We all know how it goes… you decide to write a blog post, you sit down and enthusiastically open your laptop. You immediately launch the editing programme, place your hands on the keyboard and then… nothing! Just your cursor on a blank page. Yup, we have all been there. So here are a few steps to write blog posts easily.

8 steps to write blog posts easily

Step 1: Know your audience

First things first, when you write blog posts you have to know your audience. It’s important that your blog posts are relevant to your customer base or readers. So, before you start writing, create a buyer persona. This is a general representation of your ideal client. Think about what you know about your buyers and what their interests are when selecting a topic. Tweaking your content to suit your buyers will help you create content that your audience really want to read and better equip you to meet your customers’ needs by knowing who they are.

Step 2: Decide on a topic

It can be really difficult to nail down one topic to write a blog post on. However, it’s not necessarily a bad thing to have too many ideas as having no inspiration at all can be 100 times worse. Try writing a list of five to ten of your favourite topic ideas. Ideally, topics should be a mixture of what has traffic potential and what is interesting to you. The overlap between these two is what will give you a winning blog post.

Keep in mind that if you want to drive long-term traffic to your website, you need to write about things that people are searching for month after month. This is a great way to generate consistent readership, where your blog produces ongoing and stable interest over time.

If you are blogging for a brand or business, write blogs that have business potential by selecting topics that are related to your niche and have the potential to convert readers into customers.

I like to look at Answer The Public to help me decide on a topic, but there are many other online tools you can check out.

Step 3: Think of a headline

There are two approaches to headlines when you write blog posts. The one way is to decide on a final headline before you start writing your article and use it to structure your writing. The second is to create a working title that helps guide your writing and then choose a more appropriate title once you’re done. Headlines not only help you think of different ways to approach a broad, generic topic but it will also help you narrow down the topics with the most potential.

Really think about your post and how to grab your audience’s attention. There are a few techniques you could use here. The “case study” and “How to” based articles with headlines such as “5 things we did last year to grow by X%” and “How our company generated RX in 60 days” are generally successful because it has a transparent nature, which eludes to the secrets behind successful companies and the people who run them.

Another technique is to pose a question in your headline, such as “When does bespoke development work best?” Whichever you choose, make sure it resonates with your audience.

Step 4: OH the introduction

What’s the first thing a person sees after a headline? That’s right, the introduction! Writing a blog post with a captivating intro will immediately grab the reader’s attention and make them eager to read the rest. No pressure.

There are a number of ways to make an introduction appealing. Including a story or a joke, being empathetic and using interesting facts and statistics are all great place to start. Secondly, outline the purpose of the blog post and how it will benefit the reader. This inspires the reader to keep on reading and make a connection to how the blog post will improve their lives.

Step 5: Start writing

When you’ve decided you want to write blog posts the hardest part is actually starting.  To kick start your writing, put your ideas down and arrange them into some form of structure that will serve as the outline for your article. This is just the base of your post. Once this is done, flesh it out into a rough draft. During this process do your best to not self-censor or repeatedly rearrange your outline. This stage is all about just getting it down on paper, so you have something solid to work with. Try to minimise interruptions and keep going.

Write about what you already know and perhaps do some additional research to gather additional information, data and examples to back up your point. Once you’ve written your rough draft, go ahead and fix issues such as grammar, structure and sentence construction.

Step 6: Revision

Get a second and a third opinion. It’s highly likely that when people look over your work, they will be able to identify loopholes and poor flow that you may have missed. The goal is to build on the ideas and opinions of others to improve your writing.

Note: constructive criticism is based on the idea that if someone gives you advice, they offer an alternative. Take the time to reflect on what each person has said and do your best to incorporate the proposed changes you feel are necessary. If you are faced with the dilemma of making an edit you aren’t sure about – think about how much you trust the person giving the suggestion.

Step 7: Include a call-to-action (CTA)

Whether its subscribing to your newsletter or directing them to your website, CTA’s let the client know what you would like them to do next. Typically, the CTA is something of benefit for the client which assists you in generating a lead. Once your client has read the blog post, they can click on the CTA and hopefully become a customer or client.

Step 8: SEO (search engine optimisation)

Once you have finished writing, the next step is to optimise your post for search. Include meta descriptions. These are the descriptions that readers see below the post’s page title on Google. While meta descriptions may not actually feature into Google’s keyword ranking algorithm, they do provide the reader with an opportunity so see what the post is all about and increase the likelihood of potential readers actually clicking on your blog.

Your post title is one of the most important SEO tools. If you have been following all the steps above, you should already have a working title which may naturally contain keywords/phrases that your target audience is interested in. If you don’t, remember to keep it simple and short and if there are clear opportunities to add keywords to your title and headers, then go for it!

Give these 8 steps to write blog posts a try and let us know what you come up with. If you’re still struggling to write blog posts then it’s all right to cry for help. Give us a call and we can assist you with a content marketing strategy for your business.