have Facebook retargeting it's no secret that Facebook's organic Reach is pretty much zero right now fortunately you can still get your Facebook followers to see your posts without paying a fortune the secret is to boost your posts but only boost to people that have visited your site in other words retargeting for example I paid about 50 cents per click on this boosted Facebook post whic

h is dirt cheap considering that I'm in the competitive expensive b2b niche finally we have email outreach if you don't have an email list yet outreach is probably the best way to you're content that's the good news the bad news is you can't just send the same spammy email to a hundred people and expect it to work in fact I get generic emails like this all the time you probably - - and I delete them within two seconds but I don't automatically delete every hour each email that I get if someone t

akes the time to send me a personalized message I'll usually at least check out their post and if the post is something that I think the backlinko community would enjoy I'll share it so there you have it my seven step process for writing a blog post if you like this video make sure to subscribe to my youtube channel right now just click on the subscribe button below this video and if you want exclusive SEO techniques that I only share with email subscribers head over to backlinko comm and sign u

p for the newsletter it's free now I want to hear from you which strategy from this video are you gonna try first are you gonna promote your content with email outreach or try using shorter blogpost URLs let me know by leaving a comment below right now when if you hear that beeping blowing your ears out finally testing testing with that okay okay next use okay let's try another take of that