Blog Post

Tips to write a blog post

Objective → Provide updates on the project through personal commentary. Give the reader the feeling that if they keep the reading they will overcome a challenge or be able to add value to someone else by sharing.

Content ↴

• Approach: Blogs should generally be written for all audiences; if the blog is for a specific public, it should clearly be stated in the introduction or through tags. Blogs should use tags, like the lab’s and project’s keywords and the audience the blog is meant for. Blog posts discuss updates on project activities, findings and events. Topics should not be over-explained, the reader only gets the information they need.

• Lengths: 350-600 words posts, which means between 2 and 5 minutes reads. Paragraphs should be short, maximum of 100 words approximately. Sentences should be short and easy for the reader to digest

• Structure: Start with a catchy headline (surprise factor, clear benefit, SEO keyword, etc) Second, write a hook or answer a big why for the reader. Then, the body post should split the ideas into sections preceded by subtitles. Conclude summarizing key points of the post or highlight something the reader can put into action.

• Other: Include at least two or three high-resolution free (or original) visual resources. Include links to external sites.

Recommendations ↴

• When brainstorming blog posts, imagine you are outside of the project and think of the information you would like to learn if you were your audience.

• Ask project members and stakeholders, and even experts outside the project, to contribute.

• Material will be updated regularly.

• Make sure you have permissions to use the visuals resources you chose to your blog post. Read some legal considerations in the Pictures Page.

Tools → This is a selection of useful tools to check while writing a blog post.

• Uber Suggest → Here you can check suggestions for keywords related to a topic, see the websites ranking in search engines for that topic, and get ideas and insights from popular blog posts related to the topic.

• BuzzSumo → Here you can check the most viral articles regarding a certain topic, this is very useful for inspiration, to see what works best and understand why they’ve been so popular. Normally the idea is to try to make it better than #1, so we can gain some traffic.

• Similar Web → Discover similar websites to a reference you already like.

• Feedly → Discover new articles on the topics you choose.

• Social Animal → Find and analyze top-performing content for any topic or competitor.