Blogging Challenge Week 3: Craft an Intentional Post

This is the 3rd week of our four-week blogging challenge. We are continuing to build off of our Intentional Blogging workshop from the TpT Conference. This challenge was designed to help you learn to write an intentional post and optimize your blog. It's OK if you missed the conference workshop, this challenge will work for any TpTer. Join our mastermind group for blogging accountability as we work through the challenge: www.growwithusmastermind.com.

Week 3 of the challenge is here and we're going to dive into writing an intentional blog post. If you're just joining us for the challenge I encourage you to go back and work through the first two weeks:

Week 1: Plan Your Year - We walked you through how to plan out and choose topics to write about for the entire year (which isn't as many as it sounds like).
Week 2: Blog Optimization & Prep - We discussed areas of your blog that you should optimize before you turn your focus on directing traffic to your site.

Crafting an intentional post
This week we are all going to work through brainstorming and writing one blog post. Here's what we're going to focus on when writing:

Make it SEO friendly
Clearly state what the post is about in the title
Keep goals front and center

The entire purpose of writing intentional posts is to meet the goals of your TpT business. In order to do that, you need to ask yourself a few questions before you start writing:

What are the goals for your post?
How will it benefit your business?
What are you hoping to achieve by writing the post?
What do you want readers to do?

How to write an intentional post
In Grow With Us episode 33, we talked all about intentional blogging. So, instead of restating the same information again, I'll highlight a few things we discussed. Then, if you missed the episode the first time, head over to listen to it or read the show notes.

What blogging intentionally is
How to create a 3 part blog post
The importance of answering questions from your audience
Focusing on quality and not quantity
Plugins that can help you

Blog organizer and checklist
If you haven't downloaded our free resource from the TpT conference yet, you can get that on the Resources page here. The Challenge Organizer document has a place to help you brainstorm your blog post ideas. There's a spot for you to write the post title, post goals, and the main ideas you want to discuss.

Keeping the goals front and center is important because you need to know what action you want readers to take when they finish reading. Your post should be based around leading them in that direction.

The organizer and checklist are designed to make it easier for you when you get to the point of sitting down to write the blog post.

This week our focus is on brainstorming the post, writing it, creating the images, adding the email opt-in, editing it for SEO, and adding in links.
Importance of including links
You want to include links throughout your post for two reasons:

It's good for SEO
It allows you to provide more valuable information for your readers

After you write your blog post go back and look for areas that you can place links. You can link to other blog posts that you have on the topic, your email opt-in, or your TpT store. Remember to keep your blog goals in mind so you know what links to include.

Your links don't always need to be i