Up Your Blogging Ante By Utilizing A Post Checklist by @blissandfaith

Tenns Reid | Featured Contributor 

We all want to blog better, in order to best serve our audience, increase stats, and possibly make money. Its especially important if you blog for your business, because you want to insure that they way you’re conveying your content benefits, promotes, and supports your business. Its one of the main reasons that I use a blog post checklist to up my blogging ante. By using a checklist, I can insure that I’m not missing any major or minor areas that may affect my content not being as impactful as I set out for it to be.

The Benefit

A post checklist allows you to save time and prevents you from having to go back and add or redo things later down the line with your blog posts. Writing a post and immediately hitting publish sets up to miss out on so many things and it can be your biggest blogging mistake.

I benefit from using a checklist for all of my posts, because as I check off each item, I check for optimal quality across the board with the post. I can think critically about if my headline appealing, what keywords I’m using throughout the post, and what the tone of my post is. These are all things that effects your post’s ability to resonate with readers, and in turn their willingness to promote and engagement it.

How & When to Use It

I use my post checklist throughout the post publishing process, from beginning to end and I recommend anyone that uses one to do the same. I do this because can follow along the checklist and mark off things as I do them. It saves me a lot of time in the end, when all I usually need to do is check for grammatical errors and schedule my post in my dashboard and on social media.

Using a checklist is essential for SEO purposes, because optimizing my post for SEO while I’m writing it is much easier than having to go back through and place in keywords through it.  In addition, I can insure that everything flows smoothly from introduction to conclusion and that my call to actions are clear.

What It Includes

A blog post checklist should include some key areas to insure that your post is not only high quality, but that its epic and people have no choice but to love and share it. Here’s what it should include at a minimum:

1. A compelling and relevant headline

2. An introduction that hooks readers in

3. Content that is unique, accurate, backed by research and facts

4. Contain a post image – *optimized for Pinterest (2:3 aspect ratio, min 600 px wide)

5. Organized paragraphs with subheadings

6. Keywords sprinkled throughout post

7. Internal (and external) links

8. Clear call to actions

9. A solution to the issue presented in the headline

10. Proofreading for grammatical and spelling errors

11. SEO

12. Social media scheduling

If you don’t already have a checklist on hand that you’re using, you can this handy one that I’ve put together here. A checklist will encourage accountability and increase the quality of your posts. Its an essential tool you need in your blogging toolkit to insure you are publishing content that will get found, resonate with your readers, and position as an authority on the topics you write on.

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Tenns Reid is the voice and one-woman-show behind the branding, design, and coaching boutique, Bliss & Faith.

She helps fellow busy and creative female solopreneurs and entrepreneurs who are passionate about blogging and business bring their brands to life! Her goal is to provide a resource to help them reach their goals, embrace their passions, and strive for success. She is committed to educating, informing,  and sharing with those who want to achieve their dreams.

Tenns holds a degree in Business Management with an emphasis in HR and a minor in Sociology.  She has worked in many industries to include Retail, Restaurant, HR, & the Military, which has given her a wealth of knowledge and experience. In being a Brand Stylist, Business Coach, Designer, and Blogger, she is able to combine both the creative and artistic side of her  brain, with the technical and analytical side.  Tenns loves learning, researching, and solving problems and is so happy to be able do a job every day the marries so much of who she is, while being able to help others and make a difference in their lives.

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Tenns Reid