How To Write A Blog Article

Over the last few years, I have been writing D365 articles and tutorials. During that time, I have learned some tips and tricks on how to write a blog article that I would love to share with you. Like me, you may love learning and teaching others new things. As part of that, you want to be as helpful to as many people as possible. To do that, you need to know more than just how to create good content. You need to know how to get it seen. Like in so many of my other articles, I wanted to share with you what I have learned in the hopes that it may help you.

My Experience

Before telling you what I have learned about how to write a blog article, I wanted to take a brief minute to tell you about my journey so far. First, I laugh at this section because when people look up cooking recipes they often start with a story when the reader just wants to get to the recipe. This is somewhat similar. but nonetheless, I think it may be helpful and encouraging.

There are many ways to write a blog article and be successful. I can only tell you what I have found to be helpful for me. Specifically, using the technology that I use. Therefore, I encourage you to read lots of other articles on this topic and see what works for you.

Many people have taught me things that have helped me tremendously. Dian Taylor was instrumental in helping me get to where I am today. Additionally, Rachel Profitt, Seth Bacon, Nathan Clouse, Alex Meyer, April Dunham, Mark Smith, and many others have been incredibly helpful.

Therefore, learn from other people. Many other people are way more widely known than little old me. I write this article because I want others to learn what I have learned from so many others. And learn from what I have learned along the way.

A few years ago, I wrote my first article. By following these tips and tricks, and of course, writing more articles, I have seen my page views grow a huge amount. Thank you to all who have helped make that happen. I hope these tips will help you do the same.

Set Up Your Website

In order to write a blog article, you must first have a website. That said, I recommend most people start by writing a few articles on their computer. Make sure you like writing before spending money to create a website.

Once you are ready, you need a couple of things.

First, you need to come up with a domain name. Mine is dynamics365musings.com. This is maybe the hardest part about starting. You want it to be something people can remember. But also ideally it would explain what your site is about. Others choose to use their names. Here are a few examples:

• https://d365goddess.com/
• https://alexdmeyer.com/dynamics-365-for-finance-and-operations-blog/
• https://thebaconbytes.com/
• https://www.intraclouddynamics.com/
• https://www.d365withbrittany.com/

Second, you need a hosting provider. A hosting provider is someone you pay each year to store your website files on their server and make that content available on the internet 24/7. Typically, you also pay them to keep your domain name registered.

There are many hosting providers. Each offers different services and pricing. I use Bluehost.com. Feel free to use whatever site meets your needs. Some options are designed for simple websites or blogs like mine. Other options are for online e-commerce stores or higher volume sites. In the case of a blog, you can typically choose the simple option.

While you can write all of the website code yourself, when you write a blog article I highly recommend you do not. Instead, most websites support installing WordPress. This content management tool is typically installed for free as part of your web hosting provider. This is what I use.

Instead of writing down all of the steps to set up your WordPress blog site, I recommend you follow this great article.

WordPress

There are tons of articles already written about how to use WordPress. Therefore, I want to focus on a few recommendations I have found to be extremely helpful. For other tips, I have found this site to include many helpful tutorials.

Themes

Now that you have a domain name, hosting provider, and WordPress set up, it is time to set up your website.

First, in a browser navigate the WordPress dashboard page found here: <your domain URL>/wp-admin/. For example, in my case it is https://dynamics365musings.com/wp-admin/. This requires a username and password to access, so only the site administrator can go here.

Second, navigate to Appearce>Themes.

Instead of setting up all of the pages and designing a website from scratch, WordPress allows you to select a Theme. This dictates the look and feel of your website. Such as how the menus look, where they are shown, and how each article you write will show.

Conveniently, many WordPress themes are free but some are paid. I use the free theme called ‘Baskerville 2’ by Anders Noren. I like it because the home page shows tiles of each article, including a thumbnail image and a few sentences of the article.

Furthermore, while using the theme, you can still change many things about the site, such as what pages and images are shown. As you are familiar with, this is how my website looks. See the similarity?

Plugins

Even after picking a WordPress theme, Plugins are add-ons that can enhance your website. There are TONS to choose from. I will share with you a few that I found to be helpful for someone who wants to write a blog article.

