You've got HubSpot set up. You're all ready to start blogging and show the world all the amazing things your company does. Your content's just gonna blow your leads away and have them clamouring to buy your product. Right?
Well, it starts with mastering the blog publishing process. Maybe you’ve blogged before. Maybe you haven’t. Either way, there’s plenty to do besides the content of the blog itself if you actually want it to be successful.
Will people find the blog? Will they click into it? Will they see value in the blog? And where will they go next? Let’s answer these questions by looking at the components of a good HubSpot blog post.
How to Write a Blog? Start With Content
When you first look at creating a new blog content, you’ll have a choice: use draft mode or the inline editor. If you’d prefer to write your draft in another app, go for it and start right in inline — otherwise, you can use draft mode for a distraction-free writing experience.
That aside, the first thing you’ll need is a topic. And you’ll want to know that topic’s actually of interest to people. Ideally, you have an editorial calendar that’s already considered these questions. But if not: in short, you’ll want to address something you know causes pain for your buyer persona and you’ll want it to be supported by keywords they’re likely to actively search with.
And you’ll want the average blog post to answer one question.
The Question
Think about what your customer may be struggling with — and how they’re likely to express their desire for a solution. And note that the struggle and the words are not always the same. You might be ready to sell a SaaS product that lets an office take a process paperless — but your customer might be searching how to better manage their filing systems, not “digital paperwork solution” or whatever.
Think about topics that relate to the words they’re expressing their problem with. “Save time on filing” for instance, or “filing system upgrade” might be better options. Then you can set a topic of “How to upgrade your filing system,” and use your blog post to emphasize with the problem and set out your solution.
The Other Components of a Good HubSpot Blog Post
Let’s talk about the other things you’ll need to figure out to support the content itself.
- Of course, you’ll want a blog title. Incorporate your topic, but make sure it’s snappy and attention-grabbing. You may want to borrow the lesson from this post on writing good email subject lines.
- Your blog URL will come in automatically based on your title — but give it a quick read to make sure you did get those keywords in there. And be wary if you make any changes, especially if you’re updating the title after publication.
- Selecting an author is simple enough. If possible, it’s often best to use a real person’s name (ie. Your own).
- To help with categorization, make sure you pick a couple of tags to help organize your blogs as they grow. Don’t underestimate the value of taking 15 seconds to do this now compared to the time it’ll take you to go through a tagless content database later.
- Finally, there’s your meta description. This will show up in previews in search engines and social media, so use it well. If you don’t know where to start, paste in the first two lines and see how they look — you should’ve made these sentences powerful already, but strategic edits can make them even more compelling in this new context.
Optimizing the HubSpot Blog Post
With all the basics in place, there’s one more thing you can do (that HubSpot makes nice and easy!): optimize.
This final step is a good way to ensure that your post is as good as it can be for SEO and readability purposes.
Click the Optimize button at the side of your post and go through these suggestions one by one.
Topic
Topic clusters are a great way of organizing your content around central pillar pages that allow you to build a helpful network of links on your website. Pick your topic and assign it to a pillar page as you go.
When you set this, you'll see a few new tasks show up. You'll want to make sure you've used the topic name in the blog, used a few related keywords, and linked back to the pillar page.
Content Length
You’ll want to make sure your content is at least 300 words. For most blogs, this will be fairly easy. By the time you’ve explained the problem and the solution, you’re probably set.
Do try to get even higher, though. 500 words is often a good minimum target.
Where you might run into some issues is if you’re making a simple announcement, like hiring a new staff member, or talking about having achieved a new certification. If this is the case, consider having a separate feed for news posts — or think about ways to tie the announcement into previous blog posts.
Title
As I’ve said, the title has to be great! HubSpot will additionally recommend you keep it to 70 characters or fewer, and that you don’t include your domain name in the title.
Meta Description
Again here, length is an issue. Keep it to 155 characters or fewer to avoid it getting cut off in the search results. And don’t repeat your title here.
Links
HubSpot will recommend you include fewer than 300 outbound links. If you’re not actively trying to game a search engine? You’re probably fine.
Header
Make sure you just have the one H1 tag for your title. If you use more headers (you should!), use H2s and H3s.
Image Alt Text
First, ensure you actually have some images. Second, go through each one and add alt text. Search engines value this — and so do visually impaired browsers. Add a quick description of what the images depict to make things easier for everyone.
Your Very Own HubSpot Blog Post!
Publishing blogs on HubSpot is pretty easy once you know what all these settings are about. Write your content, think about how you’ll promote it, and do a quick optimization run. With that, you’re all set up with some great content that should play well in search rankings!
Want someone to help you through all this? Weekly blogging is just one of the services Flawless Inbound has performed for more than 80 B2B organizations across Canada and the US. Get in touch to find out how we can help you — or learn more about what we do below.
