(This post may be updated over time, as my own checklist for blog posts develops)
This is going to be a simple post to ensure you have the bare minimum for publishing blog posts on a website.
If you’ve not created a blog // website yet, check out the following:
The Essentials
A Topic
First of all you’re going to need a rough idea of what you want to talk about. It can change, it can be polished, honed in or zoomed out. It doesn’t really matter at this stage, but you’re going to need some kind of idea.
If you want to write an article about blogging, then perhaps you might write about how to get more pageviews.
A Title
You’re going to need a catchy title. I tend to keep things simple, honest and to the point.
Sure you could overexaggerate, but I want people to come to my website because I give practical information based on what they want to read. Hopefully, then they’ll come back.
An Image
Every article needs at least one image, for me, it’s the Featured Image that goes along with the title. I sometimes put images within the body of the text, but I already have some adverts in there (that help the running of this website, and keeping content free) so I try not to obstruct the text anymore!
Content
I think when you’re starting off writing – START SMALL.
In the article above, I talk about how starting with smaller blog posts is better.
Sure, they won’t rank on Google as well. But you’ll start building up content that you can actually publish!
I recommend, at least 300 words but up to 2500 is good!
A Keyphrase
You should have a keyphrase for your article. It should be in your Title, within the body of your text and within any descriptions/summaries that might appear on your website or on Google (meta description).
This allows Google (and SEO) to know what your blog post is about!
The keyphrase for this article is: checklist for blog posts
Some links
You should be linking to your own content, and to other content/sources within all of your blog posts. This allows you to build up a map of content for people to navigate around but also allows you to link to credible sources to back up what you’re saying.
Hopefully, by the time you’ve published a few dozen articles, other blogs will do the same for you! This is called a pingback.
Conclusion
These are the main things that I ensure I have in every single blog post, some have more but they all have these! Feel free to comment below with anything that you always add to your blog posts!