First, navigate to Plugins>Add New PlugIn

• Akismet Anti-spam Spam Protection – If you enable viewers to comment on your articles, this is a must. It helps ensure that those comments are not added by spammers.
• Disable Them and Plugin Auto-update Emails – WordPress will send you an email each time WordPress is updated to a new version. These emails get tiresome. This Plugin will stop them.
• Everest Forms – Would you like your viewers to be able to contact you and send you a message? This Plugin makes it very easy to add a ‘contact me’ form. I apologize to anyone who has filled out this form and I have not responded. Unfortunately, I do get a lot of spam from this form. Therefore, I sometimes miss the legitimate questions.
• Google Analytics and MonsterInsights – This is a great plugin for tracking your page views. I highly recommend you set this up.
• Head, Footer, and Post Injections – This allows you to add some HTML at the bottom of every post. I use this to add a picture of description of myself, along with a field to subscribe to my articles. I saw another site do this, and learned that I could use this Plugin to do the same thing on my site. See the example below.

More Plugins

• Jetpack – This plugin is great. It is similar to Google Analytics but I like it a bit more. It will show you how many page views you are receiving, where in the world they come from, and which articles are being viewed. Additionally, you can see where people are finding your articles. For example, are they being found using a search engine or are they clicking on a social media post? Download the iPhone app for Jetpack to see these stats anytime.

• OptinMonster – Have you ever been on a site, and after some time a pop-up dialog asks if you want to subscribe to the site? This Plugin causes this to happen. It can be hooked up to MailChimp, and email each subscriber anytime a new article is written on the site. Follow this MailChimp to set this up.

• Sassy Social Share – This plugin adds icons and links to all of your social media profiles to each article. I don’t know that many people click on these, but just in case I think they look neat.

• The Bluhost plugin – helps integrate the hosting provider and WordPress.
• UpdraftPlus – Backup/Restore – Takes a backup of your website and saves it to cloud storage.
• Yoast SEO – This is by far the most helpful Plugin. I will explain it in depth in its own section.

Write A Blog Article

Now that your website is set up, it is time to write a blog article.

To start, navigate to Posts>Add New Post.

Next, WordPress will open a new page, similar to a Microsoft Word document, where you can begin typing your article.

Focus Keyphrase And Title

For every article, it is important to decide on a focus keyphrase. A focus keyphrase is 2 to 4 words that describe the primary topic of your content. Specifically, it should be what you expect users will type into a search engine to find this article.

For example, in this article, my focus keyphrase is ‘write a blog article’. In this other article, my focus keyphrase was ‘D365 Debug Tutorial’.

Often times I know what my keyphrase is when I start writing the article. Other times, I have to go back and adjust my keyphrase after I finish my article to better align with what I wrote about.

In either case, there are several very important places where you need to use the focus keyphrase throughout your article.

• First, the focus keyphrase needs to appear in the title, near the beginning.
• Second, it needs to be in the meta description. (I will explain what this is in the Yoast SEO section).
• Third, it needs to be in the first paragraph, (i.e. the introduction) of your article. Ideally in the first three sentences.
• Fourth, it should be in the URL of your article. (I will explain how to set this later).
• Fifthly, they should be used in subheadings in your article.
• Sixthly, the focus keyphrase should be used several times throughout your article. If you notice, I write the phrase ‘write a blog article’ several times throughout this article.

Fortunately, WordPress and especially the Plugin Yoast SEO will help track these recommendations for you. See more on this in a later section.

For more information on focus keyphrases, see this article.

Blocks

After writing the title of your article, the majority of your article likely will be headers, paragraphs, and images. To add this, use the WordPress block editor.

To add a block, hover your mouse after the last paragraph. Then, click the plus button to add a block. Each block represents a header, paragraph, image, video, or code snippet that you can add. WordPress will add the necessary HTML code to ensure the type of content you are adding shows correctly on the webpage. For example, see the below screenshot of me adding this next paragraph as I write this article.

