How to Write a Blog Post for Vape Shops [A Step-by-Step Guide]

If you’re here, chances are you own an online vape shop and are thinking about starting a blog for it. But why do so?

Well, that’s the very first thing you’ll have to define. Including a blog section in your vape shop’s website needs to add some value. If it doesn’t, it won’t make sense to pay writers to create posts for you or invest time writing posts that won’t accomplish anything.

Blog posts should have a specific goal in mind. Whether that is increasing sales or newsletter signups is totally up to you. The good thing is, when done right, it can help with both.

We’re here to explain how we do it, and hopefully, that will help you start yours as well.

Table of Contents

1. What Is a Blog Post?
2. What Makes a Good Blog Post
3. How to Write a Blog Post Step by Step [10 Steps You Should Follow]
4. Conclusion

What Is a Blog Post?

A blog post is a piece of long-form content published in a section of your website. Blog posts often include articles, news pieces, and guides. A traditional blog post is usually kept between 500 to 2,000 words long, but there may be exceptions to the rule.

Some outliers could reach up to 5,000+ words or more. When the length of the content is kept under 500 or 600 words, the piece is usually considered a blurb, product description, or a different piece of shorter content.

Split blog posts up into different types of copy. Some of the most popular blog post types include:

• How-tos
• Listicles
• “What Is” style articles
• Pillar Pages (Complete Guides)
• Product Reviews
• News & Current Events
• Infographic Posts
• “Learn” Articles

You will also be required to define categories before even thinking of how to start a blog post. This is the way your content will be classified and fed to the reader. Having clear categories will make your content more digestible and appealing to your audience.

The bullet points listed above are standard blog post types, not necessarily categories. While you might have a category called “Learn,” you probably won’t have a category called “Listicles.”

Categories are supposed to let the reader know in advance what type of content they’ll find in that section of the blog. “Content Marketing,” for instance, is a category name that lets the reader know that all the content submitted to this category is on the topic of content marketing.

What Makes a Good Blog Post

A good blog post tackles a variety of goals simultaneously. Among these standout, motivating the reader to keep reading through the post, make a transaction, or explore the rest of your website. These actions can be categorized as ‘conversions,’ and the content should trigger their completion.

The content itself can trigger action, but the most efficient way to do so is by including a ‘Call to Action’ (CTA) in your content or at the end of it. Most people will not read an entire blog post and skip down to the conclusion, so perhaps it’s best to include the CTA at the end of the piece.

A good blog post should also answer all the questions the reader clicked on it for. So if your blog post is called “How to Write a Blog Post for Vape Shops,” then it better gives you the answer to it.

Another indicator of a good blog post is that it helps the business publishing it, in this case, your online vape shop, to accomplish its goals. That’s why it’s so important to define what a conversion looks like for you so that you can design your content accordingly.

A vital element of a blog post is an introduction that jumps out to the reader. Once a reader has clicked on your blog’s link on their search results, the intro becomes the primary motivator for them to keep reading. We like to follow the A-P-P Strategy.

APP stands for Agree, Promise, and Preview. The idea is to structure your introduction in this order. First, you look for a middle ground between you and the reader, then you make a promise of how their query will be answered, and lastly, give them a small preview of what they can expect to find in your article.

But contrary to popular belief, the intro is not always the first thing you write. In many cases, it’s the last.

How to Write a Blog Post Step by Step [10 Steps You Should Follow]

The steps in writing an article for publication are not set in stone, but there are a few standard rules you can follow. You will become an expert at writing blog posts and adopt a process that works best for you. The steps below detail the method that works best for us.

1. Understanding Your Audience

You might have heard of the term ‘buyer personas.’ While the marketing team usually does this, it’s also a piece of information that you can use to your advantage when creating blog posts.

Having a buyer persona means that you know who your readers are. What attracts them, motivates them, and interests them. These are all essential things to bear in mind when writing for a specific market.

If you don’t have the luxury of a marketing department, you can also talk to the client directly to get to know your customers. If you don’t have a brick-and-mortar store that allows you to have direct contact with the consumer, then talk to your customer service agents and ask them questions that can help you in your quest.

2. Researching Valuable Keywords

Keywords are the building blocks of solid SEO content. Having strategic keywords in your blog writing strategy will help boost organic traffic.