Writing Recommendations

When writing paragraphs keep in mind the following recommendations:

• Write in the active voice instead of the passive voice. In other words, the subject of the sentence should perform the action. This will help with search engine optimization. I am not great at doing this or explaining this so I recommend you read the examples in this related article.
• Write short paragraphs and short readable sentences. To explain, sentences that use complicated language are considered less readable by websites, and they will not rank as high. Additionally, paragraphs that are shorter are easier to read, than long paragraphs.
• Do not add more than 300 words under each heading. This again helps with search engine optimization. If you write a section with more than 300 words, add another Header to break up the section into two sections.
• Add lots of transition words or phrases to your sentences. To explain, these are words that help the reader progress from one idea to the next idea. I just used one in the last sentence: ‘to explain’. Additionally, adding words like ‘First, Second, Then, Next, and Additionally’ are all examples of transition words. Every time I write an article I open this page to help me with examples.
• Add images to your article.
• Add links, including links to external sites.

All of the above recommendations, help enormously with search engine optimization. Furthermore, they help make your article more enjoyable to read.

How do I know this? The ‘Yoast SEO‘ Plugin tells you.

Yoast SEO

Importantly, the Yoast SEO Plugin helps with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). When writing an article, this Plugin makes recommendations that help your articles rank higher on Google results. This is the single most impactful tip for people who write a blog article.

After installing the Yoast SEO Plugin, you will see a new dialog at the bottom of the WordPress post editor. This dialog will tell you what you need to do to optimize your SEO score and the readability of your article.

Notice, that when you have not followed enough recommendations, the dialog will show red sad faces. In contrast, when enough recommendations have been followed you will see green smiley faces.

SEO

To demonstrate, the Yoast SEO will ask you for your keyphrase.

Next, it will ask for a ‘slug’. This is the URL needed to view the article. This should include the focus keyphrase.

After that, the PlugIn will ask for a meta description. This is a short description that also needs to include the focus keyphrase. This is shown on search engine results.

As you write the article, and especially at the end, review all of the SEO recommendations. Below are the recommendations I see as I write this article.

Readability

In addition to the SEO tab, the Yoast SEO dialog will show a ‘Readability’ tab.

This tab focuses on the words you use. In the case below, the tool is telling me I need to break up a section with another header. Oftentimes, I use too much passive voice. Or, I do not use enough transition words. Clicking the ‘eye’ icon will show you which sentences require fixing.

While meeting these recommendations does take some time, they are vitally important. To emphasize, content creators will spend many hours creating content. But if they would only spend another 20 minutes following these recommendations, their article would likely be seen by way more people. Therefore, I highly recommend you spend the time.

Over time, you will learn to change how you write in the first place, and it will take less time to correct any issues.

WordPress Checklist

In the dialog on the right side of the editor, WordPress has several important settings.

Publish Date and Time

First, set when you want your article to be published. The default is to publish ‘Immediately‘. However, I recommend you change this to schedule the article to become live at a future date and time. When you change this to a future date, the ‘Publish‘ button will change to read ‘Schedule‘.

For instance, I tend to publish my article on Monday mornings. The timing of your social media posts announcing the article is more important. But I like to publish the article and post it on social media at the same time.

Indicators

Next to the ‘Publish‘ button are several indicators that are useful to check as well.

First, the number out of 100 shows the score of your Title. In my case, I see ‘66/100‘. Click on this to open the ‘Headline analyzer‘.

The higher the score, the better for attracting viewers. Using words like ‘How to‘ or ‘Tutorial‘ can increase your score.

However, getting a high score may not always be possible. For example, I have articles with titles like ‘Override The JumpRef On A Base Form’. This phrase is not a common phrase to the general public. Therefore, it may not get as high of a score. But, by it being more unique people searching for this topic are likely to find it. So try to balance the accuracy of the Title with a high score.

Yoast SEO Scores

In both the top indicator and in the ‘Post’ tab, notice the Yoast SEO scores. Ensure they are both green smiley faces before publishing. If they are not, read and make the suggested corrections until they are green. It will be well worth your time.