In other words, including the right keywords could make the difference between a blog post people have visibility of and one that doesn’t get any traffic.

However, you’ll need to beware of keyword stuffing. Blog and article writing with bad readability due to overuse of keywords is a common mistake.

But organic traffic is not all you can use keywords for. They may also help you find competitor benchmarks you can use to develop new content ideas for your blog.

3. Content Ideation

You can start thinking of content ideas once you’ve identified your content categories. But thinking of ideas is not just sitting around looking at the ceiling trying to develop novel subjects to write about. However, that’s part of the process.

Content ideation is a process that can be standardized according to what works best for you and your business.

Some things that we like doing at Vape Ranger to think of new ideas include:

• Benchmarking competitors,
• Looking at essential dates (i.e., father’s day) that could help us fill in spaces for content,
• Looking at upcoming company marketing and sales events,
• Having an ideation session with team members from different areas at least once a month.

4. Analyzing Competitor Benchmarks

Looking at benchmarks can be mistaken for copying content, but it’s far from it. We would never recommend writing the same thing a competitor wrote. That is plagiarizing, and we strongly suggest you stay away from doing that. Not only is it illegal and wrong, but it could also hurt your Google rankings.

Benchmarking competitors is done only to get the creative juices flowing. It can also give you insight into the type of content that your potential consumers are interested in. Not to mention, reading existing copy for your market may give you a better understanding of your audience in the long run.

5. Working Title & Sub-Titles

Writing a working title is the first step towards what you want your content to do. You’re not doing creative writing here.

While writing a blog post needs some level of creativity, posts for an online vape shop blog should have a clear goal in mind. A working title may help you visualize the content that will help you accomplish that goal.

We like writing working sub-titles for the same reason. Sub-titles help us split up the content into sections that will allow the writing process to flow smoothly.

The finalized title and subtitles should include keywords in them whenever possible. Sources like Hubspot, other SEO experts, and our SEO team recommend using titles that are 60+ characters long and use “[]” as a source of further clarity for what the reader can expect to find in the post.

6. Make an Outline

Writing the title and sub-titles is part of the outline process.

Having a “skeleton” of what the final copy’s structure should look like will help your writing process go faster and plays a vital role in making the final product look sleek and well thought out.

7. Research

On top of competitor benchmarking, you want to find authoritative sources and unique information that help your blog posts stand out in the sea of data on the internet.

Acquiring legitimate research can be done by using tools like Google Scholar and other authoritative websites.

You could also take the approach of interviewing thought leaders and experts in the industry. Using your interviews and the notes you take to quote them on your articles adds value to the piece and creates domain authority.

If you’re writing content like product reviews, then part of your research is done by using the product yourself and taking your experience with it to give your readers details they would not be able to see without purchasing the product.

8. Begin Writing

You now have an outline, you have the information you need, and we’re assuming you know your audience well. Now it’s time to get writing.

We won’t go into writing and article perse because this is where most of the creative process takes place. And unfortunately, creativity cannot be taught or molded. It just is. One of the beautiful things about writing is that the style of a content piece can take many different forms.

9. Write Intro & Conclusion

It’s a standard recommendation to write the introduction and conclusion after you’re done writing the “meat” of the article.

I usually try to follow this premise. But sometimes I like writing the introduction first, depending on the type of article I’m writing. In the case of this article, the introduction will be the last thing I write.

10. Proofread & Edit

Some articles on blogging insist that having a co-worker or friend proofread and edit your posts is a good idea. Although this sounds good on paper, it’s not feasible every single time.

Most of the time, you’ll have to proofread and edit your posts unless your vape store has hired an editor that can take care of this for you.

If you don’t have access to an editor, we suggest you download and subscribe to a service like Grammarly that could help you go through mistakes and give you suggestions for your content.

Conclusion

A blog post is a piece of long-form content published in a section of a website. They are often classified as articles, news pieces, and guides. A traditional blog post is usually kept between 500 to 2,000 words long, but there may be exceptions that sit below or above that range. A good blog post must answer the questions the reader clicked on it for. It must motivate them to keep reading through the post, make a transaction, explore the rest of your website, or whatever your conversion goals might be.

Writing a blog post can be done in many different ways, and creativity is a massive part of it. But there are a few additional steps you can take to write a blog post that makes a difference.