Categories

Next, specify a category to add this article to. When you write a blog artcile, it is helpful to your audience to organize your articles by similar topics. Check the checkbox of the categories the article should be added to.

Additionally, click the ‘Add New Category‘ button. Then, enter the ‘New Category Name’, and specify a ‘Parent Category‘.

Tags

Next up is the ‘Tags‘ section. In this section, list topics such as hashtags and short phrases that let search engines know what topics your article covers.

Consider using the headers from your article. Additionally, list out any search engine phrases that should lead to your article.

Featured Image

Lastly, upload a picture to the ‘Featured image‘ to display a picture at the top of your article.

Moreover, setting this will also cause the picture to show as a thumbnail on your homepage, when using the ‘baskerville 2’ theme. Additionally, the image will be shown in google search results. Best of all, anytime you post a link to this article, the image will typically be pulled into social media posts. (This works for platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook. It doesn’t work for X.)

There are many different ways to create a featured image. I will show you my process in the next section.

Create A Featured Image

When you write a blog article, it will attract more viewers if you have a featured image. The subject in the picture does not necessarily have to relate to your article. But it can. Other times, include the title of your article on top of an interesting background image.

Pixabay

Notably, there are a lot of sites that offer royalty-free images, that you can use as your featured image. I really like Pixabay.com. On the site, search for the image you are looking for. Sometimes l look for the topic I am writing about. Other times I just look for images that would be good to have text over top.

For example, when I search for ‘article’ in Pixabay.com, I get back a lot of images, but not always what I am looking for.

Therefore, it is helpful to be creative and try lots of searches until you find something that fits your style.

In general, I like to download a bunch of images that I think look interesting and then decide afterward. Perhaps an image will be helpful for a future article.

Canva

Once you have a great image, I like to use Canva.com to add more to the image. On Canva’s website set up a free account to store the projects you work on in the cloud.

First, search for ‘Youtube thumbnail templates’. Canva will show you lots of templates in the correct aspect ratio for YouTube. I find this aspect ratio also works well for articles, and social media posts as well.

Notice, many of the templates are not free. However, as you scroll you will see many that are free. Pick one that looks like a good starting point. After clicking the template, click ‘Customize this template‘.

The Canva editor will open. First, drag your Pixabay image to the window to upload it.

Second, delete the existing background from the template, and replace it with your image.

Third, replace the text with your title. Additionally, feel free to modify the fonts and colors until it looks good to you. Check out these Canva tutorials for more instructions.

Fourth, optionally add a picture of you that has the background removed. This may feel uncomfortable to you. Perhaps you are a shy person. However, this was a tip that April Dunham gave me. This will increase your brand recognition as you continue to write articles and post on social media.

Fifth, when ready, give the name of your project a title so you can find it later. Then, click Share>Download to download a file of your image.

Lastly, drag that into the ‘featured image’ tile in the WordPress editor.

Finally, go back to the Publish settings, and schedule your post to go public on the internet.

Grammarly

Before finishing I want to share one more tip on how to write a blog article. Grammarly is a free grammar checker application. First, download and install the desktop application. After that, Grammarly will actively provide feedback on any text you type. For example, detects misspelled words and grammar mistakes as you type and underlines them. It will even suggest when a sentence could be made shorter.

I make spelling and grammar mistakes all the time as I type. While many writing applications detect spelling mistakes I find that they often miss the grammar mistakes. Grammarly will not only help catch mistakes, but it will also help you become a better writer as you learn from the feedback it provides.

Learn From Others

As I said, there are many more tips that I do not even know about. I encourage you to learn from others. My friend Alex Meyer, who is also a Microsoft MVP, wrote this article on creating content. I definitely recommend you check out his tips and tricks.

Conclusion

Don’t forget to publish or schedule your article! Thank you for following along. Let me know in the comments what tips you recommend! But this is just this is just the beginning. After writing an article, I like to record a YouTube video, using the article as a guide. In the next article, I will share all my tips for creating and posting a YouTube video. Finally, in the article after that, learn tips on posting to social media. Ultimately, after doing all of the work of creating the content, it is well worth your time to make sure your audience knows about it. Thank you for reading.